Hi there Kunnusingh, for someone with little to no previous design experience I would chalk that a good first attempt and also applaud the that you are stepping out to seek review and or guidance. The first thing to be said is take everything on the chin, for everything right about a site there will always be something wrong and a lot of this is opinion, however there are guidelines that are proven and will help.
Examples are
Jakob Nielsen's Ten Usability Heuristics as well as
Ben Shneiderman's 8 Golden Rules and lastly
W3C's Guidelines( for accessibility). You will see a lot of overlap between the guidelines from various experts however there are a few which only appear once, however most of these guidelines are short and to the point thus easy to digest.
That said, personally I would
change the following:
- Centre-Align the Page| Very few designs "work" being left/right aligned. This is due to the size of the average PC monitor as well as the higher resolutions now achievable, meaning any non-centre aligned pages often look out of place due to the large space left on one specific size.
- KISS | As media-host, Keep It Simple Stupid - Being an engineering term more so than marketing, but it basically means the more simplistic you can make something, the more sophistication the solution must be. Meaning specifically cut back as much information and clutter as possible and provide only vital information - provide more detailed and targeted information after the user has made their choice.
An example of this could be: uk2.net, notice specifically how they advertise each area of their business simply with key facts but no in-depth information, you are then required to click an area to "find out more" thus engaging the user as well as avoiding overwhelming them (think short-term memory load)
- Colour/Layout | Pick a colour scheme, perhaps a background colour and a wrapper, divide content up into different boxes(colours) differentiate the sections of the page using boxes and the layout rather than one block of content.
- ToDoList | Fix the navigation, Fix the clientarea SSL, Integrate the forum and the clientarea correctly, perhaps a blog?
However My recommendation is to start again, there is salvageable information on the site, though the site itself will not sell you, or your company and thus your business wont gain clients and thus income.
It's not often that I would recommend starting again though if you have serious ambitions the best bet would be to purchase a template that "best fits" what you are trying to achieve from such sites as templatemonster.com and set about modifying it, it is clear you have the ability to create/edit/manipulate a template however the look and feel/design is lacking professionalism which is difficult to achieve without professional help.
Choosing a prefab template isn't uncommon and will give your site a professional look but it will still allow you to get hands on with the development, there are then many design sites and or forums such as HD that could help you with the finer details. Rather than a step by step redesign of your current site, however this also frees up time for other tasks such as advertising, sales, support, administration, training, accounts etc.
Hope that Helps
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