Please critique power bit web design

Beautiful. Nice work.

A very nice piece of artistic, semantic and CSS-structural work - very nice indeed Glad to see you've stuck to 800pix wide.

A few constructive criticisms at first glance are:

1. if one increases the text size of the home page (because the default size is a little small on a high-res monitor), the blue text falls over the blue pictorial background, rendering it almost unreadable.

2. The websites shown in your portfolio do not include links to the sites. Hyperlinks are one of the biggest advantages to using the web for promotion.

3. The 'call to action' is almost non-existent - for example I'm on a page showing a website and I like what I see; I want to get in touch but where do I go to find you? 'Contact Us' is the last link under 'Ideologies'. Not very obvious. Show your phone number on every page.

4. What country are you in? ...Loveland, CO 80537 ...where's that? USA? Australia? Canada? The Moon? (and no, dot-com is not an American suffix)

5. Is the business name Power Bit or New Man Studios? Why confuse people.

6. 'creating powerful expressions' ...it's cheesy and meaningless. Replace it with a contact number.

Very salient points, I'll pass them on to the person who wrote the content. Please explain the comment on sticking to 800px wide, I'm curious.
Thank you roy and triumph

Most people design their sites so that they fit within an 800px browser window, but some, seeing that large monitors are becoming more popular, go for a wider fixed width. This aggravates people like me who have large monitors but who set their browser window to 800px in order to fit other things on the screen at the same time. Hence I am pleased that you did not fall into the trap of going for > 800px.

Thanks for the explanation... I tend to do exactly the same thing as you, I have a 21" monitor... I'm starting to think that the old "770px" wide site "could" be expanded to "800" and there would be only a "minimal" horz scroll for those at 800... what do you think?

30px isn't going to make that much of a difference is it?

I'm okay with anything up to about 900px but there are still lots of people out there in interwebland who either don't know how to change their monitors to more than 800px resolution, or don't want to. Thus I tend to stick to 770px as a maximum fixed width for commercial sites.

yeah it looks ok. Personally I think it's a little dark and the beveling makes it look a little dated... It it was me I'd probably make the bevel less and try and introduce slightly lighter colours, or atleast maybe pad things out a bit to give the design room to breath, but I'm not designer.

I use beveling graphic effects a lot. Is this now dated? Does anyone else feel this way? ...serious question

I like the site very much.

I just noticed that when you go to Passion and hover on portfolio option, the mouse pointer turns to a editing one. I think it is because of the SuckerFish Menu you have implemented, cause it doesnt do so on any other links.

Otherwise, lovely site.

mihir

roy, you're so old you INVENTED the bevel!

Anything done well is never out of style. Anything done to be in style is never done well.

Uh. :? Let's go with that.

Well it's true that I used to manually create bevel and drop-shadow effects with PhotoShop in the days of floppy disks when most designers were still using CS10, Rotring pens and cow-gum (I've still got all my old kit), and auto-effects were the stuff of dreams, but I'm still interested to know if graphic bevelling such as is used on the OP's site is generally considered to be 'dated'