Review of purplebleeding.cjb.net
Reviewed: Daniela
Site URL: purplebleeding.cjb.net
You’ve pissed me off already. I didn’t really want to have my windows interrupted by a full-size World Casino advert. If you can’t afford hosting that doesn’t have adverts, find someone to host you at their site. There are loads of people willing to give space to “up and coming talent”. You’ll have to prove you’ve got talent first thought.
Obviously having been attacked by adverts my first impression isn’t a good one. Starting badly is not a good idea, it’s more likely to make me pick at the little things. For example, the fact that you’ve not customised the font on your splash page which means it is set to my default; Times New Roman. This doesn’t compliment your crappy splash image at ALL and should be customised.
Your requirements are ridiculous. I have an open mind, it doesn’t mean my viewing of your website will be any better. Do I get extra features for having an open mind? Do you do a brain scan and kick people out if they’ve not got an open mind? No, so remove this pointless waffle. While you’re at it, remove the image that you have decorating your page, as it looks like it’s been cut straight out of someone else’s layout and covered with text.
Your text is barely readable on the background because of the colour, and yet again it is un-customised. In fact, the only thing that you have customised is your scrollbars. Coloured scrollbars only work in Internet Explorer, so they are pretty pointless too. Wow, a lot of your site is pointless so far.
Your text is centered. That fad went out in the early ’90s. It makes pages even harder to read because the eye isn’t allowed to follow the lines as it flows. I recommend using CSS to customise your text font, colour and how your text is aligned, I’ll explain this a bit later in the review. That is, if I can bear to carry on.
I’m not even going to bother reviewing your content because it’s all taken from other sites, or is generic crap that seems to be appearing everywhere. You need to add something unique; put yourself into your site. Not only will this give you publicity, but you’ll start to form a loyal visitor crowd who will keep coming back.
I was going to spell-check your site, but I’m quite frightened that if I start, I’ll be here for hours, and I don’t have that much time. I suggest running your site through a spell-checker, just to be sure that your pages are correct. Microsoft Word has one built in.
Your coding is absolutely awful. You’ve got IE-specific coloured scrollbars, random capital letters, unclosed tags, missing quotation marks, no CSS to customise your text in the main frame; in fact, no type of font/font size customising at all. You’ve got a .html document (created with a pagebuilder) included as an external stylesheet in your links frame, which features badly written CSS to boot. Where do I start?
Okay, let’s see if we can get this sorted, because at the moment you’re not getting anywhere with what you have. Firstly, your main page, where you reference your frames. At the top of the page, you have:
<HTML><HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=black>
This is wrong. All of it. Firstly, coding should be in lowercase, not UPPERCASE. This is not just personal preference, it is a requirement if you ever decide to validate XHTML compliant (you’ve got a while to go yet thought). You need to change your coding to lowercase, and remember to use quotation marks around things like bgcolor=black. Eg. bgcolor="black". This is what the top of your HTML should look like:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Purple Bleeding</title>
</head>
As you can probably see, I’ve added a title (your site name), and closed the <head> tag. The head tag should always be closed (</head>) before you open the <body> tag. I’ve also added a DOCTYPE. That is the long piece of coding on the first two lines that tells your browser how to process your code. In this case, it’s HTML 4.01 Transitional.
Next, you’ve got style coding. This should really be placed in an external stylesheet. You can find a tutorial on how to do this here. Once you’ve put your CSS in an external stylesheet, you can add the link before the closing </head> tag. So, with your stylesheet, you new coding will look like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Purple Bleeding</title>
<link href="stylesheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
</head>
<body>
I’ve now opened the <body> tag (see above). I have removed bgcolor=black from the <body> tag, because that can be specified in your CSS, like so:
body {
background-color: #000000;
}
#000000 is the hex colour code for black.
Now, onto the layout coding. Firstly, if you want to absolute position your iframes, you can do this without putting them into “div” boxes. You can give them a name, then position them with your external stylesheet. For example, this is your current code:
<div style="position:absolute; top:519; left:13">
<iframe src="http://www.freewebs.com/paulfrankluv/PBmain.htm" name="Main" width="347" height="3000" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" scrolling=auto style="border: 1 solid #935379" allowtransparency="no"> </IFRAME>
</div>
If you remove the div, and gave your iframe a name, you could cut your code down to this:
<iframe src="http://www.freewebs.com/paulfrankluv/PBmain.htm" name="main" id="main" scrolling="auto"> </iframe>
This makes your document smaller, and tidier. Notice that I’ve added quotation marks around the things you’d missed? For this coding to work, you need to put things like your width and height in your CSS document. Take what you’ve already got, and add you frame information:
body {
background-color: #000000;
}
#main {
position: absolute;
top: 519px;
left: 13px;
border: 1 solid #935379;
width: 347px;
height: 3000px;
padding: 0px;
margin: 1px;
}
The “#main” stands for ID. This tells the browser that you’re looking for the item that you’ve given an ID of “main”. Look in the iframe coding before, notice how I added id="main"? The CSS will now co-operate with the HTML document, and assign all of this CSS properties to your iframe with the ID of “main”. You can repeat this for your “menu” iframe. Remove the unnecessary HTML, and give it an ID. Put the information for that ID in your CSS document. Once you’ve done that, you can now close your body (</body>) and html (</html>) tags in lowercase.
In your frames, you need to repeat this process. Put your coding into lowercase, and make sure the correct tags are closed before you open something else. You also need to give your frames a separate stylesheet with CSS. This separate stylesheet can assign your font colours, styles, etc.
I can see you’ve tried to use an external stylesheet in your menu frame. There are two things wrong with this. First, it has a “.html” extension. All stylesheets need to have a “.css” extension, like in my example above. The ideal name for a stylesheet is “stylesheet.css”. Because you’re using frames, you could call your menu stylesheet: “menu_stylesheet.css”. The second problem is that you have HTML coding in your supposed stylesheet. DON’T put ANY HTML in your stylesheet.
I’ve taken the style coding from the “.html” document, and cleaned it up. I’ve removed the HTML, and I’ve used the correct CSS for you. Here is your new, clean CSS document which you can save as “menu_stylesheet.css”. Aren’t I kind?
body, tr, td {
background-color: #000000;
color: #935379;
font-size: 9pt;
font-family: arial, sans-serif;
text align: left;
}
a:link, a:active, a:visited {
color: #BA80A2;
font-weight: bold;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:hover {
color: #BA80A2;
font-weight: bold;
text-decoration: underline;
cursor: crosshair;
}
p {
color: #935379;
font-size: 9pt;
font-family: arial, sans-serif;
text align: left;
}
textarea, input {
background: #000000;
border: 1px solid #935379;
color: #935379;
font-size: 9pt;
font-family: courier new, monospace;
}
This CSS can also be used in your main frame. Make any changes you might want (although you don’t need to) and save it as “main_stylesheet.css”. You can then include it in your main frame too. This will ensure that all of your text is customised, and that your text is aligned left, instead of center (center = bad).
I am going to stop here. I think from what I’ve criticised, you can pick up the basics. If you need to, use a website like lissaexplains.com to remind yourself of the basics, and then w3schools.com when you start to advance. Your HTML skills are obviously beginner, and I think you need to practise a lot before you consider submitting for a review again, otherwise you could end up getting your feelings hurt. You have potential, everyone does, all you need to do is put effort and thought into your coding, because it is essentially what holds your layout together. Good luck for the future.