Welcome to Gaia! ::

First things first. Never publish an unfinished website.

Unless someone else is forcing a deadline on you, you are curing poverty, disease, or ending war forever, or you are testing the website(in which case it should not be "public" as your site seems to be) the world can wait for you to finish designing your website. Personally, nothing* is more annoying than seeing those "Under Construction" messages when I go to a website.**

Secondly, I am sorry about you being hacked but that is completely off topic. You may take your story to the Charity forum is you have not already. I would recommend trying to figure out why you were hacked(repeatedly?) and resolving the problem immediately.

On to the design! Aren't you just looking so forward to my critique of your website? (:

First, the behind-the-scenes stuff. If you plan on doing a website that has more than 15 pages of content with only one or two variations on a certain format, link your CSS. This makes it SO much easier to do quick little updates in the future. You can change font, background colors and images, etc at the drop of a hat by editing one file. When using CSS, try to utilize all of its potential that would be useful to you. domokun

Secondly, I'd like to compliment you on the -moz-opacity feature. As I'm sure you know, it is a very good idea to make your website compatible with all mainstream browsers feasible. Very good. (: This is all I have to say about the behind-the-scenes work, since I don't get along terribly well with tables or Javascript(I prefer divs... and I avoid JS when I can xp ).

On to the actual design. First of all, if this is the finished product the clean-up job you did was shameful. The only person I've seen get away with that kind of sloppiness was Lanzer&co, and they got a lot of complaints and ended up fixing a lot of other, more serious bugs. Anyway, just be more careful in the future. I realize that some of the errors I'm seeing may be because I am using Firefox, and I know as a designer that it can be insanely annoying to try and fix all the little stuff. Also, if you stopped working on this particular layout because you wanted to do a different one, then there's no real problem.

Secondly, if you want to get a new layout(which I recommend you do), get something colorful. You do not want to depress your visitors. Also, the black, grey and white thing is very much overused and usually it is not done very well, so I woul avoid that altogether if possible. My recommendation, is to choose a two or three tone color scheme, with at least one bold color. By bold, I do not mean stoplight red. I mean dark red, or light yellow, or something. Because you are designing a website(and not, say, clothing) you have to remember that the focus is not as much on the design as it is on the content. So I would say, choose a scheme that is easy on the eyes and subtle, but not monochromatic or boring. If you want, you can try a black, white and ___ color scheme, with a heavy accent on the white and ___ color.

Thirdly, your title should be either larger or smaller. As it is now, your site seems.. top heavy. You have a ton of space so you can fit that big sphere in, and your title fills up less than half of the room there. So the result is that even on a 1280x960 resolution, your site seems squished down. Remember, your site is about tutorials, and that's a lot of text. You don't want to weigh it down with a lot of fanciness on the top.

Finally, your navigation system seems.. overused. This isn't as much of a critique, it's just that I've seen that system EVERYWHERE, and I'm really not that impressed with it. Try to look up several different websites with different navigation systems to see what could work for your site. Since your site seems like it's going to be content and community heavy(kinda like deviantART, only tutorials instead of art), you should look at those types of site to find effective systems on navigation for that kind of content.

That's it. I know I didn't do a lot of complimenting, but I'm short on time and it's been a long time I did a serious critique. Remember, you should take a lot of what I say with a grain of salt -- you didn't give any information so I had to do most of this based entirely on assumptions. It's likely I got something wrong. domokun

*Okay, background music at 100% volume with autoplay is more annoying.

**I have a similar problem with websites shutting down to renovate. I don't care if it looks like your cat vomited on the monitor, the content can stay up while you redesign. p:

I really don't have much to say as far as the design, only that you should take some of Kitsuta's advice and clean it up and work on it a little more.

What I would like to mention though is that if you plan to keep that scrolling effect in the upper right corner, you may want to set the page up differently to make it work better. As is the image scrolls at a fixed point, where the image it (I would assume) is meant to scroll within huggs the right side of the page, so depending on window size, the scrolling image isn't always over the intended point in the header.

no, but i had help from him, but i did all the coding myself.

well it looks like it does LOAD somewhat over the underlying image, but if the window is resized, maximized or anything else it stays about where it loaded, it also doesnt seem to load right over the spot you intrended, it looks like it needs nudged to the left some.

The greys need more contrast if theyre going to compete with the white. Its somewhat blindingly contrasting against the subtle grays

What, exactly, is the difference between your site and the GreyCobra site?