Well, after about 3 days of designing and trying to get to grips with CSS layout I've completed my next site for a client. If you have the time take a look at www.soetkaroo.co.za and give me some opinions.

The site should work without a problem in IE5+ and Mozilla browsers.

I can't see the menu on the 2nd page, the photo of the house is in front of it. I am using Safari 1.2.4

Well at present the site won't support Safari. The main target is IE and Mozilla so if it works in any other browsers it's a bonus. I'll look into it though.

All pages load, side and bottom bar. Contact works. The photos are a little hot. Not yours I'm guessing. Just used to looking at our stuff I'm sure. All works great and presented nicely in IE.

works fine
but the layout is a bit simplistic
perhaps some lines or borders of some sort to separate images from text?

The client insisted on no lines/borders or any seperator between text. I'll see if I can convince them on using a white border around some of the images.

As for the pictures. Nope, they're definitely not mine. I'm actually very dissapointed at the quality of them. Supposedly the images of the wine bottle itself was taken by a professional at a cost of $16/h and it took them 2 hours!

I'm working on getting better photos. The original designer also messed the quality on some of them up by compressing them too much.

i c, stubborn clients are frustrating no? everything seems to be running 100% a-ok, I double checked in IE and Mozilla/Firefox so good job

Works fine for me - I felt the simplicity was a good thing - and very fast loading.
Images fine as are for these old eyes...

Thanks for all the input guys. It really helps to get a fresh pair of eyes to go over everything. Simplicity was one of the requirements. That and the fact that most of the target market will be using 56k dail-up to access the site. Personally I believe a site is just as good as it's content and creating an image heavy site using nested tables isn't my style. I like my pages to be 3KB or less in size ;)

IMO you've unnessesarily sacrificed style for download size. I'd suggest studying some examples of minimalist design (both of webpages and in other artistic media). Just off the top of my head it is the lack of a containing border which bothers me the most.

I just hope my critique of the site isn't too harsh since I have a habit of really ripping into website designs.

Nah, not too harsh at all. I'm always looking for ways to improve my design skills. I wanted to add a containing border to the site with a white background so there's a much better contrast with the actual site contrast. Unfortunately the client wasn't to keen on the idea. In the end their opinion is the most important (they pay the bill after all ;)

Could you perhaps link to a few examples of "minimalist design" websites?

If I were you I'd tell the 'client' that they hired you for a reason and should just stand back and let you do your job. If they require you to compromise you professional integrity then they aren't worth working for. I would not feel comfortable having a site like that used to represent the quality of my work because it would not be conducive to me getting more work.

On the other hand if the client is paying enough then I'd be willing to hand them a pile of crap if that's what they really wanted. To me it seems like the client is trying to play 'designer for a day.' =\

http://textbased.com/~minimalist/

http://www.accordmarketing.com/tid/archive/minimalist-web-design.html

I couldn't get to either of those. Is it just me?

Thanks, I'll be sure to check them out as soon as I have time! I really like the minimalist approach to web design.

I agree with Caedes, you should't risk damaging professional reputation, in order to please one client.

keep workin on it =)