Review of eighty-8.com

Reviewed: Loz
Site URL: eighty-8.com

First, I want to start off by pointing out that your comment “please be nice ” on the submit form was pointless. I am always nice. If others perceive me as harsh or unfair, that is their own problem, and something they will have to deal with themselves. Now that we’ve got that cleared up, I can get straight to work on the review.

Immediately I can see typing errors, grammatical errors and a bloody scrolling marquee. These three things are probably the worst things a site can have. They’re almost as bad as half-naked celebs/models featured in layouts. Oh wait, look, a half-naked “vector” of someone I’ve probably never heard of. How original!

The subject of your topmost blog entry (Tempory Layout – becca’s party!) is incorrect. It should be spelt “temporary”, and as “Becca” is a name, it should start with a capital letter. The reason why I’m criticising this already, is because at the moment it’s the first thing people see when they enter your website, as it’s right smack-bang in the middle of your page. Anyway, for visitors who might miss this fabulous blog entry, I’ll just post a summary of it for you:

lol. and then i did this. lol. and then he did this. lol. then we did this. lol. we got drunk. lol. there was weed. lol. and i think i’m cool. lol

I usually refuse to criticise blog entries as they are the owners personal outlet, but yours really are too funny an opportunity to miss. I would suggest putting your blog on a new page, because at the moment the entries are really letting you down. All they say to me is: teenage moron. This is not a personal attack (or is not meant to be), this is just simply the impression that your entries are giving off.

Your layout is far from practical. The text box is too small, and the links are hard to distinguish from the bold text. Your text in the main text box is set to my browser default because of your incorrect/inadequate CSS.

The layout is incredibly slow to load in IE. The layout also looks different in IE than it does in Firefox. In IE, your tables are “smooth”, (no borders) which I assume was the look you were going for, but the background is white. In Firefox, the background is pink but there are ugly thick borders around everything. I’d suggest downloading Mozilla Firefox to test your website before uploading it.

The content is, as with your blog entries, full of errors. Just an example, a sentence from your “loz” (about me) page:

ok my friends where do i start!!

For starters, why haven’t you started your sentence with a capital letter? Does your shift/caps lock key not work? That’d explain why you’ve also not capitalised your “i”. You’re missing a comma, and as it’s a question, you’re missing a question mark too. Here’s what the sentence should look like:

OK my friends, where do I start?

Then, of course, is your repeated use of the word “really”. Trust me, it doesn’t fit three times in one sentence, like you seem to think:

i really love having some really good friends and i am really lucky to have such nice friends like them.

Read that sentence back to yourself. If you think it sounds okay, you should have tried listening in school. My suggestion here is that you copy the entire site page-by-page into Microsoft Word (or a similar piece of software), and using the spell-check function to tell you where you’re going wrong, because I simply do not have the time to spell-check your site. I might as well re-write the entire thing for you, it’d probably be quicker.

You’ve got content. That’s my summary of your content. You’ve got it, simple. There’s nothing exciting about it. It’s not unique, it’s rarely correct, and often pointless. For example, your form tutorial. This would only work for those who’ve signed up to the response-o-matic.com service. Not only that, but it instructs users to place CSS in with the form, which is incorrect. CSS should be placed in the header of a page, or an external stylesheet. Oh, and you’ve made a typing error in “your” CSS.

Your thumbnail tutorial suggests users should “resize the image” to insert a thumbnail. This is extremely bad design practise. It means that the user still has to load the full size image before it resizes the image in the browser. Those on dial-up could suffer from potential browser crashes because of this stupid piece of advice. If people want thumbnails, they should take their images into Paint Shop Pro/other software, and resize the image properly.

Your basic HTML tutorial tells users that “<P>” creates a paragraph. Incorrect coding, again. Firstly, the “P” should be “p”; lowercase. Secondly, you failed to inform your visitors that the <p> tag should go at the start of a paragraph, and </p> should go at the end. On the same tutorial, you’ve told your visitors that “<img src="IMAGEURL">” includes an image. This should be “<img src="IMAGEURL" alt="">” – images always need an “alt” tag. This is in case the image doesn’t load, and for those users who’re blind/visually impaired that use read-out voice software.

The coding is of poor standard. Not because you can’t code, just because you seem to overlook little things. In your <head> you’ve got two titles; you only need one. You’ve also got two <body> tags; again, you only need one. Your CSS should be in the <head> of your document, before the closing </head> tag. Alternatively, you can use an external stylesheet. You can find a tutorial on that here. Don’t forget to add alt="alternate text" to ALL of your images.

You should be surrounding your paragraphs with <p> </p> tags, and not just using them to make bigger spaces between your text. Put quotation marks around everything in a tag, not just the occasional bits and bobs that take your fancy. (<img src="bla" alt="bla"> not <img src=bla alt=bla>.) Remove your alt="" tags from links. If you want to have text-on-hover with links, use title="", not alt="".

Overall, the site is “okay”. There is nothing that stands out as cool, unique or interesting to me, and nothing that makes your site different to any of the other millions of teen-girl sites on the Internet. If you want to make a good impression, you need to work on the little things. Make sure your site is cross-browser compatible, work on the coding, add content that interests everyone, not just teenage girls. It’s these things that will turn your site from an “okay” to a “great”. Work on it, you will get there. Once you’ve got the basics covered, I suggest you start looking into validation, until then, don’t give up.