Reviewed: Sparky
Site URL: at-the-beginning.net
At The Beginning
First thing I see is a big splodgy blue image. I’ve never seen the point of these trendy/grungy style images but people seem to be attracted to them so if you think this represents your site I have no objections. I do think, however, that the top image is far too big for what it is and if you took about 70 pixels off the bottom as well as saving it as an optimised .jpg this would reduce the file size by half without affecting the quality.
The light grey font is useless. It’s virtually invisible at the top of the <div> and is too small for anyone with impaired vision to read. If you specify the size of your font in percentages or using another relative sizing method the font will be resizable in all browsers. You might not think a larger font looks as “trendy” but it’ll make it easier to read. I’d advise changing your font colour to at least #5F5F5F.
The site looks the same in all browsers, so kudos for the cross-browser compatibility. However, the point of XHTML Strict seems to have escaped your attention altogether. The Strict doctype is supposed to enforce the removal of presentational coding from your content and yet you’re still using style=""; to customise some things and you’re not using an external stylesheet. This doesn’t affect the validity of the document but is worth changing all the same.
2006 doesn’t “exist” yet – there’s no point adding it to your Copyright disclaimer. If you’re paranoid that the year is suddenly going to change and you won’t notice and therefore will forget to change it, you can assign the year using the PHP date function to a variable and echo it instead.
There’s not really much to say about this site. It’s one page featuring a layout and some linked banners. I never have seen the point of submitting a one-page collective to a review site; yours being no different.
ATB Tutorials
Yes, it’s absolutely logical to have a watermelon representing your tutorial site. (That’s sarcasm.) I’ve always thought that tutorial websites should be displayed alongside “technical” style graphics or with funky effects that astounds everyone – it builds confidence in your site. A badly cropped watermelon does not fill me with confidence about your website.
There’s no introduction to your website – this should be added before the entries are processed on the index.php page. WordPress is not hard to customise, so customise it beyond the basics. Get rid of the blogexplosion link – this is not a blog, and nor does the button add any sort of quality to your sidebar.
Your links on the sidebar look grey yet in the main content area they’re black; the text is grey. This is not only confusing because of the lack of consistency it would mean a lot of fiddling about for people who expect set colours for links – at least when a link is a completely different colour to text is stands out and therefore becomes obvious. You could make your links dark red (maroon: #660000) in colour to tie in with your colour scheme.
Your Affiliates and Links states “Here are our affiliates and link exchanges. We are not responsible for anything on these sites.” There is only one owner/staff member/creator as far as I’m aware so why the usage of our and we? That should be “Here are my affiliates and link exchanges. I am not responsible for anything on these sites.” – basic English skills which you should have learnt at school by now. On to the tutorials…
Your Acronym vs. Abbr tutorial explains when to use the <acronym> and <abbr> tags but you don’t actually explain the difference between the two, and nor do you explain that Internet Explorer completely ignores the <abbr> tag. To be semantically correct and cross-browser compatible <span class="abbr" title=""> </span> should be used to back up <abbr> where the abbr class is customised via CSS.
On your Custom 404 Error Page in the first sentence, “tyou” should be you and in the last sentence “randomk” should be random. You seem to have a habit of typo-ing; maybe you should spell check your pages before publishing them?
Your Page Anchors tutorial is obviously rendering HTML that, I assume, should be displayed to your visitors and therefore is ruining the page.
Your Image Spaces tutorial is recommending deprecated coding that should be replaced with margins/paddings in CSS. You also don’t seem to have specified the difference between hspace="" and vspace="", so not only is this tutorial out of date it’s also unclear.
Your Proper Iframes tutorial is nonsense. You’re trying to tell people how to code properly yet your coding isn’t even accurate. For starters, you’ve left a space between the < and iframe which you could have avoided if you’d simply typed the entity out properly (< to produce < and so on) instead of relying on WordPress to convert it. You have inserted pixel measurements (px) into a html declaration of width/height where it’s not needed. You don’t need to use absolute positioning and the words allowTransparency seem to have been stuck in the middle of the other attributes. Iframe transparency is proprietary (only works in Internet Explorer) and therefore your so-called “right coding” is just as wrong as the “wrong coding”. You’ve missed the quotation marks from around the value in border=0. Both you and “Cherryland” (where you seem to have nabbed the coding from) need to learn a bit more before trying to educate people about what you’re unaware of.
On your Image Alt/Title tutorial you refer to alt="" and title="" as tags – they are not. They are attributes.
Your Show HTML is also incorrect. <textarea> is a form element and should only be used as such, and <xmp> has been deprecated. You’re telling people that they can use “Alt Tags” to display code too – they are not alt tags (there’s no such thing) they are HTML entities; which you really should learn to use properly because then you wouldn’t have to keep inserting spaces.
Your Ad Blocker tutorial is breaking the law. The adverts are on free sites for a reason; if people don’t like them they should pay for a domain or ask a domain owner to give them a sub-domain.
Your Automatic Redirect JavaScript tutorial has also been badly written – in fact the code is trying to redirect my browser to a page that doesn’t exist because you haven’t used HTML Entities to display your code. This tutorial is also pointless, as you can redirect someone using the refresh meta tag.
Your Disable Right Click tutorial is redistributing someone else’s code. Do you have written permission to do this?
You tell me in Cookies and Temporary Internet Files that a cookie is “to modifty the way a site is browsed” – this is not strictly true (and features another typo). A cookie is used to store information about a user, usually so that when they return preferences or log-in information is used as reference to enhance their browsing experience. It can change the way a site is browsed but is not the primary purpose.
On your Web Browsers page you have stated “IE’s only good feature is that it displays all CSS, and runs all scripts.“; this is not true. Even IE has it’s moments and if a script is that badly coded it won’t display correctly. Anyhow, IE’s lack of ability to weed out crap is not a good thing – it is the bane of a web developer’s life and can make cross-browser development incredibly hard. “This is good because you can see the correct formatting of the site (the CSS)” – wrong! IE will display whacked-out CSS which is another reason why cross-browser developing is hard. “use dollmakers correctly” – if the dollmakers were coded properly they’d work correctly. I had a drag and drop icon maker once that worked in the same way as a doll maker and worked in every browser. Roxanne has a “doll”maker which works in every browser. Mozilla Firefox doesn’t have any problems displaying JavaScript like you’re claiming – providing they’re coded properly. “Crazy Browser is probably the best alternative to IE” – Crazy Browser IS Internet Explorer; just with a different interface.
Most of your CSS Tips are silly. “Get rid of all <!– and –>. It’s not necessary.” – it’s more than not necessary; it’s completely irrelevant to stylesheets. “Lowercase all tags in your stylesheet.” – not needed. “Indent your tags” – also not needed.
Your Validating CSS tutorial is the most ridiculous advice I’ve ever heard. Try and validate and then just copy the processed valid coding? This doesn’t achieve anything – it cuts out parts of the stylesheet which need fixing which could then negatively effect the appearance of a page.
The site itself has a few coding errors. I assume you’ve been editing the sidebar because WordPress automatically generates valid coding. You’ve got an additional unneeded </li> after your pages list as well as missed quotation mark (<li id=categories">) where your Authors coding is declared and the blogexplosion linking button image is missing the closing slash ( />).
I’ve come to the conclusion that you have no idea what you are talking about. I get the impression that you have a tutorials site because it’s one of the easiest ways of getting site hits – in reality you probably validated your main site because it’s trendy and haven’t bothered to do a single bit of research into the whys and what fors of validating or the stuff that comes along with it. I would suggest that you actually do some reading and educate yourself on HTML, XHTML and CSS before trying to preach about everything else: w3schools.com is a great resource.
Serendipity Reviews
I am presented by an attractive layout that draws my eyes down on to the main content – something not many layouts can achieve. But then, as you’re using a free template designed by a professional (Narnia Theme), what did I expect? If you think that you’re good enough to offer advice to people then you should be good enough to create your own themes.
First thing I noticed is that several of your pages are linked along the top navigation bar and in the side. There is no need to repeat these links as all you will achieve is confused visitors browsing the same page twice. In the sidebar, where the page list code is called, you can use this to exclude pages already linked: <?php wp_list_pages('exclude=17,38'); ?> – 17,38 can be replaced with the page numbers you do not wish to show. Separate each page number with a comma.
On your About SR page you state “SR, short for Serendipity Reviews, is a small site owned, maintained, and hosted by Sparky” – you run your own hosting company do you? I doubt it, but that’s the way it sounds. You don’t host your own site, you just serve it as a sub-domain detached from the rest. Your host, in this case Surpass Hosting, hosts your site. Also “you may submit your site to be reviewed in an unbiased way.” – how do I submit my site in an unbiased way?
There’s not a lot I can say about your rules or format; as both are similar to my own any criticism of you would be criticism of myself.
On the Staff Profile page you state “but I do focus a lot on coding. I guess that’s my best skill with web design” – if that’s the case there’s no hope for anyone. I’m still reeling from the shock of your tutorial site. Why would anyone who has attempted to validate XHTML Strict on one site promote deprecated or crappy coding on another?
The Staff Guidelines page is useless to visitors and should be either excluded from the links list, or saved as a file in the reviews directory but separate from WordPress.
One of the most irritating things about your reviews is that you seem to start each one with “The first thing I noticed upon hitting enter after typing out your URL“. I’m all for a bit of consistency but I’m sure there’s more to your vocabulary than that. I wouldn’t submit my site to be reviewed by someone who cannot use different sentences to express things; I’d worry that I’d end up being told exactly the same as everyone else.
I noticed on your Staff Profile page you stated that you would not just tell people that they need to fix something; that you’d explain what needs fixing. On the contrary, in Emma’s review you state “Although your stylesheet is valid, it still needs work.” yet other than a bit of minor compression of the values in certain properties, you’ve not specified what needs work. Just because someone hasn’t optimised their stylesheet to show the shortest values doesn’t mean it needs work, it just means that it’s your job as a reviewer to educate the person about the benefits of font: 11px/17px Verdana, Sans-Serif; (example) over
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
font-family: verdana, sans-serif;
On Belinda’s review you said “My first impression of the layout was this: your coding.” – how can you get an impression of the coding by looking at the layout? The only way to get an impression of the coding is by looking at the coding, and according to your reviewing scheme you don’t need to do that for another few paragraphs. In the same review you said “Try fixing those iframes.” but don’t explain how. Another contradiction of your promises to reviewees.
In Beth’s review you compliment her for having a pointless splash page – why? “I’m in 1024×768, and your layout is rather small, yet big enough to be viewable in.” How can a layout be small yet big? And if you have no problems viewing the layout in your resolution (you’re not “in 1024×768″, you’re “using 1024×768″) then what is the point of mentioning it?
I’ve noticed that after your name (and some of your other “reviewers”) most of what I’m reading are “updates” – why do I get the feeling that you’re filling posts with crap to make the count next to your name appear larger? You’ve not done that many more reviews; you just seem to post every time a single change is made. People don’t need to know that you’re making miniscule changes to the queue or that you’ve added a review – people can see that you’ve added a bloody review!
As with the tutorials site it seems to me that you’re reviewing people because it’s a good way to get extra hits to your website. You’ve not given thought to how you might actually affect a person’s site (probably negatively). While your scoring system and guidelines could potentially be effective, you seem to go against claims of in depth help and resort to linking to my tutorial site. While I don’t mind the extra plugging I really do not need people thinking that I am associated with your bad coding.
Having spoken to you on some occasions via e-mail recently I can tell that you are a nice person who maybe, deep down, is more concerned with helping people than getting hits, but at the moment you come across as an amateur and your tutorials/reviews are doing nothing but promoting bad coding which makes my job as a decent reviewer harder. Until you’ve got up to date knowledge on the ins and outs of coding and why things are implemented, not just how, I recommend you quit reviewing and revise some of your tutorials. I, as a self-proclaimed coding nazi, could not honestly recommend your sites to anyone in good faith.