Reviewed: Christine
Site URL: silent-mist.com
Ooh, what a pretty splash page. I’m not generally interested in splash pages as I think they’re pointless, but this is nice so I’ll forgive you this time. Although, I don’t understand why you’ve got the splash page, as you’ve not listed anything that one might normally find here?
Ahh, a grey layout. I think it’s so easy to create something grey that works, because grey goes with basically everything. This is no exception. I love the use of neon-blues/neon-pinks on grey, and enjoyed the splash of colour the top image and links gave out. Unfortunately, this minor plus is overshadowed by graphic dividers (line.jpg) that seem to be stuck in place randomly (remove these, you don’t need them), and a “wallpaper contest” banner that would be better under your updates.
On the subject of your updates, you’ve got a space between the date and curly brackets (eg. { 10.27.04 } ) but no space between the end curly bracket and the text (eg. { 10.27.04 }Received). This would look better the other way around. No spaces around the date, and a space after the curly bracket (eg. {10.27.04} Received).
Other than the items I’ve mentioned above, the overall presentation of your site is good. You’ve got text which is easy to read, links which are clearly different from the text, and a navigation system that is visible above the content.
Now that I’ve mentioned content, I can quite happily say: where is it? You say that your site is a collective, but you approach it as if a normal site. A collective in my eyes is just a bunch of links to your sites, yet you include information and suchlikes. Because you started including information, I am disappointed to find that there are only FIVE lines about you, and none of these really tell me who you are, where you’re from, what you enjoy doing; all the sort of things I like to read about. Either remove this altogether, or add more information (even if it means copying what you have on your actual personal site).
I would have included mini-reviews on the sites within your collective, but you have too many for me to even know where to start. If you want any of these reviewing, you will have to submit them seperately.
I was hoping this would be an easy review, because the flaws in your site are basic, and you claim to have valid coding. However, your page currently isn’t validating, because of your <noscript> code. You can fix this by ending the <p align="center"> tag before you declare <noscript>. While you’re fixing that, you might want to consider giving your <div> boxes an ID/class and assigning properties such as width/etc in your external stylesheet, that way you can get rid of style coding from your main document.
For example, you currently have:
<div style="position: absolute; top:0px; left:0px;">
..specified to house your broken-up top images (which is actually pointless as splitting up images doesn’t increase the loading time as people say). If you gave it an ID, you could put the style coding in your stylesheet which will aid you in the future when you’re creating new layouts. So, this is what your HTML would look like:
<div id="images">
You’d add this to your stylesheet:
#images {
position: absolute;
top:0px;
left:0px;
}
..and there you have it. It might seem like fuss now, but in future you’ll be able to change JUST your stylesheet for a new layout to take affect. Magic, yes?!
Thankfully, your CSS *does* validate. Thank you.
All in all, your site is pleasant. There’s no real content or anything special to it because it’s simply a collective. To be honest, I don’t understand why you submitted for review, but heyho. You did, and now I’ve reviewed you. Work on the errors/flaws I’ve brought up to improve the general standard of your site, and that’s about all there is to it.