Review of reviews.frozen-rain.net

Reviewed: Sanosuke
Site URL: reviews.frozen-rain.net

I refer to “you” many times in this review where on occasions it may apply to another staff member, don’t take things that don’t apply to you personally. I would recommend letting all of your staff members read this review.

If there’s one thing more irritating than a pointless splash page, it’s a pointless splash page with pointless requirements. I like the colour I see before me but that’s about it. I am annoyed that my cursor changes to a crosshair when moving over your text, and as I don’t need help I was surprised to see the “?” cursor pop-up when I went to click enter.

I am using Mozilla Firefox and can still view your website without problem, and resizing my browser to 640×480 shows me that it’s viewable in that resolution too; that’s your first two requirements made redundant. I have an lots of tables—one in the front room, one in the kitchen, one in Karl’s front room, dining room and bedroom—but what relevance to these have to your website? Oh, wait, you mean your site is coded with tables? So? That’s not a requirement it’s a tag. Lastly, if I opened my mind my brain cells would fall out. Ooh look, four pointless requirements. Why do you have a splash page?

I enter your site and immediately see four common design mistakes (most involving colour). The first, a sliced image, is not needed. Slicing does not decrease loading time (in fact, it often increases it). 2 + 2 = 4, yes? Well, slice the 2s up and you have (1 + 1) + (1 + 1)—the total is still 4. Save the image as one and optimise it to reduce the size. The second mistake is using too much of one colour; this particular colour scheme is nice but not at these levels. Change your font colour—this would make the site easier to read (i.e. more accessible) as there’s not enough contrast right now. Third mistake I noticed is the use of a different colour to highlight bold text. There are very few times where I feel people can get away with this, and this is not one of them. The bold text looks like a badly coloured link and I keep trying to click it. The last mistake is a bad hover colour on links. Not only is it completely invisible on my laptop and all of the flat screens I’ve visited your website on, but it is yet enother dose of this blue-purple. Go for daring—make it maroon (#660000) or something like that.

How exactly is “Memories are always beautiful” an applicable title for a review site?

The second line of your introduction reads:

We offer honest reviews to webmasters in hope that it will help them improve their website.

I am not sure if it’s a British thing or a Me thing, but I’ve always used the term “in the hope” bla bla bla. The last line states:

To navigate around the site, please use the boxes on your left.

Firstly, the boxes are on the right. Secondly, you use links to navigate around the Internet/websites and not ‘boxes’. The horizontal line below this paragraph is ugly and out of place.

I’ve never understood the reasoning behind using avatars to represent people on small websites like this one. It’s a reviewing website, not a forum. Why don’t you just write “Reviewer name says..” or something along those lines. This would speed up the loading of the page and stop it looking so cluttered. Or, as most of these updates seem to be pointing out completed reviews, why don’t you just have a “5 most recent reviews” list or something? Think about conserving space to save both yourself time, and to speed up the loading of your web pages.

“Reviewed // Listed” would be better suited on Linkage (there’s no reason why you cannot combine links in/links out) and your disclaimer is over the top. No one cares who owns the site (this kind of detail can go on the About FHR page) and no one is interested in who made the layout. If you must have a disclaimer, all it “needs” is a short Copyright notice.

On your About FHR page I expected a description of why you choose the name, and/or why you decided to start reviewing but instead all I see is the same tripe you get on other amateur review sites: “we don’t sugarcoat”, “we are honest”, “we don’t review based on our personal opinions” etc. I don’t think anyone really listens to this anymore because it’s exactly the same thing that everyone says and 9 times out of 10 it’s a lie. Why do you have affiliates listed here and on the sidebar?

I was a little disappointed to have my e-mail client opened and forced into my face, with an incorrect e-mail address no less, when I clicked contact. If I wanted to e-mail you I’d expect a link saying “e-mail us” or “e-mail admin”; I am under the opinion that contact pages should contain contact forms. The reason why I stated your e-mail address is incorrect is because of the use of “[at]” instead of “@”. When spam bots harvest e-mail addresses and will have no problem replacing a few letters for the correct symbol so not only is this pointless, but it is frustrating: I never remember to delete additional stuff from an e-mail address.

I didn’t expect to see a blank page when clicking the Reviews and Design links under Articles. If you have no content, don’t put up a link. However, articles on a reviewing website is a good idea; something I’ve been considering adding to here for quite a while. Why offer only one service when you can offer two or three? Kudos for the idea, even if the articles you have up are not worded as well as they could be.

Under Anti Right-Clicking you state “So many webmaster/mistresses on the web are so afraid of having their code stolen. Does it really matter?” yes, I think it does matter. Particularly for people like myself who spend hours and hours perfecting cross-browser compatible layouts for the Internet. I don’t want my code stolen. I do agree that disabling right-clicking is pointless though. It’s not very user friendly, it is irritating and can easily be got around either by disabling JavaScript or by using the “View Source” button on the Mozilla/Firefox web developer toolbar.

I dislike having to click to see staff only to realise there’s another pointless page before I can get to the actual information on each person. Why not just display each description on the same page? It might make the page a bit longer but it saves me precious browsing time. It’s not as if the descriptions are very long either. I have no real positive/negative feedback on the staff section other than the image on the Past page next to “Tenshi” looks quite rude. What I mean is the anime thing looks like she’s giving oral sex. This is not good.

I have no major issues with your Reviewing Rubric. I personally don’t get on with scoring a website but you seem to have clear boundaries as to what you will score. I see you noted “if any” next to splash page in First Impression, which is good. I think you ought to make allowances in the Spelling/Grammar for people who speak another language as their first; if you already do you might wish to point this out. I am a bit confused by the Comments section of the rubric and think this could probably be covered in Overall Impression.

Rule #1 on your rules page seems a little pointless. “You MUST have a website.” – people aren’t going to submit a piece of toast through your form, are they? You can use the second part of this rule as the first rule if you wish, although I’ve never come across a person submitting pornography to be reviewed. Rule #5 is also pointless. If you want people to show you where they link you, ask them, don’t make one of these crappy “cryptic” rules. Rule #7 reads to me as you’re not allowed to change the layout but you must go on hiatus – fiddle with the wording of that. Rule #8 is not a rule and doesn’t need to be there.

I don’t like the idea of your Blacklist. On many occasions I’ve forgotten to add the secret password to the comments box after reading silly cryptic rules or I’ve accidentally deleted the link to a website because I’ve edited a page in more than location thus overwriting a page. In this case, being rejected for a review is bad enough. I wouldn’t want to be listed for making a mistake—all humans make mistakes.

I checked the first review on the Archive page, Akuro.org, and within a few sentences I’ve noticed an error. You’ve told the owner of Akuro.org that even though they’ve got a large image that won’t slow the website down because they’ve sliced it. Wrong. As I mentioned above, slicing an image doesn’t do anything for loading time. Optimising images using a good graphics program will dramatically decrease the size of an image and this will benefit any website.

In the third paragraph down (same review) you’re telling someone to overlap headers with quotes; this is daft: this’ll will make the text barely readable.

In the fourth paragraph you’ve told people not to use the title “tag” (it’s not a tag, it’s an attribute) because it doesn’t work in some browsers and that you turn it off in Internet Explorer. What? I used Internet Explorer for around 3 years before switching to the delightful Firefox and I never discovered an option to turn off title attributes being displayed (not that I’d want to.)

Under content you’ve told this person to remove descriptions of navigation and yet you’re telling them to be more descriptive about banner rotations/buttons. I would have thought that both are pretty self-explanatory?

In the Coding section of the review you’re making suggestions which are only applicable to someone validating at XHTML standards. People are entitled to use capital letters and no quotation marks if they are only aiming for HTML 4.01 validation (or no validation at all, although I’d always recommend trying for one level or another.) Asking people to put alt “tags” (again, these are attributes) into navigational link text is pointless. Alt attributes are for defining alternate text; links are text and therefore don’t need more text.

Generally the standard of this particular review seems okay. It’s not the best it can be but I’ve definitely seen worse. I’ve received worse! I’m not going to review more of your reviews because I can predict the general state of them: half-baked suggestions and little inaccuracies littered here and there. I am of the opinion that if you think you’re good enough to preach to people about their website then you need to prove it; you’re not doing that at the moment.

Viewing the source on your main page (not the splash page) shows me a few things I was hoping I wouldn’t have to see. In reviews I’ve noticed mentions of coding that could be improved and yet you’re not following your own instructions? For starters, you don’t have a doctype. Depending on which you choose you will have a variety of improvements to make; if you choose XHTML you will need to add all of the appropriate quotation marks and convert code in capital letters to lower case (and that’s just the beginning!)

You’re using proprietary attributes in your body tag: topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 could be changed to margin-top: 0; margin-left: 0; (or even shorter, margin: 0;) in the body selector of your external stylesheet.

The table containing your image slices could be replaced with a few methods. The first that comes to mind is declaring the image as a background in the body (using CSS) and then assign the y-repeating background to an appropriately sized <div>. Easier yet if you merged the four parts into one whole image you could use the <img > tag inside a fixed width <div> floated left with the sidebar floated next to that. Either way there are multiple methods for creating a clean-coded website without having to rely on <table> tags which are essentially meant for tabular data.

I see no reason why you, a user of external stylesheets, is using inline styles. You have a grasp of classes, why not assign a class to the absolute-positioned table and define the styling in your stylesheet? Moreover, you can get rid of other attributes which are not doing anything but adding to the size of your pages when mixed with HTML.

Your CSS has a few issues. Proprietary scrollbar colouring is not supported in the majority of browsers and does nothing to benefit your website. Defining a cursor other than default is not only likely to piss me off (it did) but is going to drive lots of other visitors mad too. You have set a colour in the top body selector and a different one in the next – these will overwrite each other so get rid of whichever is not needed. You don’t need text-decoration: none; in the table,body,td,tr { } selector because normal text is not underlined by default. You also don’t need to specify the same font in your link selectors as this will be inherited from above. Your link pseudo-classes are listed incorrectly—they must be in the right order to work appropriately (a:link, a:visited, a:hover, a:active). Why are you using a quote class when there’s an HTML tag already defined (<blockquote>)?

Overall your website is not bad—and this is a compliment coming from me. You seem to have consistency between pages and your reviews have substance. You don’t seem to practise what you preach though and this gives off a hypocritical vibe which may put some people off. Obviously this means less work for you but completely defeats the point of you helping anyone in the first place. Work on my suggestions to improve your website and reviews.