Review of arach.net.au/~electrawoman

Reviewed: Cissi
Site URL: arach.net.au/~electrawoman

Eek! What have you done to your website? The text was big and chunky and readable. Now it’s small and harder to read. Okay, seriously, your text is still readable, but if you’re aiming for better accessibility like you say, then surely the larger text size which you were using before would be more appropriate? Obviously I can increase the text size with my browser, but I don’t want to. A lot of visitors will feel the same way.

I’m finding it hard for my eyes to settle. You used to have a grey-line border on the right side which I thought was slightly weird, but effective. Now you have nothing, and on my screen I can’t see the background (I didn’t realise you had one until I saw your CSS) which means the text looks like it’s just shoved in the middle of a white page. Some kind of border, or a darker background would work better.

I feel that ‘Skip to search’ and ‘Skip to updates’ are interrupting the “flow” of your site. When I visit a website the first thing I like to see is a welcome or a brief introduction. This allows me to familiarise myself with the website immediately. Those two links are interfering with your fabulously funny first message and should be moved to somewhere more effective, or removed maybe even altogether.

I think your links should be another colour. While underlining them has helped identify the different between text and link, they still could be missed. I think if they were red, they’d tie in nicely with the butterfly and the red navigational menu system at the top.

Your written content is great. You have a fabulous grasp of the English language, and seem to be able to insert wit and humour into possibly drab paragraphs of text. Some of my favourite lines include “Don’t sound surprised – Asians can listen to Metallica too.” and “can tolerate almost anything. Even Canadians.” It’s rare I find a site which can tickle my funny bone; you should be proud of yourself for that at least. I would absolutely love to see some opinions though; opinions on current affairs and the like.

I did notice a few spelling errors, but as I’ve already said, the majority of your English is great. Anyway, here’s the few I spotted:

Your sentence “I like animals, but especially dogs” would read better as “I like animals; especially dogs”. I didn’t check the rest of your pages because I am hoping that by spotting these few on the “About Cissi” page you’ll take it upon yourself to run through the other pages carefully looking for mistakes.

Your site information was more in depth than needed, but don?t take this as a negative criticism. It’s fabulous that you have the patience to type up all of this, including in-depth “instructions” on how you created your layout. Bravo — not many people do this as they’re afraid of their designs being ripped off. Are you not afraid of this?

Your coding is not currently validating because of a few missed quotation marks here:
<link rel="access" title="Accessibility statement href="http://www.arach.net.au/~electrawoman/access.php/ />

..and because you’ve given two elements the ID of “search”. Your <a name=”search”> tag is clashing with your search box which is also named “search”. I’m not going to patronise you by telling you how to correct this — I know you can code well. With the exception of those two errors your coding is up to scratch.

I find it incredibly hard to critique your website because I enjoy it so much. I have been visiting your website since before you became a reviewer here, and love the fact that you can successfully incorporate such a simple layout with great writings and masses of personality. You aim for maximum practicality and accessibility, and know your stuff when it comes to coding. What else can I say? Keep up the excellent work.