Review of fatedfoibles.ca

Reviewed: Manon
Site URL: fatedfoibles.ca

My first impressions are somewhat mixed. While I like the main image and was pleased to see it loading quickly even on my dial-up, I am not so sure about the green links. Don’t get me wrong, red and green could probably be a good combination, but that particular shade of green reminds me of badly coded websites with dodgy proprietary transparent iframes. Perhaps a different shade of green?

I don’t usually get on well with the grungy/dark look but the photography of the rose is quite attractive and with the right touches would carry it all off well. Your navigation, while perfectly fine to look at, is not as easy to read on hover. Instead of using the dark red colour you could use #EF4A4D which I’ve taken directly from the rose — where the light hits.

The two bees are somewhat confusing and I’m a Quilting Bee member too! I would suggest using the bee in the menu to link to your quilt (as it is) and then text to link to the Q*bee Toplist, or vice versa. At the moment I’m simply confused about which does which. The layout is so simple that there’s not much else I can add, but this isn’t necessarily a good thing. I am fond of clean uncluttered layouts.

I’m some what flattered that “Review You” is the first and foremost content (if you can call it that) that your visitors can see but I think a nice introduction or a witty rhyme would be a little more user friendly. I love the usage of quotes on a website but the one on your front page doesn’t substitute real content, and the centered text is very 1990s — left aligned is much friendlier on the eyes.

Reading your “bio” I was put off by the over sized smileys — especially as some were meant as replacements to words and some were just decoration. Turning images off, “I’m a female born on March 31, 1974 so I’m an aries” makes sense and is therefore a good use of alt attributes, however, “We got pregnant baby comingfor Christina about a year after that” is confusing. In my opinion you should remove the emoticons altogether as they make you look immature which I know you’re not.

The lack of consistency between dates on your “bio” is also confusing. First there’s “February 22, 1977″, then “97-03-02″ and then “1999-03-06″. The first method is favourable in my opinion because 03-02 could mean 3rd February or 2nd March. Otherwise it provides a brief but base-covering description of your life and what’s important to you (your family) — good stuff.

You might want to point out that “my 43 things” links to an external website (same with your weblog.) The listings/button rotations would be better on the domain page. I found your original PC specifications to be quite amusing, although my original PC was not even that “good“. I remember running DOS 6 on a 300Mb hard drive! Anyway, on with things…

You might want to point out that the “reads” aren’t written by you. Well, the “why I love mom” has certainly been around a bit, not sure about the rest. On “the awakening”, maneuvering (And that there is power and glory in creating and contributing and you stop maneuvering…) should be manoeuvring. “aboutbuying” needs a space between the two words on the “who’s on first” page. To be honest, there’s not much that can be said about these. Sure, they’re funny and all, but how about coming up with some writings of your own — stories, poems, opinions, anything like that. The current “reads” are generic and most people will have seen them before.

On “domain”… the “past layouts” page could do with a little more text — perhaps why you used the layout and/or why you got rid of it. There’s little else under “domain” which is disappointing because I was expecting at least some basic information on your domain name or what inspires you to keep your website.

The pop-up link showing the fanlistings you’ve joined would be better under domain.

In terms of coding there are lots of little things you could improve on. First you need a document type declaration (often referred to as a doctype). This tells the validator how to validate your code and also tells the browser whether to render your pages in Standards or Quirks mode (not that you need to worry about that). I’d recommend aiming for the standards set at HTML 4.01 “level” first — you can always move up to XHTML in the future. The doctype I’d recommend to use in conjunction with the <iframe> tag is the Frameset doctype:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">

Although if you want to move away from <iframe>s (which I recommend to everyone) you’ll want the Transitional doctype:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

The doctype goes at the very top of the page above all other tags. Below that you place your <html> tag, and then you can open <head> — a tag you’re currently lacking. In the head of your document you place important information such as the title of the page, content type and other meta information. Here’s a basic <head> setup:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords here separated by spaces or commas">
<meta name="description" content="brief site description">

<title>your site title here</title>

Now you can declare your external stylesheet and close the <head> like so: </head> Open your <body> next, this is where everything else goes.

You currently have several <div>s full of style="" information. This should be moved to your stylesheet: give the <div> an id, like so: <div id="bla"> and then use the following format in the stylesheet:

#bla {

some more: css stuff;
}

If you get stuck on a certain piece of CSS, the w3schools CSS tutorials are the ultimate resource. You can assign ids to more than just <div>s; clearing your style presentation up and placing it in your stylesheet is a big step towards XHTML compliancy.

I have a tutorial at tutorialtastic which covers converting from <iframe>s which you can follow if you want to convert to .shtml or .php includes (usually more efficient). If you need any help following the instructions, e-mail me personally. If you do convert to includes, remember to remove every occurrence of target="I1".

You’ve given some of your tags self-closing endings where they’re not needed. Firstly, this is an XHTML-only practice and secondly, it only applies to those tags which do not otherwise have an “official” closing tag such as <img />, <br /> and <hr />.

Finally, you need to close your new <body> tag with </body> just before your closing </html>.

To summarise what I’ve already said: your site isn’t bad. You have the basic outlines of a good personal site and the layout is quick loading, pleasant on the eyes and easy to navigate around. You need some new content that you’ve written yourself and you could do with clearing up your code — although it achieves it’s aim across all of my browsers. Keep working on what you’ve got!