Review of fluffyland.com

Reviewed: Sam
Site URL: fluffyland.com

You didn’t specify a skin, so I’m just going to review your new one – Abstract Butterfly.

Surprisingly enough, I like the colour scheme. The particular colours you’ve chosen fit well together, and you’ve obviously picked them to complement the butterfly. Unfortunately, I think that the fact your side-bar is almost the same size as your normal content ’section’ lets your whole layout style down. Side-bars are supposed to integrate into a layout as an aid for the user, and not be a huge waste of page space. Resize/cut the image and decrease the size of your left hand sidebar to make the layout more practical.

I was a little irritated that this skin was only viewable in 1024×768 or above. While you’ve made-up for this in the size of your other two skins, I think Abstract Butterfly is the most elegant and therefore should be viewable by everyone. A good percentage of computer users still use smaller resolutions, especially those who are new to the Internet.

The presentation of the site is simple enough, and easy to navigate. Typical side-bar/column layout with basic links to the various parts of your site. You should set a margin on your headers though, so there isn’t such a huge gap between the header and the links/content underneath. My main problem was that some links were hard to find – I completely missed the “links” mini-image the first time I looked, which would have resulted in the deletion of your review.

I think content possibilities are endless – there’s so much you could do for your site, but it’s honestly lacking. You have a well-sized bio that gives minimal insight into who you are but you should try adding some things like likes (like your “Favorites” only more detailed), dislikes (along with your own reasons), etc. Information on how long you’ve been designing sites for, where you picked up your knowledge of HTML/etc – anything, as long as it gives your visitors a way to get to know you and your site better.

I noticed a few typing errors on your site, they are listed here for your convenience:

Your other content is basic, at most. Basic backgrounds which are easily created with Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop and basic ‘builders’ which lack any real interest. They’re good, they just don’t hold the attention of the user for long. How about some articles, or some of your opinions on controversial subjects that users can read – these will help involve the visitor. If you’re going to have a tutorials section, add more tutorials.

Your coding is untidy. You use excessive line breaks instead of paragraph tags or margin/paddings. Instead of using:

<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />

..to set a height for the “pic1″ column, you could have placed the butterfly image as an image instead of a background picture. Alternatively, you could have set a height in your CSS. Your code would look like this (replacing ### with the correct measurement):

td.pic1 {
text-align: center;
width: 350px;
height: ###px
background: url(http://www.fluffyland.com/images/butterfly.png);
border: 5px solid #FFFFFF;
padding: 2px;
}

Just as a helpful note – you don’t need to use “valign=”top”” in your main coding, you can simply specify vertical-align: top; in your CSS on the columns that you want top-aligned. Also, instead of typing the full URL to the picture (http://www.fluffyland.com/images/butterfly.png) you could simply write /images/butterfly.png.

Your coding would be much tidier, and easy to keep track of if you used paragraph tags everywhere, not just in your main content. <p> to open a paragraph, and </p> to close it, with line breaks where ever necessary. For example, your menu, would look like this:
<p>
<a href="aboutme.php">About Me</a><br />
<a href="site.php">About Fluffyland</a><br />
<a href="skins.php">Skin the Site</a><br />
</p>

<p>
<a href="backgrounds.php">Backgrounds</a><br />
<a href="builders.php">Builders</a><br />
<a href="adoptables.php">Fluffy Pixels</a><br />
<a href="templates.php">Icon Templates</a><br />
<a href="printables.php">Printables</a><br />
<a href="tutorials.php">Tutorials</a><br />
</p>


..instead of what you have now.

It’s tidier and easy to edit/keep control of, don’t you agree? One last comment on your CSS, don’t forget to offer alternatives when declaring fonts in your CSS. At the moment, you’ve simply got “font-family: lucida sans unicode;” – this should be “font-family: lucida sans unicode, sans-serif;” just in case the user doesn’t have Lucida Sans Unicode on their computer. Alternatively, if you were to decide to use Times New Roman or Georgia/etc – you’d specify the alternative of “serif” instead of “sans-serif”.

Sort of coding related – your font tutorial is inaccurate. The <font> </font> tag has been deprecated and therefore you’re suggesting people use invalid coding – what’s the point in that?

In summary, your site was nice to browse – but that was it, “nice”. There doesn’t seem any real dedication to the site or it’s written content, and you’re too busy taking ‘inspiration’ from other people instead of setting your own style. Get more of yourself into the site, and work on your coding skills before going for more complexity. You need to KNOW the basics and put them into practice before assuming you can advance. Really put in some effort, and it will pay off eventually.