jemjabella

Review of sami.sophistichiq.com

Reviewed: Sami
Site URL: sami.sophistichiq.com

First impression: too much text. I like reading websites — they’re quite interesting — I don’t like being chucked in at the deep end though. An introduction should be a few sentences maximum, preferably with a few keywords nicely highlighted for me to pick up as I scan. If these keywords are repeated in your title and meta keyword tag, they will help raise your search engine ranking for those particular words too. (And yes, I’m blatently ignoring your Note to Reviewers.)

Your top image is somewhat odd. I like the ‘old’ style of it — the greyscale, the building in the background with the newspaper guy adding a focal point — and then the girl throws it all off. She doesn’t ‘go’ at all, and I’m not sure what point she serves.

I think your content area would be better with a left and right black border to ‘carry’ the top image down the page. At the moment it stops quite abruptly giving the eye nothing to visually follow.

Your text, headers and links are clearly distinguishable from each other, but I think you should go for a darker link hover colour.

On to your content, and back to your introduction. I find that it quite ‘rambly’ — you talk too much, and at times often contradict things you’ve already said. In the first sentence (”Vanishing Glass is a personal site in which writing makes up most of the content.”) you are telling people it’s a personal site, and then a writing site (then again on the Reviewers Note page) — which is it? Your visitors don’t need to be told in the intro’ that the site is cluttered, that’s off-putting. I consider “I tried to make this site …” a description of the site, best served under your Site section. You don’t need to explain your navigation in such detail (”navigation is above” would be sufficient) and descriptions of what is in each section could go in a title attribute for each link.

“of a ex-hippy” should be “of an ex-hippy” and “I want people to enjoy but” doesn’t explain what it actually is you want people to enjoy. You don’t explain what a fangirl is (nor fanfic earlier on), and your statement about enjoying reading would be better suited to your Girl section.

Be careful when labelling your updates “10-05-06″: while at the moment it obviously means 10th May, later on this year it could mean the 5th October.

In your Girl section, girlpics.jpg and girlpics8.jpg are not aligning to the right because you’re using the ’special’ quotation mark character instead of the plain text ” after the alt attributes.

“I’m Sami as you can read above” ..actually, it says you’re Samantha. “I gobbled up books” makes me think of somebody eating books, hm! Oh, and if you’re in to fantasy, you might like Terry Pratchett books (that’s if you’ve not read ‘em already). You have an interesting outlook on history, and you’re definitely more active than I am — not sure about your taste in TV shows though. Talking of which “I heart TV. I really do. I love television, I really do.” bugs me, the last bit seems so redundant: you’ve already said you love TV! I empathise with your feelings about music. It’s something I just never really got into as a kid, and when people ask me what I like I say “anything I can sing along to”. In fact, I’m singing along to Nina Simone at this very moment.

I find it quite surprising that you have your rejection letters typed up — that’s incredibly personal. Were I in your shoes, I don’t think my ego would let me do that. Still, I found it quite interesting the difference between each slip (the fact that the latest was quite complimentary and the others so blunt) and at least it shows that you’re pursuing your hobbies.

Collective would probably be better under Site and “quite a bit” on that page seems ..wrong, in some odd and completely anal way. Quite a lot, would be better (although I’m guilty of saying the former). On this page, it’d be better if you linked the URL as well as displaying them as it wasn’t immediately obvious that the thumbnails were clickable.

In the first paragraph of your NaNoWriMo snippet you use the word “Succubae” far too many times (and my spelling checker says it’s “Succuba”). Now, I’m no expert when it comes to writing but when I’m reading I like a little variation. When I was at school we were told to avoid using the same words closely together as often together (obviously this doesn’t apply to the lines of ‘the’, ‘they’, ‘and’, etc). The rest of the page was quite an interesting read, although I must admit to skipping over a few bits (I’m a very impatient reader). I did notice the Latin thought — does that mean anything in particular or did you make it up?

Under Writing, none of your Rants work; rants.php apparently doesn’t exist.

Still in the Writing section > Published Works > In The Queen’s Sister, “thankfully it was just a bic not one of the shiny” would probably have read better as “thankfully it was just a bic and not one of the shiny” and “how his eye followed her hands” sounds like he only has one eye. On Teenagers, Wake Up “They electing a leader whose inflexible” would be clearer as “They elected a leader who has inflexible” (although the entire sentence sounds funny read out loud — perhaps you should look at that and be more specific about your point?) I am pretty sure “internet” (3rd paragraph) should be capitalised.

Your writings are quite creative — you have some good storylines. However, I find it incredibly hard to read through your writings and start scanning. A lot of your sentences are awkward and your grammar is lacking. I know you’re aware of this, but I feel that it’s quiet important you hear it again. The way I see it is that if people constantly nag you about it, you might work on it. I will say that you’re definitely not the worst writer I’ve seen though (I cannot get over J.K. Rowling’s use of commas personally, but there we go).

Regarding your Copyright, Plagiarism, and Distribution piece — it’s not entirely accurate. For starters “Did you know that everything on this site is already copyrighted?”: the images in your layout, did you take those pictures yourself or did you obtain them from somewhere else? Assuming they’re not yours, they aren’t protected by copyright, not yours anyway. Likewise, you state that your avatars are yours and can only be used if you are credited, and yet without even looking at the avatars I can guarantee that they contain celebrity images that you don’t own. You really ought to link to more reputable sources at the bottom of the article too, and can find some at the bottom of my piece on Copyright Violation.

Moving on to HodgePodge, “full of things that doesn’t fit anywhere else” should be “full of things that don’t fit anywhere else” (do not instead of does not). The ‘in’ is not required in “I love entering in icon contests” and shouldn’t “so I will have a bunch of avatars” be “so that’s why I have a bunch of avatars”? The introduction to this section is far more wordy than it needs to be.

I find it amusing that you’re being defensive about your own copyright and yet, you’re not respecting the rights of the celebrities and celebrity photographers by using their work in your wallpapers and avatars?

I’m not qualified to comment on your Fanfiction/Drabble tips because I know nothing about them. You meditation techniques seem interesting enough, and your Reading a Website Review article is quite accurate. Theoretically you should take everything any reviewer says with a pinch of salt though. Taste, is after all, objective, and despite many objections to the contrary this is all reviews really are: the reviewers taste in website expressed in writing.

The top paragraph of the Site section would be better separated into two (starting with “The programs used …”), “Helpful sites are” would sound a little better as “Helpful sites include” and “it has the first time Harry talks to snakes” makes more sense as “it is the first time Harry talks to snakes”. I don’t really get why a personal site needs affiliates and Reviewed appears twice in the bottom link list.

Your coding is tidy enough. In fact, for the most part it’s pretty decent, so I’m not sure why you’re sticking with HTML Transitional and not Strict (or even XHTML for bragging rights). There are a few errors here and there:

• You’re using the  /> style end tag for your stylesheet link which is invalid in HTML (remove the space and forward slash)
• You have paragraph tags around your Updates header on the index that shouldn’t be there.
• Your layout image is missing the alt attribute. I can’t remember for the life of me if this is required under the HTML doctypes but it’s good practise to include it anyway.
• The images on your Girl main page are all also closed using  /> and shouldn’t be.
• You’re missing the opening <p> under Name in the Site section.

You seem to have a case of div-itis too. Your layout image coding for example, looks like this:

<div id="picture" class="centered">
<img src="layout.jpg">
</div>

But could be switched to:

<img src="layout.jpg" id="picture" alt="alt text here">

You have two <div>s around your navigational list (bravo for using lists, btw) both of which are unneeded (the styling could be applied directly to the unordered list). Talking of which, #navcontainer ul { } has an incorrect } on the same line (after list-style-type: none;) and a redundant { on the next line, after that.

Because you’re using absolute positioning and trying to use the ‘center cheat’ to center your layout, your layout is way off to the one side in Internet Explorer. Remove the absolute positioning: it’s not needed at all. You may need to do a little fiddling to get it to sit in the middle, but it the code looks pretty accurate.

Your site is not bad. There was plenty for me to read which keeps people like me going for a few hours, and you have the right idea when it comes to functionality (right text size — although it’d be better as a percentage — clear headings, links, etc). I think the real let down is the awkward phrasing which could probably be sorted simply be reading your pages out loud. Overall, it kept me busy, even if I spent every few minutes correcting your grammar in my head.

Unrequested review of maxed-virtuals.com

Reviewed: No idea
Site URL: maxed-virtuals.com

I can’t wait to start reviewing this website so I’ll just dive right in…

Your splash page — what’s the point of it? Presentationally, it looks okay I guess, but in terms of functionality it achieves nothing. It doesn’t even have the word “enter” on it. There’s no title attribute, the alt attribute text seems to be aimed at Internet Explorer users and you’re using presentational height and width attributes which are redundant under the XHTML doctypes (particularly as you’ve given the image a class and could specify dimensions with CSS).

After entering the site (I figured out that I’m supposed to click that splash image) I see a mass of faded greys otherwise known as “bloody tiny text”. I’m not sure what planet you were on when you decided upon 9px #B9B8B6, but I don’t know of anyone who’d agree with your choice. I would recommend a minimum of 11px (preferably 71% as that’s resizable in IE) and #575653 or darker (as that is sufficiently different from your background colour, as specified by the W3C). You can use the Juicy Studio: Colour Contrast Analyser to experiment with colour contrast.

Excusing your poor design decisions, you seem to be having trouble with English too. Now, I’ve no idea whether or not your mother tongue is English so I could probably forgive you for typing errors, but you have grasped the use of “!” so why not other punctuation — i.e. the apostrophe? Talking of which, it’s normal to end most sentences with a period/full stop, not an exclamation mark. Oh, and “alot” is not a word.

I must admit that this isn’t the first time I’ve visited your site. I had a quick glance earlier on this and couldn’t find any navigation within the first few seconds so I left. I only came back because I noticed you linked on totaltutorial.com offering a way to “show the visitors IP” and I wondered what kind of person would offer that as a single tutorial. I had another look for navigation this time then it occurred to me that perhaps it was being ‘broken’ by my NoScript extension. I switched JavaScript on and tada — navigation. You might want to make this available without JavaScript.

Your main “blog” page coding is invalidated by a pointless target attribute on your e-mail links (”Posted by: Lee”). You’re also using nested tables, more presentational attributes, and language="JavaScript1.2" isn’t needed in your JavaScript tags. Of course, alternatively you could get rid of your JavaScript and use CSS menus — you might be interested in A List Apart’s article: Suckerfish Dropdowns.

I noticed this classic paragraph at the bottom of your updates blog:

In Internet Explorer when you go to the Tutorials page it might just load one tutorial automatically, if this happens please use the e-mail page and tell me what browser you are using!

..surely if you’ve just told visitors that the error happens in Internet Explorer, you don’t need them to tell you what browser they’re using when e-mailing you?

Moving swiftly on to your Tutorials page, I’ve already spotted a few errors. Under PHP, “its easy” should be “it’s easy” and JavaScript is about more than ‘adding tweaks’. Likewise, CSS is not about having sexy tables but rather completely the opposite! CSS should help you get away from tables — perhaps you ought to read my tutorial on Creating a Tableless Layout. I don’t know the first thing about Photoshop so I’ll move straight on to PHP..

The first tutorial that caught my eye was “Banning A Person From Your Site”, particularly because I know a lot of people who are relying IP addresses for tracking and banning of late. Before we even get to the problems with the tutorial, there’s the key fact that anybody can get past an IP ban by using a proxy. Back to the tutorial: “sorry, your banned” ..my banned what? I think you mean “Sorry, you’re banned”. It’s also somewhat silly to assign an IP to a variable when you could just do this: if($banip == $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']){, exit() needs a semi-colon after it, and if you DO decide to keep assigning $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] to a variable, don’t wrap it in quotation marks.

The “Display the current date” tutorial is somewhat misleading, as the line of code would only echo the date as set on the server running the PHP, not the date of the person using the tutorial. Your “PHP Include Code” tutorial description states that PHP includes can be used to make a website more efficient and yet doesn’t explain how. Why not?

The “Showing Users Client IP” tutorial not only uses PHP ’short tags’ (<? ?>) which aren’t available on every installation of PHP, but it relies on register_globals to be turned on. Again, you assign the IP needlessly to a variable. The entire “tutorial” could be cut down to:

<?php echo $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']; ?> ..but then of course there’s the fact that the contents of the $_SERVER superglobal array are easily tampered with, so would you want to echo an ‘unclean’ value to the browser?

The “Unique Hits Counter” is not really a counter at all and would be better referred to as a Hit Logger. Again, you don’t teach anything about the tutorial which means you’re aiding a copy&paste society instead of actually teaching people useful things that they could then implement elsewhere.

On to your JavaScript tutorials and all of your opening script tags seem to be missing type=”text/javascript”. Then of course there’s the redundancy of them — why would any sane person want neon text on their web page? Also, why are you using client side scripting (which can be turned off) to print the current date in your “Self Updating Copyright Script” tutorial when you could achieve the same thing with a line of PHP which can’t be turned off? (<?php echo date("Y"); ?>) The description of the tutorial is incredibly deceptive (”Use this script to copyright your site!”) as there is more to Copyright than a piece of JavaScript.

The “Connecting to Stylesheets” tutorial is not only badly named (you link to a stylesheet), but it seems to be limited to a single method of including styles (what about users coding to XHTML standards and the import method?). It also tells your reader to “place the code below in the ” tags” — this is because you’ve not used HTML entities to display your demonstration <head> </head> tags. They have been parsed and are invalidating your page, as well as providing no use to those who won’t view your source like I did.

“Customize Those Scroll Bars” ..no, no, no. Please don’t offer this stupid bloody tutorial. Coloured scrollbars only work in IE (and possibly Opera if you’ve got the option turned on) and the CSS to display them will invalidate the stylesheet of any poor, unknowing fool that uses the code. Talking of scrollbars, the “Totally remove the scroll bars” tutorial is completely incorrect (you’re mixing an inline style declaration with external stylesheet coding as well as a missing ‘}’) and incredibly frustrating for those of us who actually like to use the scrollbars.

I tried to use your tutorial search box to look for ‘CSS’ and it found no results. As we both know you have three CSS tutorials, perhaps you should come up with some sort of keyword system for your tutorials which the user can also search for. Not that I think you need a search box, you’ve not got enough tutorials.

The message on the Tutorial/Site Problems page needs clarifying: “I try to respond to your messages in 1/2 days” could mean that it takes ½ a day to respond to a message, that you only respond to messages on days that have halves (uh, none?) or that you respond to messages every ½ a day. That is of course unless you’re trying to suggest that you reply to messages every one or two days, in which case you should write that. Clear and concise = best. Perhaps your “Page of Error” input field could also take the referrer URL (<?php echo $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; ?>) from the previous page so that the visitor doesn’t have to go back to copy and paste it?

Your downloads are mostly 3rd party scripts and fonts that you don’t own and therefore are breaking the law by redistributing. Beyond that, you’re also putting your users at risk by offering scripts as a 3rd party which may not have been recently updated to include security fixes and the like. The Easy Guestbook script, for example, has no validation of date input which means anybody using it could easily have ‘bad’ data injected to cause mass damage to their databases and hosting account. It also relies on register_globals being turned on, which again, not everybody has.

I had a giggle at your Services page. For somebody who claims fluency in PHP you don’t really tend to express that in your tutorials. I’ve been working with the language for a couple of years, have my own popular guestbook script, wrote my own weblog system and CMS and have advised friends on script security — and I’d still only consider myself a beginner with PHP!

Your entire site is badly written; I don’t know the first thing about you — not even your name! Every good website should have an introduction just to make your visitors feel more comfortable. I’m debating with myself what your qualifications are, official or practical. While you obviously have some skills in Photoshop (way beyond what I can do) your PHP and other coding is lacking any clarity, and in some cases lacking decent code too. I feel you should invest in a couple of good books before writing any more tutorials.

Unrequested review of blueberriez.com

Reviewed: Nile
Site URL: blueberriez.com

Aw, look, it’s that cute panda thing! I think the company behind the TarePanda™ character (San-x I believe?) must be really generous to give so many people on the web permission to use their images. Unless of course you’re breaking the law and using images you have no rights over? You wouldn’t do that and then put a copyright notice at the bottom of your page, would you?

I love browsing websites designed/created by people so wrapped in their own self-importance; so wrapped up in trying to make themselves look good; that they go and misspell words and don’t even notice. In your introduction “ambedextrous” should be ambidextrous, and do I really need to explain that the first letter of the first word after a full stop (period) should be capitalised?

The general impression I get from the appearance of your website is “unfinished”. Now, I believe that one key factor to a website is the ability to constantly update it and add to it. This, however, doesn’t excuse untidiness such as the lack of padding between your text and images, run-on sentences, smiley abuse, etc. Then there is the blue background which doesn’t really ‘go’ with any other part of your layout, links which are almost impossible to distinguish from the text and little Polaroid-style images which tell me nothing about the website each is linked to.

Why are you seemingly allergic to paragraphs in your weblog? Or rather, why have you butchered the style coding so that paragraphs don’t seem to exist? I don’t know anyone who finds it easy to read long sections of text without some sort of line break every now and again. Talking of butchering coding, I find it incredibly annoying that you’ve hacked about an install of WordPress to suit yourself, but haven’t bothered to leave any credit anywhere?

Moving on to your content… you talk about your hobbies on your About Me page, and go on to say and more, just so many to list, might get boring…lol — I personally find pointless interuptions in the flow of text far more tedious. I’d replace that sentence with “and many more.” <- end of, simple, easy.

I am a published writer, yet not famous yet…oh well, but one day maybe….lol — lol do you think it’s because of your abuse of the acronym lol that is making you “unfamous” lol?

I was born September 13, 1980 — that makes you 25, not 24, a clear demonstration that you’ve not bothered to keep your page up to date. I figured by then that I had wanted to become a writer ..had wanted? meeting a great guy who I married and having a beautiful baby boy, — sounds to me like your great guy had a beautiful baby boy. Physical impossibilities be damned, you’re intelligent with a high IQ. You’re not going to let a little thing like Science get in the way!

Displaying ABCs, “Outlined Biography”, Googlisms, test results etc all went out of fashion about 2 years ago. Well, at least for anyone who has spent more than 30 seconds considering the kind of content they should have. I would say that judging by the pointless pages that aren’t linked because they don’t exist, it’s been about that long (2 years) since you updated this section though.

Visitor… your elite clique seems to be a site for bagpipes, and neither of your other cliques load. I’m too lazy to go through the links to your fanlistings, although I will question exactly how these are supposed to be “visitor” related content? I would say these belong on a “pluggage of my own sites” type page.

I love your Sanrio pixel characters! Sorry, did I say that? What I meant was: I love how you demand a link back for use of these Sanrio characters and yet have not even attempted to credit the original Sanrio creator on this page. Not that it’d make a difference — derivative works are copyright infringements, credit or not.

Some Site Tips — excuse me while I do a Nile: “lol”. Tip #1 can be summed up as “have quizzes, be unique”. How can you publish the results of ridiculous memes on your web space and be unique at the same time? In fact, how exactly are you unique? Tip #2 I agreed with, until you recommended banner advertisements. Advertisements are irritating, irrelevant of the form they appear in. #4 is grossly incorrect. If you build your layout for 800 x 600, anyone will be able to see your site. ..what about those still unfortunately stuck at 640×480, those using PDAs and phone browsers? #5 is unnecessary; I have plenty of visitors and no affiliates. #6 is lol-worthy “pass me a bucket” bollocks: I have enough siblings offline, I don’t want idiots online calling me that. #7 is not even close to correct — I get maybe 1% of my visitors from the listings I’ve joined. #8 is also wrong as drama is the quickest way to get visitors to your web site. #10 is good advice but wrong at the same time; dmoz.org don’t own lots of websites, it’s just a listing. #11.. well, what about following your own advice?

Words of the Wise about Review Sites ..boy am I looking forward to reading this. There are a lot of review sites online. Some are weary and think about having their site reviewed, yet are afraid of being mulled to a pulp. Eh? Some review sites think about having their site reviewed? That doesn’t make sense.

I find it amusing that you have to justify your opinion at the top of your page with your complete Internet history, how long you’ve been designing, etc. I don’t know why you bother, because it just makes you look arrogant. Age is a factor in reviewing and so check the staff member’s website. ..no it’s not. I have a reviewer at my review site who’s been giving reviews since she was 12, and the quality of her coding is far superior to yours. For shame those that criticize for a high score when their site beams with talent!!! ..eh? Splash is optional and all review sites should allow the “About” section or “Me” section suffice as a splash ..what has an about page got to do with a splash page?

although all review sites are free (well, except for linking back), you should not wait any more than 10 days (week and a half) for your review. ..hahaha. Just because it’s trendy to change your layout every 10 days, doesn’t mean that reviewers should be forced to review in that period of time. I don’t know about your reviews, but mine are longer than 3 sentences and take anything from several hours to several days to complete — with a job, family, a partner and other real things to deal with, I know which I consider to be more important.

Reviewer Tips — am I expecting to see this full of hypocrisy? Yes. Can you honestly critique another when your site is in a horrible shape? — can you honestly give advice on websites when yours is out of date, providing false advice or fails to demonstrate the tips you’re recommending?

To be a reviewer is to become a webmaster/ webmistress first. ..not really. Anyone is entitled to an opinion, it’s just whether or not it’s justifiable that’s important. Learn tables, and seriously learn the basics. HAH! Or, you could learn about standards, divs and CSS layouts. Maybe you have seen a lot of sites? That means nothing when you cannot code a site properly. ..says the person with invalid code. Originality. [...] This category is many review sites is a ridiculous part of the rubric. ..it’s equally as ridiculous for shitty elite cliques, no?

I could care less ..you couldn’t care less, you mean? which is caused from the reviewer’s experience. ..eh? In years to come, these guidelines will still be relevant ..don’t kid yourself.

Your HTML tutorials are crap. You mentioned on your reviewer tips page that reviewers should explain how to solve problems, and yet your attempts at tutorials just list a bit of code. They don’t explain anything or guide newbies, and you’re using <textarea>s to display code, which is complete misuse of the tag.

The Site section is blah — typical generic crap, as is Services, Listed and Joined. Oh look, the end of the content.

For someone who is such an expert on websites I’m surprised your code is so amateur. There’s the alt attribute in your body tag, despite the fact that <body> shouldn’t have an alt attribute. Elements customised with inline style could be given a class (for elements with the same styling that appear more than once) or an id (for unique elements) and then customised via your stylesheet. Your list of navigation would be better marked up as exactly that — a list.. all of these things simply to bring your code up to HTML 4.01 standards. WordPress is valid XHTML by default, so I’ve no idea why you’ve “downgraded” to HTML.

To be honest, there’s nothing overly wrong with your website. Okay, you’re breaking the law by creating images based of material protected by copyright, you haven’t updated your personal section in almost two years, and your coding is hardly great. Still, the website is of reasonable quality, there’s an attempt at content and your design is cross-browser compatible.

It’s you that’s the problem. Your entire site REEKS of “I’m so better than you”. You refuse to shut up about how intelligent you supposedly are and how great your writing is, yet I see countless grammatical errors, sentences that don’t make sense or that run on and on. Paragraphs that shouldn’t be paragraphs, punctuation errors, superfluous chat-speak style acronyms and crap. Your arrogant attitude is far more off-putting than any coding errors, and yet is the easiest to fix. Give it a thought.

Unrequested review of fallen-rose.com

Reviewed: Kayla
Site URL: fallen-rose.com

10 seconds.. 25 seconds.. 40 seconds.. 1 minute 20 seconds..

For crying out loud! I’ve been on your website almost two minutes now and your top image hasn’t loaded. I’d keep counting but I’ve forgot where I got to. And your top image is STILL loading, even after typing this.

Uh, STILL loading…?

Thank Christ! It’s finished! Over 660Kb for a crappy blue-black pattern with only your site name as a focal point. Having your site name as the focal point is not a bad thing, but it does mean we don’t need the redundant shite above your site title. Saved as a GIF your top image is a third of the size; pointless additional pattern-stuff removed and then saved as a GIF, your top image is just less than 60Kb. One tenth of the original file size — now doesn’t that make more sense?

There’s a problem with your website: I’ve been here three minutes (possibly longer) and I have no idea what your site is about. Bearing in mind that the average visitor has decided whether or not they want to stay in about 3-9 seconds, you should probably fix that. I shouldn’t have to click a link to find out the most basic information about a site, it should be immediately obvious (either in the title of a site or in an introduction). I asked “an outsider” (thank you Karl) what he thinks the site is about and he said “that person?”. Is this a personal site?

I am super-duper pleased that you’ve got your links underlined but incredibly annoyed that you’ve fiddled with the cursor property and got rid of my default little hovery-hand. Why do people, yourself included, feel the need to change that kind of stuff? It doesn’t add anything to a website; it has no aesthetic value.

Your links are too similar in colour to your text and too similar in colour to the background. I’m all for matching a colour to the decorative images used but there is such a thing as “contrast” and it’s not a bad thing. The same thing goes for the ‘headers’ which are barely readable on the patterned background underneath them.

In any resolution above 1024×768 your background repeats horizontally as well as vertically. This doesn’t leave me feeling confident about the standard of your tutorials, as the problem can be fixed with a single word in your CSS which you should know if you feel you’re good enough to offer advice. The background could also be fixed and made smaller in size, by using a small background for the body {} and then placing the repeating part in a container div around your absolutely positioned divs (which don’t need to be positioned, but I’ll get to that later.)

I am confused as to why your About FR dives straight into previous details about the website without even a “hello, this site is about xyz” — i.e. the important current details. No one cares what a site was, nobody sane anyway, they just want to know what a site is about and if it’s going to benefit them. As I’ve read a paragraph and still don’t know what your website is about, you’re not doing well so far.

“Fallen Rose” has more of a mature sound to it, and much darker and mysterious.

What has a much darker and mysterious name got to do with a website? I don’t think anyone ever visits my website because of its name! Anyway, if you insist on using that logic to justify your site name, the second half of that sentence would read better as “it is much darker and mysterious”.

It’s a website to hopefully be a graphics resource site

..makes very little sense. It’s either a graphic resource site, or it isn’t. If it is, try something like “This is a quality graphics resource website” instead. It ‘bigs up’ your website and clarifies the point of your pages. If it isn’t (which I’m still not sure about, because you’ve got content unrelated to graphics) then say so. Please, whatever you do, be more specific.

Another sentence that doesn’t sound right when read aloud is:

To me, although not more important, hits are pretty high up there.

Hits are not more important than what? You’ve not discussed something important previously and as such I think that this sentence should be: “To me, my website hits are quite important, although not as important as (whatever it is they’re not as important as here)”. Although if I’m being really picky, I would say that documenting your hits at all is pretty superficial. Don’t worry, this review will increase your total hits by loads!

I don’t know why you’ve saved the entire page set-up for your past layouts? Not only does Google see this as replicating content (which can negatively affect your search engine ranking); I certainly don’t want to click each individual past layout page preview. I would suggest taking a screenshot of each layout where you can, and then putting them on one page. If you don’t have past layout previews, don’t include the details — most visitors are only interested in seeing your learning curve and they don’t need 50 previews for that.

Received would be more appropriately named Awards or Gifts, and Stats.. well, I see no need for them at all. You’re also missing Review-You off your review sites list, which is just crazy because everyone knows it’s the best one around.

Your affiliates/hostees/network links would be better on a separate links page and the piece of JavaScript that creates the little buttons could quite frankly be shoved up a certain bodily orifice for all I care, but that’s just my hatred for pointless JavaScripts biasing my opinion.

Moving on to the actual content of the website…

It is frustrating to have to click the links in your sidebar to get to each content type, only to discover that I have to click another link to get to individual categories within each type and then click again to see the full-sized versions of each item. Of course — I’m not interested in downloading any of your generic, boring, unoriginal content — but those who are will have to go through this click-click-click procedure for every item they want to download. Add this tedious clicking to slow page load times (despite the images being cached; this is caused by the Haloscan comments and additional pointless JavaScript) and it adds up to one bored visitor.

It seems that the majority of your content, and the little buttons on the Link FR page, contain artwork, pictures, celebrity photographs/etc. that don’t belong to you and therefore you have no right to create derivative works of. Simply adding a “Credit” link does not excuse you from having to follow Copyright law and it’s websites like this that tempt me into ‘ripping’ the whole thing off just to try and see if you can justify your legal standing (you have none — you are breaking the law). I have an article on Copyright Violation, if you decide you’d like to educate yourself (what are the chances?)

Tutorials; I love it when people try and advise others when they can’t even get their own website in line. The lists tutorial is actually semi-accurate: “command” should be tag (”that’s what gives the computer the command that you’re making one”) and it’s not the computer that generates the page dependant on the HTML, it’s the browser. Also, you don’t need a line break in list items, you just need to close the items properly (</li>). I know this isn’t a requirement under the HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype but tidy coding is always better than untidy coding.

Under Showing HTML Code you’re demonstrating <textarea> as a method of displaying HTML. This is misuse of a form element, and I don’t get why you’re doing it as you clearly know how to use the entities (&lt; etc.) to show HTML ‘properly’. In fact, why haven’t you got one of my handy Code Converters? As for the graphics tutorials: no personal interest = no critique.

I’m not even going to glorify your Reads section with the profanity that it deserves. I will say though — I thought this chain mail-style junk had gone from sites like this years ago! Bullshit like “He Drank. I Died” that tries to inject the young mind with guilt and emotion to persuade them not to do one thing or another doesn’t work, and has only one place: in the bin.

Your coding is.. hm, not too bad (in places). I’ve seen worse, that’s for sure. You’ve probably ignored what I’ve said throughout the majority of this review because that’s what people do, but if you decide to read and take action on any one part of my review: let it be everything after this point, for the love of all that is Holy (like coffee, ice cream and cake).

Firstly, crop the diagonal pattern from your current background. Or, just create a new image in PSP 3 pixels by 3 pixels in size, fill the background in #7793A9 and draw a line from the top left corner to the bottom right corner in #1C4B70 (those two hex colours are the current colours in your background). Save it as an optimised gif and link to this as your background in the background-image property of your body {} selector. The blue column ’setup’ part of your background can be assign to your container div, which you’ll be creating shortly…

Next, still in you CSS, remove cursor:default; and the scrollbar colouring from the body {} selector, background-color: transparent; from the content class selector (.content {}). You can also remove text-decoration: underline; font-size: 11px; cursor: default; font-weight: none; from each link pseudo-class, and , a:cursor from after a:hover. You also need to swap the a:active and a:hover properties around as the pseudo-classes need to be in a specific order to work across all browsers: link, visited, hover, active (remember them as LoVe HAte).

Remove background-color: transparent; and font-size:11px; from the header class selector and give a measurement to the height property value(e.g. px — height: 20px;). Measurements also need to be given to the padding and border property values.

Talking of the border properties: you’ve typed out the values in the wrong order twice. Remove border-top: #000000 0 solid; border-left: #000000 0 solid; border-right:#000000 0 solid; border-bottom:#000000 0 solid; and re-arrange border:black solid 1; so that it says: border: 1px solid #000000;. Obviously you can change #000000 for whatever colour you want, 1px for whatever width you want, etc.

In the contenthead class selector you can remove background-color: transparent;, font-size:11px; and the four border-[side] properties. Fix the main border property so the values are in the right order and don’t forget to give measurements to the padding/etc. Lastly (in your CSS), you can remove background-color: transparent; from the select, input, textarea selector.

I have suggested you remove all of these properties because they’re all pointless. The reason being that they are either set that way “in” the browser by default or you’ve declared them previously and will be inherited in the rest of your CSS. The only exception to this is the coloured scrollbars CSS and I’ve suggested you remove that because it is proprietary (designed for one browser). This basically was just a CSS-optimisation exercise. Now, onto your HTML…

After <body>, put the following: <div id="container">. Then, place </div> before </body>. This is the container div that I mentioned earlier and will contain the rest of your layout which we can move where we want it, without having to rely on absolute positioning. Next, you need to remove all of the style="position: absolute; [etc]“ crap from your div tags because then you can follow my tableless three-column layout tutorial because I’m too lazy to explain it all again. Basically this will explain how to float your three columns in the container div.

You need to go through your HTML and change every instance of <p class="header"> </p> and change it to <h2> </h2> or <h3> </h3> where required (i.e. subtitles to h2, sub-subtitles (I made that word up) to h3). You also need to change <p class="contenthead"> </p> to <h1> </h1>. Once you’ve done that you can change .header { to h2 { and .contenthead { to h1 { in your CSS.

Instead of using double line-breaks at the end of each line, wrap your paragraphs in (wait for it..!) paragraph tags: <p> </p>. This will allow more accurate customisation over your paragraphs with CSS, and will ensure more consistent spacing between lines.

For future compliance and to allow for a possible change to XHTML (if you ever decided to go that ‘far’) I would recommend writing your HTML all lower-case, and using unordered lists for your sidebar links instead of link line break link line break link line break. I would also recommend removing the target="_blank" attribute from all of your links as this is a pain in the ass for people who use Firefox and prefer new tabs to windows (unless of course they’ve got the tabbrowser preferences plugin: hint hint people!)

You’ve got a redundant space before the URL to the image in the <img> tag that links to the Corrupt Me SOTM contest and you’re using <textarea> instead of the HTML entities on your Link FR page. You’re missing a quotation mark after the target attribute in the link to http://kaycar11.tripod.com on Webmistress, you need to change the & in the Yahoo graphic to &amp; and remove </tr></td></table> from after your Livejournal link (same page).

Almost every single image on your website lacks an alt attribute, and those images that do have them seem to be empty which is even worse. An expert (in my not so humble opinion) friend of mine has an article on “Using alt Attributes and Long Image Descriptions”. Read it, digest it, follow it, and then compliment my friend on her very lovely layout.

To sum up what I’ve said so far: your website is generic. It’s yet another graphics resource website (I think) in a sea of graphics resource websites that all offer the same crud — all featuring stolen artwork, stolen celebrity photographs, etc. Your coding is pretty average, as is your English. In fact, I skipped 90% of everything typed on your website out of sheer frustration until I reminded myself that this is a review (all be it unrequested) and I have to read.

Unless you can suddenly change your ways and become a magnificent artist overnight; using nothing but your own content and nothing but your own graphics, your website will not ever be any better than average.

Review of band-o.org

Reviewed: Kathleen
Site URL: band-o.org

I seem to be reviewing the skin “RockyBliss”.

My first impression involves the word “cack” so I’m not sure if I should continue. The background colour, while obviously selected from the top photograph, is tediously plain and doesn’t compliment your layout like it should. A pattern, or anything to break up the solid colour, would be better. Likewise, I still don’t understand the trend of having a border around the container when it sits against the browser anyway — if you have a border you should have a top/bottom margin — and think this also negatively effects my thoughts about your layout.

The typical content + sidebar style layout makes it easy for me to instantly recognise how to get around your website; sod originality, I like familiarity. I find your top image to be rather too large in terms of area (not physical size). If the photo were cropped just above the three chunks of rock at the front of your photograph it’d retain the focal point but get rid of some of the redundant blue. Alternatively you could put a title or something similar on the blue area to break it up a little. I am curious as to why there’s no border underneath the photo to break it up?

Your links are clearly distinguishable from the default text but are quite pale on my screen — a darker shade such as #694843 would be more appropriate. Also, I would remove the font-weight: bold; from the a:hover pseudo-class, or alternatively, make the a:link pseudo-class bold too otherwise the links ‘jump’ and disrupt the flow of text when I hover over them. I would recommend making the link hover colour darker too.

I found it quite annoying reading through your entries on the front page. Not necessarily because there’s anything wrong with the entries themselves, they just have no distinction from one another. There is equal spacing between all of the headers and paragraphs and they appear to run on and on and on. I would find it much easier to read through if there were some sort of divider between each entry and spacing between the date and the post title reduced — perhaps they’d even be better on one line.

I think your navigation is in the wrong order. That might seem a bit of a strange statement but I believe that as this is a personal-blog site, your information (”Girl”) would be better listed at the top. If you are relying on wp_list_pages() to generate the order of your pages for you, I would suggest looking at setting a page order in the settings of each individual page and then using wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order') — this just gives you more control, and adds more sense to the navigational list.

In IE, your content div seems higher than Firefox. This is causing the top of the content to brush against the photograph and could be sorted by adding padding-top: 10px; to the #content { } selector.

Moving on to your content, I’ll start with the first page of any relevance, Domain. Under Basics I found exactly that, basics. While there are no major, glaring errors there are a few things that I think could be reworded to read better. For example: “evil javascript alerts and marquees” sounds to me like you’ve used JavaScript marquees despite <marquee> being an HTML tag. Next: “I then traveled to geocities.”. Geocities isn’t a place and you can’t exactly travel to it. It is however a name of a service and therefore should start with a capital letter. “It introduced me to new and exciting things, such as css and weaned me off page builders” makes no sense to me. How about trying something like: “It introduced me to new and exciting things such as CSS, as well as weaning me off WYSIWYG pagebuilders.” The referral link to the LissaExplains forums using the word “post” isn’t in the ‘right’ place — it would be more appropriate linked from the words “their forums”. You wrote: “have a good HTML and XHTML skills” ..what’s a good HTML and XHTML skill? Nobody really needs to know the intricate details of what plan you have with your host, and I feel the information on your current domain name would be better placed above your Web Design History.

My only thought regarding your Themes page is that the images are stupidly huge, and I’m not talking about area this time. Over 200kb for a thumbnail is obscene! It’s no wonder though — you’ve got full sized screenshots resized using the height and width attributes which I feel shouldn’t be used under the XHTML strict doctype (although are perfectly valid) because they are presentational and that’s what CSS is for. If I were you I’d crop the unneeded browser crap off the screenshots, resize them in a graphics program and save them again. I am physically cringing at the thought of trying to load that page on dial-up…

The Quasigeek.net Awards link on the Credits page is broken.

Biography should be Autobiography. “I have dark brown hair that is always fly-away” would sound much nicer as “I have dark brown fly-away hair”. Likewise, “My eyes are deep brown and are my best feature” could be “My best feature, my eyes, are deep brown in colour”. Under Personality I think you’re putting too much focus on your negative traits. Sure, they’re a part of you and people who admit their issues are probably more likely to solve them, but I don’t think people generally want to read about it. Certainly I find it depressing to read a page of “I suck at this” and “I can’t do that”.

Cast is quite interesting, although I find it quite annoying that I had to click a link to get to the Girl section, click another link to get to Cast and then yet more links to find out information on your friends/family. Some of them aren’t even worth clicking on — Corrinna for instance only has one line dedicated to her? I would merge the entire “Cast” onto one page, separate each person with a divider and then just get rid of the people you don’t have decent descriptions for. “She is boy-crazy” is hardly a biography.

I can’t critique an ask/answer section and poetry tends to bore me, so I’m skipping these pages. Wish Lists; why have an empty page?

The section Interactive is misleadingly named. When I think of interactive content I think of things that I can interact with — polls, memes, etc. You only have textual content so this section could be “Writings” or even just “My Content”. I would suggest that you make the form on the Opinions page a suggest box only — if a visitor wants to request a potentially controversial topic I have found they are more likely to do it anonymously.

Photos is an external link as should be marked as such, or placed away from the navigation so that it doesn’t appear to be ‘in’ your website. The same goes for Photoblog. Why is the Sitemap blank? ..and that is all of the content.

Coding-wise it’s fully valid, but then I expect nothing less from WordPress. I noticed that you’ve replaced the usual Transitional Doctype with the Strict — while this might make you feel like you’ve achieved more it’s still quite pointless as WordPress relies on CSS and structured mark-up anyway. I’m not trying to devalue any effort you’ve put into modifying WordPress, because I know a lot of people have trouble with the themes, I simply think I’d have more respect for you if this was hand-coded validated coding.

Summarising your website is quite easy: it appears dull. I think that if you were to add little tiny details here and there it would give immediate ’spice’ without requiring any major time. For example, you could customise the bullets in the navigational list or turn it into one of those trendy menus that changes when it’s hovered over. Break up the solid background colour to make the design more interesting and reduce the amount of clicks to get to your content and my attention won’t wither thus leaving me bored. Remove the redundant pages, make your descriptions more positive and sort out the spacing issues. Follow my advice and tada: you’ll have a great website.