Hey everyone, although i'm pretty experienced with Photoshop i've never made a website template, and I also haven't used photoshop for a couple of years. Anyway, heres my attempt at a website template for a Halo 3 website i'll be starting, please critique as I know i really need it!
Alright, I'm noticing a couple problems with it. Rather than worrying about hurting your feelings, I'm going to give you straight up critique. First: I love the screenshot used for the banner. It's really cool. However, the text is sad. Try using a simple Arial font, and transforming it so that it looks like it's laying flat on the sand and setting it to Lighten so that it blends. It'll look much better. Second: Never use a picture as a background with no solid shapes between it and the text. It makes the text hard to read and gives it a horrible effect. You can get away with using a screenie as a background, but as a background for a content section or navbar, NEVER. Try lookin at how they do it on sites like clantemplates.com or zymic.com and you will be able to make much better templates.
Template design is 50% about the edges and shapes, and 50% about the colors. Your template really is just 5 rectangular images, each with a completely different color scheme, some with white borders around them. The first thing I'd do is work on the background and content layout. If you want images in the background there, I would recommend making them faint behind the text, because as the previous poster mentioned, text on top of images looks pretty bad. Try to give your site a unified feel. That could mean horizontal bars, vertical columns, or shaped boxes for your navigation on the side and the content. Those would be my suggestions to make your site look more together.
The problem here is, everyone thinks they can do web design, because EVERYONE does web design. But not everyone does it well. But the cold hard truth is, you can't just become a designer, being a web designer is like being any other kind of artist, you have to have technique, and an eye for the things that look good, to everyone, not just you. Web design is not something a tutorial can teach, nor is any other type of design. It takes skill and practice and again, the "eye" Basically, what I see here is, three rectangles, four images, and some text, poorly thrown together to be passed off as a "template". Unfortunately, what it lacks is DESIGN. I know, you probably think I am the meanest person in the world, but I mean, honestly, compare this to other templates, such as the ones Northern has done, or any other website out there. Truly, I don't think you are cut out for web design, at all. And I am pretty sure it's nothing a tutorial here and there can fix. Also, for something like this, why use photoshop? It's just divs/tables with background images essentially.
