Reviewed: Sydney
Site URL: tehsheriff.org
Ouch. An automatic redirect. I’d not noticed that before but due to a drop of lag I saw the holding page for a few seconds — not good. If you’re using a <meta /> redirect — don’t. These can badly affect your search engine ranking because they’re commonly used by spammers to redirect people unknowingly. Anyway, back to the point…
I immediately saw a colourful and cute layout. While I prefer simplicity I can see already that this site would have no problem leaving an impression on the audience I assume your site is aimed at. While I think you could perhaps have narrowed down your colour scheme a little (you have various shades of pink, plus red and green) they are effective and compliment each other reasonably well.
I was a little disappointed to see the overlapping images in Internet Explorer — more so because you’re aware of the issue and haven’t fixed it yet. Assigning the title image an id and then adding the following to your stylesheet should hopefully fix the issue:
#id {
position: relative;
z-index: -1;
}
Don’t quote me on this though, I rarely have any luck with z-index. In case you’re curious — the position: is there because z-indexing only affects positioned elements. As you’ve not assigned any values, the actual placing of the image shouldn’t change. It’s a bit of a hack really and doesn’t always work. (Know of a better solution? Contact me via e-mail.)
The small text on the top image is virtually illegible — it’s too small and the colours are not ideal. The green in particular is hard to see on a laptop screen, both on the top image and the link colours — a darker green would probably be just as effective and still tie in with the Watermelon colour scheme.
I wasn’t expecting the top entry to be the actual introduction and while these keeps a feeling of consistency it is pointless to have comments/plugging enabled and can be somewhat confusing. The “vote?” link would be better off in the sidebar with the other graphical link buttons/etc. Despite these few bugs and issues, the presentation is typical of a blog/personal site but easy to use all the same. The text is a decent size, headers are obvious because of their size and there is a sufficient gap between the content and sidebar. The virtually pointless ‘web bands’ irritate me, but that’s down to personal preference so I won’t mention these again.
The Sheriff is short and doesn’t really tell me anything about you. Your physical attributes don’t change the “life” behind your website but insight into your personality might. A couple of paragraphs on you, your hobbies and why you made the website would be a massive benefit. On an almost related note, I think the Related Pages section might possibly be better at the bottom of each page — people will want to read the one they’re on before browsing elsewhere.
The Evil Plan is quite cute but I was disappointed to read that it was generated by a website. Maybe if you’ve got the time you could write your own evil plan? It’d certainly be a unique piece of witty content.
Your Adoptions are cute and if I was in to that sort of thing I’d no doubt adopt some for my own website. Although the background section is brief I can see why it might appeal to those who don’t have the time or ability to create their own backgrounds — I would however recommend creating thumbnails of the backgrounds to display them instead of showing the full image with the size reduced with HTML (height="100") because this page seriously lags on dial-up.
On your Wallpapers page you have the following rules:
3. Don’t redistribute
4. Should not be on the web anywhere but here
..and yet in my opinion they mean exactly the same thing? Also, I always find it quite amusing to see people making rules for images (wallpapers, etc) that include photos/cartoons that they have no rights over in the first place. If you’re going to infringe on the original Artist’s copyright the least you could do is remove any restrictions to get them. I personally think you’d be better off making wallpapers with your own images — I’d download a great big watermelon!
I would say that you’re pushing it a bit with your Downloads. Simply stating “If you want me to take them down (if they belong to you), please let me know and I will.” doesn’t excuse you from Copyright laws and you’ll be just as liable if the creator of one of the programs/Screenmates decided to take action against you. The same thing goes for the Pixel Fonts. You’re demanding people don’t redistribute your stuff yet you’re doing it to others?
There’s nothing I can really say about the quotes as I’ve read most of them before.
On to your tutorials. I was really interested to see the Intro to .htaccess tutorial — until I clicked it. It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know and didn’t explain what you can actually use .htaccess files for. As quite a few of your tutorials explain how to do things with .htaccess you could create an entire section for these with the Intro to .htaccess tutorial as the introduction. You might also want to point out that if a person wants to add multiple things to their .htaccess file they will need to start each element on a new line.
On the CSS Link Effects tutorial, the following:
A:active {EFFECTS GO HERE}
A:hover {EFFECTS GO HERE}
..need to be switched. Remember LoVe HAte — where each capital letter is the start of the CSS pseudo-element. Although all of the tutorials up to this point are relatively accurate none of them are entirely in depth and may confuse beginner users. To make your tutorial available to a wider audience you need to explain each step as simply as possible.
The Speed Up Firefox tips won’t make a difference to the majority of users. In fact, only those on high speed broadband will probably notice a difference with these ‘tricks’.
Domain, Credits and Link Back are pretty generic, there’s nothing I can say about these. The Past Layouts page has small enough thumbnails to make load time bearable but are detailed enough to show talent progression throughout the ‘ages’, so to speak. There’s an extra, incorrectly coded </p> under Layout 03.
In general your coding is tidy and valid because WordPress is nice like that. There was one little issues that may affect the integrity of the pages but is easily fixed: in the sidebar the < for the skinning webring needs to be changed to < and the > needs to be changed to >. That was the only issue I could find!
Your site is pleasant and easy to browse. It’s well presented and colourful and I noticed no glaring spelling/grammatical errors. I can see how it’d be popular amongst those who own similar “cute” style websites as well as a mixed bag of content which caters for all other types of users. To top it all off you’ve got a well coded website to host it all on. I think that you could benefit from a little more personal information and written content but otherwise — super! Keep it up.