Review of acior.net
Reviewed: Jane
Site URL: acior.net
Despite how common this design is at the moment, there’s nothing more wonderful than a beautifully done colour scheme with a perfectly complimentary decorative image to tie things in together – something you have managed to achieve. Your text is an adequate size for me to read, and you seem to have a clear grasp on keeping headers as they should be – <h1> the biggest, <h2> a bit smaller and so on. Super first impression!
Your site is set out in such a clear manner that I can immediately tell what works and what doesn’t work without even having to browse far. For starters, the colour of the links is great. It’s immediately obvious what is and isn’t link text, and you’ve even added an underline on hover – this is great. Your navigational “images” are properly defined in an unordered list, and the fact that they become more prominent when active adds to the overall accessibility of the website. My only suggestion for the navigation is that you add a title="" to each describing the section being linked – just in case someone has capped bandwidth and decides to turn off their images to preserve it.
One of the things I noticed that doesn’t work is the justified sidebar. Not necessarily the whole thing; for the most part it looks great. However, the Destinations box would quite obviously look much better left aligned. That’d get rid of the unsightly gap between your first two links.
Your individual pages appear neat at all times. Even the Narrator page which contains links off to other pages of content is tidy and descriptive enough to allow the user to pick and choose the content which may interest them. As I say with most people, Basics could be added to the top of More, but other than that your content is fairly spaced. You have plenty on a page but not too much; it doesn’t look over crowded. I was quite impressed by your Academics page – it goes above and beyond my usual expectations for education information. I loved your examples of “girl cliques” and the history behind your name was quite amusing.
Your content is well written and your English, when you consider your age and location, is superb. I searched in vain for a typing mistake or a grammar error which I could pull you up on, but the only thing I could see was an extra full stop (period) under Layout on the Domain page. but they were the only colors that fit.. What am I supposed to criticise now?!
I love reading through your written content because of your style of writing. You make everything seem like an exciting discovery, which adds spice to even the strangest most boring things. For example: I made an amazing discovery: people can install blogs on their own websites and From that day on, I knew how to change addresses in the address bar. Simple things with a seemingly adventurous twist!
Your coding is Valid XHTML Transitional Strict almost all of the way through. I only found a few simple errors which I’m assuming you forgot to change when you went over to the Strict doctype. On Domain, the link to A Small Orange has a target attribute which is invalid under Strict. Your Preferences page has a few pieces of underlined text. The <u> tag was deprecated because (theoretically) only link text should be underlined. I don’t really understand why these things are underlined anyway – surely you can just remove the ‘bad’ tags? Lastly, under Guide to Surviving School you have an unclosed <p> tag at the top, and no <p>s anywhere else – you’re separating paragraphs with double line breaks.
I only found one broken link; under the “New Layout” blog entry (April 4th) your link to your Past Layouts page is incorrect.
Generally speaking, I don’t really know why you submitted for a review. I guess for the same reason I submit – just in case? You’ve managed to keep your pages at a high standard, and your coding is sheer quality – you have a good grasp of valid XHTML and basic accessibility which others seem to avoid. Your content is well written and free of any visible spelling/grammar errors, and your site is easy and pleasant to use. Keep up the superb work.