Reviewed: Brenda
Site URL: little-wonder.net
A splash page. If you listen hard enough you might hear me grumble! Seriously though, I’ve seen your reasons for keeping the splash page and I would say they’re pretty reasonable. The size of the splash page isn’t though. Approximately 100Kb for an image that a user will look at for less than 3 three seconds? Pointless. I compressed it a little and then saved it in Paint Shop Pro — the file size was reduced to about 30Kb with little quality loss.
I personally would re-jig the splash page. Put your reasons for keeping it here (keep them brief, perhaps include a link to the full explanation) and a link inside. As a side note, the JavaScript on your page is mostly redundant. The right-script prevention is pointless and easy to get round (I saved your image so I could compress it) and the browser status bar text-changes only work in Internet Explorer.
Before I move on, a few minor things I spotted in your splash page coding: you’re using the deprecated <b> tag, inline style that could be defined in a stylesheet and additional whitespace at the top of your document which does nothing but increase your file size. If I’m going to get really nit-picky I could also point out that you’re using <strong> to make the footer (Copyright information) text bold instead of it’s intended purpose which is for emphasis. You could assign the centered paragraph a class and define the bold styling via CSS with that instead.
Now inside the site I have to wait for another 266Kb to load — and that’s just the decorational graphics! You also have three longer than average blog entries, a sidebar and JavaScript bits and bobs which just keep knocking up the loading time. Safe to say that your website takes forever and a half to load on dial-up. I usually would have turned images off by now (despite the fact that I’m on a 512K connection) to make the loading speedier, thus making me miss your beautiful graphics that you have on display.
Your font style is not the best choice and I frequently find myself overriding the default fixed size in Firefox to make it easier to read; perhaps this is because I’m so used to Verdana/Arial. Either way, you’re using ‘pt’ font sizes which are supposed to be reserved for printing only — I would suggest using ‘px’ if you want to be precise (11px is the rough equivalent of 8pt) or percentages for maximum flexibility in all browsers (76% is good choice.)
Your choice of colours for your links is good; I didn’t find myself wondering which text was hyperlinked and so on. However, there was very little difference between the standard link text colour and the hover link text colour. My suggestion would be to use a darker shade of the pink featured elsewhere in the layout.
I like the pencil in the favicon/beside the entry titles, it really emphasises that this site is focused on writing. I don’t think that anybody could possibly miss that anyway — there’s so much of it! Don’t get me wrong, I love a website with plenty of content for me to sink my teeth in to, but the sheer amount of writing you have is overwhelming. I can guarantee you that most visitors will only skim it, if they even bother looking at all. Even I’ve reduced the amount of writing on my site so visitors are more likely to actually read it.
Your constant 3rd person style of writing is frustrating; it actually makes it hard for me to read. I also find the explanations of every single detail to be a waste of space. She has been named Brenda Tan, a 19-years old female residing on a tiny tropical island surrounded by H20 (Singapore) for example, could be shortened to Brenda Tan, a 19 year old Singapore resident or Brenda Tan, a 19 year old young lady living in Singapore. Both more concise and more likely to hold my attention.
Despite a few annoying tendencies your writing is of a suitable “level” for a personal website and your spelling/grammar is almost immaculate. I did notice the following mistakes (error = correct spelling/grammar):
01.php (Persona)
skeptical = sceptical
wilfil = willful
One of her pet peeves are = One of her pet peeves is
02.php (Residence)
pasttimes = pastimes
03.php (Literary)
discussive = not a real word, I suggest rewording the sentence
03-1.php (Spirit Of Yesterday)
curiousity = curiosity
what what = what
aquaintances = acquaintances
quickily = quickly
03-2.php (Back With Vengeance)
neither of them know = neither of them knows
audacy = audacity
That lady, was none = That lady was none
scrowled = scowled
gound = ground
03-3-1.php (Paradise Lost Part 1)
mich = much
caughing = causing
seperation = separation
03-3-2.php (Paradise Lost Part 2)
seperation = separation
wherther = whether
hiccuped = hiccupped
indigant = indignant
Its okay, Amanda = It’s okay, Amanda
inrepairable = irreparable
Amandas = Amanda’s
03-04.php (Meaning Of Education)
Not strictly an error, but a suggested improvement:
The main reason why people have to be educated it to make them more up to date with the rapidly changing society. = The main reason for education is to keep up with rapidly changing society.
they has studied = they have studied
Not strictly an error, but a suggested improvement:
no point in having a good education if people just absorb every information like a sponge, but just let them sit in your head without any use. = no point in having a good education if people simply absorb information like a sponge but do not put it to any use.
Morals is a = Morals are a
03-05.php (Elderly (Good VS Bad))
thw = the
secutiry = security
nostalgiac = nostalgic
avtivities = activities
would enable the to = would enable them to
03-06.php (Pain And Torture)
floormat = floor mat
interuppted = interrupted
Devoiding = Voiding
deroot = uproot
she know that was = she knew that was
commited = committed
03-07-1.php (Whims Of A Modern Woman Part 1)
higher position than I do truly = higher position than I do, truly
skeptical = sceptical
whatever I say, goes = whatever I say goes
03-07-2.php (Whims Of A Modern Woman Part 2)
dialed = dialled
cut off my her = cut off by her
mother and himself = mother and he
03-08.php (The Internet)
presence of the internet have = presence of the internet has
but have stirred up trouble = but has stirred up trouble
03-09.php (Conquering The First Battle)
he always had a passion. A = he always had a passion, a
But… But… A = But… but… a
embarassment = embarrassment
classful = class full
quickily = quickly
04.php (Photography)
snapsnots = snapshots
a.k.a = a.k.a.
beginnerish = beginner
belowmentioned sections = sections mentioned below (belowmentioned isn’t a word)
05.php (Portfolio)
Webdesigns I’ve done = Designs I’ve created
mantained = maintained
05-1.php (Resumé)
Maintainence = Maintainance (x3)
Javascript = JavaScript
Markup = Mark-up
06.php (Escapade)
curiousity = curiosity
06-4.php (Survey)
whom = who
Eg. = E.g.
07.php (Departure)
softwares = software
Phew, I think that’s everything. It was a tiresome job reading through everything but your writing is generally interesting and unique which made it a pleasurable experience. There may have been a few mistakes I missed, but I think I got all of the glaring errors. Don’t worry if it seems like a lot, this is simply because you have a lot of writing — I still have every confidence that your work is of great written standards.
Despite being a truly personal website you still offer content for the visitor; a great distraction for over-worked reviewers such as myself. One thing I did spot though: your Font/Brush Downloads page gave me a 404 error. If you’ve stopped offering these services I suggest you remove the link. If the error is accidental, fix it!
Your coding was mostly as good as your written work — I found very few errors and those that I did discover were mostly of little importance or did not cause the page to display incorrectly. A common mistake I spotted was your tendency to close images with </img>; this is incorrect. Image tags must be closed — when using the XHTML doctypes — the same way as the line break: with a forward slash before the closing >, like so: <img />.
You have a second, unnecessary <p> before the <img /> tag in your autobiography (Persona) page, you’re missing the summary="" attribute in the table on your links page and you’re using <strong> to make the link author’s names bold instead of simply customising the table accordingly with CSS (assign a class to the table column <td>).
I noticed a lot of empty sets of paragraph tags around the site which are only cluttering up your coding. If you’re using them to try to add margin to the page, why not either assign a bottom margin to body { } in your CSS or bottom margins to the elements that appear at the bottom of each page?
I also noticed you’re using a separate <div> with a class of “quotation” to mark-up quotes. This is inappropriate because there is a specific tag for this purpose: <blockquote>. If you want quotes to appear italic, this should also be customised with CSS and not with <em> as the <em> tag is for emphasis.
I have, I admit, used a large percentage of this review to criticise flaws in your website. Don’t let this convince you that I think your site is of poor quality — on the contrary, it is a superb example of a personal website and your ability to express yourself should be envied by those who spend 10 minutes knocking up a page in FrontPage with no effort at all. You have some great content and I have exhausted my eyes trying to go through it all. Unfortunately this means that, as just mentioned, little room was left for compliments and I had to resort to criticism. I think you should try to create a layout which doesn’t rely on huge images or pointless JavaScript, and take some of my coding suggestions in — soon you’ll have a website fit for a Queen.