Reviewed: Louise
Site URL: deep-within.dk
My first impressions are that of disorganisation, and not because of your site. You put your domain under a subdomain to hide from someone and then moved it back to the main domain – yet didn’t bother to contact anyone to notify them of the URL change. The graphic notice of your move that you left on the subdomain is virtually impossible to read with an resolution bigger than 1024×768 – because it just blurs. There’s also a spelling mistake in it: it should be “whoops”, not “woops”.
Your website immediately reminds me of kiss-my-kitty.com, so I’m not surprised to see it linked in the sidebar, along with the Kitty Rotation/etcetera etcetera. I am looking at skin 5, which I assume is default as it’s the first I saw before I started fiddling with your other skins. Incidentally, all of your other skins are basically identical to this default one. You need to add your own personality to a website instead of just following “popular” opinion – add your personality to your layouts.
The background is overbearing: far too dark in colour, and too busy for the page. Anyone who is crazy enough to cram their sidebar full of crap ought to think about going for something a little more simple for the main design. While I’m on the topic of your sidebar – it is badly presented. Here are the flaws I found with your sidebar:
- There is no padding, so the text runs into the side of the table.
- The navigation is set out in a list, but the names of the pages aren’t big enough which gives the feeling of wasted space. Separate each navigational link with a comma instead of a line break.
- You have a donate icon that does nothing and goes nowhere.
- You’re crediting Squidfingers for a background they didn’t create (I assume you forgot to change the link).
- You have two calendars, neither of which are labelled with a title so they both just look pointless. I don’t know anyone who actually uses the calendars to browse blog entries either.
- The links (to your friends, I assume) are separated only by a space, so they appear to run-on. Look at your keyboard, find the comma key, practise pressing it.
- The preview of each skin is not big enough to actually be of any use, and there is no information on each skin, so visitors have to clear each one to see which they’d prefer. Allocate the skins a page of their own.
- Your “reviews” links would be better on a page under “Domain” somewhere.
So many flaws and I’ve not even left the front page.
Your links aren’t very functional because you’ve not done anything to make them stand out other than change the colour. People change the colour of all sorts of text, so you need to do something else to make them stand out. Either give them an underline, or a different colour when the visitor hovers over them. This just makes your website generally more practical and easier to use – especially for web newbies. Talking of links – why is “Britney” listed under links but not actually linked anywhere?
Your content is poor. In fact, I can’t exactly convince myself that you have any real content. What you do have seems to be filler stuff; Calendar, Wishlist, Friends – I’m not interested in any of that, and I daresay hardly anyone else is. You can improve your Friends page by adding paragraphs of text about your friends, why you get on with them, etc. Your designs page opens a new window in a language I don’t understand – you might want to warn about that. Your “Future” page was actually quite interesting – visitors like me enjoy reading that kind of thing. There were a few typos, but I’m not going to get anal about them as English isn’t your mother language. However, businessschool should be two separate words (business school) and so should dayjob. I think the word you’re looking for (last sentence) is Nutritionist (dictionary reference).
Your “You” content was dull, really. The “Mark Your..” pages are pointless, I daresay nobody reads them once they’ve submitted their own information. Your “Get Reviewed” page is simply a list of links to review sites, yet it’s under “Stuff For Your Site” and not “Other stuff (off site)” – this should be corrected. The same goes for your Fonts page. In fact, the majority of the content under “Stuff For Your Site” is actually off site, and not listing it as such can be quite deceiving.
What I’d like to see here is maybe some of your content – things YOU’VE created and not just links to other pages. This could be anything from artwork and design, to writing, poems, opinions and the like.
“Blendchallenges” under “Domain” should be two separate words.
Your “Customizing WordPress” tutorial isn’t actually a tutorial, it’s a pre-made index page which you’re telling people to download. Not only that, it’s for version 0.72 which is incredibly out of date now. Your “Auto comment plugger” is also out of date, and I’m sure I’ve seen that before somewhere? None of your tutorials are actually useful as they’re all either out of date, incorrect or are identical to others. If you’re going to offer tutorials, PLEASE at least educate yourself on what you’re preaching. Your “Div” tutorial is cuts off half way through a sentence. You’re listing other websites as tutorials when they’re not: they’re links. Add them to a links page!
Opening your joined page crashed my temperamental browser. You should warn people if you’re going to force a link open in a new window.
I know you’re Danish and therefore have an “excuse” for your English slip-ups, but you should at least run your website through a spellchecker. I don’t have the time to even begin listing the typing errors because there are so many. There are editors out there which will check your spelling and your coding, but if you don’t have the time to find and download something like that, copy and paste your pages into a word processing document like Microsoft Word.
You’ve got an XHTML doctype but don’t follow a lot of the XHTML recommendations – I’m sure it’s probably inserted by WordPress, but this kind of thing can be changed. Talking of WordPress – surely if you can credit DaFont.com on your sidebar (which most of us use), you can credit an integral part of your website: i.e. WordPress? I don’t agree with “Credits” pages, so maybe this is just me being picky.
Because I know you use WordPress, I find it hard to critique your blog coding – I’m not sure which is your coding and which is automatically generated. I did run a few of your content pages through the validator, and it picked up on a few errors.
Firstly, the birthday “Ticker” at the top of the page (is bloody intrusive and..) should have a closing forward slash in the <img> tag (e.g. <img src="blabla.png" />). In your navigation, Q&A should be Q&A – this will generate the & correctly. The Kitty Rotation code should have quotation marks around the attributes (e.g. align="left", etc). </ILAYER> should be in lowercase. The <br> tags should be closed in the same way as the image tags. There are a whole load more errors, but like I said before: it’s hard to critique coding that could possibly be generated by WordPress and then just edited by you. This is why I’m cutting this review short.
I would like to summarise this with a few nice comments, because the review so far has been generally picky and criticising, but I’m finding it hard. Your website is very “newbie”-ish, in that it contains generic dull content and nothing that would keep the hardened web-designer/browser entertained. You’re offering silly tutorials which are of no benefit to you or anyone else, and your coding is untidy and disorganised: I had to stop reviewing you because of it. Sure, your site will generally appeal to a certain audience – that of a 13yr old girl, which is quite surprising when I take into account that you’re 17. Your site could do with some work; both on your content and coding, and then maybe you should submit for a re-review.