Reviewed: Terri
Site URL: never-silent.net/reviews
Right. So someone who thinks they’re capable of judging other people’s skills has a pointless splash page, is telling ME what *I* need to use despite the fact that YOU’RE supposed to cater for my needs, and has a link with no decoration in the same colour as text and text a different colour that’s not a link. I’m pissed off already and I’ve not even progressed past this putrid purple splash page.
WOW! How can I have judged you so harshly because of your splash page?! This layout is amazing! Amazingly inappropriate for a review site. Splotchy colours that don’t match, some half naked trollop that you can barely see because of your weird graphical effects and text that I’m going to need my magnifying glass to read.
The layout is totally over the top in size (I’m talking Mb, not pixel width/height). It has very few colours and could be saved as an optimised gif at less than a quarter of the size. While we’re on the topic of the layout, the ’spots’ do nothing for it and make the text incredibly hard to read (because of the miniscule size.) The tiny text boxes are hardly practical — how exactly is three words on one line going to benefit anyone? To top it all off, your larger box doesn’t display any content in Safari (that’s a web browser, in case you were wondering.)
Your links are incredibly hard to distinguish from the text because they’re simply bold. Bold text should be reserved for strong emphasis (which is why under modern standards bold type is achieved with <strong> </strong>.)
On the About page you state “we will review any sites (within the guidelines)” — so theoretically you don’t review any website?
“This is a not-for-profit site, our staff are volunteers, we’re here to help and make the reviewing process fun and memorable not only for us, but for you too”
The word you’re looking for is “non-profit”. The first comma would be better replaced with ‘and’ with the sentence terminated after “volunteers”.
On the rules page you state:
“Please no StIcKy CaPs – they look very tacky, and we’ll have a hard enough time trying to work out what you are saying.”
…but that doesn’t make much sense. To state that you’ll have a hard enough time suggests that there is already something preventing you from reading a website with ease — this rule would read better as “Please no StIcKy CaPs – they look tacky and we’ll have a hard time trying to read them.”
This applies for street/gang/net talk, such as “lyke, I am da shizzle, n i’m all 4 u”. Hell No.
You mean “also applies”?
The last rule is also contradictory. You state that people are entitled to make up a name but “~*~Pretty+Pretty+Peachez~*~” is an imaginary name and you seem to have a problem with that? Well, at least you haven’t got a cryptic “please enter this shit into X textbox” rule.
Hahahahaha! Sorry. Excuse me while I piss myself laughing. You’re offering 10 points based on loading time and yet your site drags like a lame donkey’s arse when I visit on dial-up. A quick look at your personal page shows “PLEASE ALLOW TIME FOR GRAPHICS TO LOAD” on yet another silly splash page — hypocrisy at it’s finest I guess?
I’m somewhat confused about more parts of your “scoresheet”. You give 20 points for layout (some of the criteria of which are also stated in “FIRST”, why?) and 10 for content. When visiting a website, do you stay for 10 minutes to stare enviously at a layout or do you stay for 10 minutes to read through interesting or witty content? If you answered layout, you shouldn’t be reviewing websites.
“Codes”. Mm, still don’t quite grasp why these pages are called “codes”, when they’re actually usually small graphical buttons.
As it is a requirement to link NS Reviews when you apply, why not make it a little more fun and use an image provided by us!
The above quote is a question, it needs ending with a question mark and not an exclamation mark. Let’s hope it’s a rhetorical question though; I wouldn’t want to have to tell you what I think of the image(s) provided by yourself.
I don’t understand the Domains category on your Categories page. All domains end in an extension of some sort — how exactly does a person clarify between the domain category, and another? “The opposite to a fanlisting.” should be “The opposite of a fanlisting.” and “Personals:” is a type of advertisement, not a website. The words “apply to” in “Sites that are not listed here and still apply to the rules.” should be replaced with “follow” and the “Go!” submit link is broken (it leads to submit.html instead of the actual page, submit.php).
More signs of hypocrisy — a request for reviewees to use their own coding and yet you’re relying on Dodos Mail Form script with no credit on the seemingly pointless credits page. I do love the “Have you linked NS Reviews?” field though — very, umm, quaint. Trust-worthy even. Don’t worry, I’ll try not to cause myself too much pain while laughing this time.
Let’s take a sneaky peeky at these reviews, shall we? First — “So Flawless” — I tried to visit the site to see how accurate your review was but I gave up after the browser timed out trying to load the top image. I did see enough to wonder what planet you are on giving this person 17/20 for her layout. All I saw was a tacky grid and the head of some bimbo, but what do I know? My 4 years of web designing can hardly compete with your 6 in which you’ve obviously learnt so much.
Anyway, back to the reviews. Still on “So Flawless” I noticed you commented on the originality (lack of) of the two-column style layout and yet you compliment her on it? If it’s not a problem, don’t bring it up as one, and don’t take points off for it.
Next I see “Stylissimo” and some stupid advice at the very start of the review. You recommend image slicing as a way to reduce loading time; this is a common mistake amongst inexperienced “designers”. I always use maths as an example to demonstrate how pointless image slicing actually is. 2 + 2 = 4, basic maths, yes? Split the 2s up into ones and now you have (1 + 1) + (1 + 1); the answer is still 4. You took 5 points off but used only the colour black as an excuse and mention how the site is accessible. You don’t seem to know the first thing about accessibility!
In the review of “Sacred-Scars.Org” you cover the same thing in “FIRST” and “LOOK” again; I am beginning to get frustrated with two separate sections saying the same thing. What’s even more frustrating is reading the recommendation of “coloured text” to make a page better. Unless coloured text in some way ties in with a page, is sufficiently contrasted from the background colour and is beneficial to the design page, it is pointless. The recommendation of visitor content is also pointless as this is a personal domain not a freebie website.
You need to educate your reviewer “Jojo” on how to close her tags (see the review of “It All Comes Down To…”). Better still, get rid of her. Someone who cannot even close a basic <b> tag needs to learn a thing or two before preaching at other people. Her review of “It All Comes Down To…” is very brief, and doesn’t contain any sort of explanation as to why she took points off for various things. Her comment:
I Dont like the layout much, its really plain and un interesting.
…is of no use to anyone. Not only is it completely unnecessary, the layout is pretty and is unique to this website unlike the cropped copied image at Jojo’s site, but is offensive too. For someone who has only just started a review website you want to make a lasting impression and not one that involves insults aimed at a layout. The letter ‘d’ in “Dont” needn’t be capitalised and you’re missing an apostrophe after the ‘n’ and again after the ‘t’ in “its”. “un” isn’t a word, don’t present it as one.
In the same review, unique content of real value to worthy visitors is mocked and criticised as “boring” and yet common crap such as freebies is recommended. How many websites have to feature the same spurious shit before you/Jojo stop recommending it?
My final comment regarding the reviews is on this:
have people send in their opinions (only post the justifiable ones, of course!).
…are you going to decide who’s opinion is/is not justifiable? Would a person have to have a website littered with celebrity rubbish, freebie icons that infringe on someone else’s rights and lots of pink to have a justifiable opinion?
What’s the point of having a “Pending” and a “Queued”? They’re exactly the same thing.
Both your’s and Jojo’s e-mail address on the staff page are missing the mailto: in the link and Notepad isn’t a design program. Oh, and lastly, do tell Jojo that Crazy Browser is nothing like Firefox and to claim such a thing is ridiculous.
Your coding is relatively tidy but then I get the feeling that half of this was generated by “CuteHTML” (all of the tags in capital letters, if I’m right?) and half was generated by whichever program you used to slice and dice the “layout” image. You’re missing a document type declaration at the top of your page (doctype) and empty meta tags are pointless and should be removed.
Back to the doctype. The doctype will tell the validator which set of standards to validate against and will put any modern browser into Strict Mode (Quirks Mode, which is what the browser reverts to when you have an incomplete — or no doctype, often displays elements with different default values and can effect how you design a page.) I think the Transitional HTML 4.01 doctype would be adequate for your skills. This is as follows (and should be placed at the very top of the page above any other HTML coding):
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
Although the validator does not enforce lower case coding under this doctype, I recommend it to everyone to make their website more future-friendly. This will make it easier and quicker to convert to if you decide to improve your general skills in the future. This means that you will have to write your own coding (I am sure you’ll be able to remember the <head> and <title> tags) instead of relying on any generators.
In the link to your stylesheet “REL=stylesheet” should be rel="stylesheet". Talking of which, you need to get rid of ALL of the in your stylesheet, as well as the proprietary rubbish like coloured scrollbars and filters. You need to specify a generic font-family after your specific fonts (serif after fonts such as Times New Roman and sans-serif after fonts like Arial/Verdana) like so: font-family: Verdana, Sans-Serif;. “Point” font sizes are for print only therefore 7pt needs to be changed to something like 10px and letter-spacing:0pt; can be removed as it’s zero by default.
The cursor changes littered amongst your other styling can be removed too — they do nothing but irritate visitors and hinder the progress through a website. Your link psuedo-elements are in the wrong order (should be a:link, a:visited, a:hover, a:active) but could be grouped together anyway as they’re all defining the same properties. You can do this in the same way as you’ve grouped textarea and input.
The section of CSS which starts with body, tr,td, h6, p, li, b, u, br{ is unrequired. Browsers inherit the defaults from the top-most selector (that’s body { } in this case) and apply them to all other elements unless specified otherwise. The only execption to this rule that I’m aware of is form elements such as inputs and textareas.
Back to your ; you’ve defined “000000″ (forgetting the #) using the bgcolor attribute which is unnecessary as you’ve already specified your background colour using . All occurances of <p class="head" align="left"> are also unnecessary — headers should be surrounded with the appropriate header tag (<h1>, <h2>, etc) and then can be customised via .
The web counter <script> tag needs the following attribute and value added: type="text/javascript".
All images need an alt="" attribute, preferably with a value applicable to the image in question. This provides alternate text; usually used when an image can’t load. In your case, alternate text would have been used when I turned images off because I got fed up of staring at the pink trollop. Last but not least, consider moving the style coding controlling the <div> elements into your stylesheet. This isn’t a requirement under 4.0 but is good practise anyway.
Aaahh. Please excuse me while I let out a relieved sigh. I am glad this review has come to an end. Obviously this begs the question “why did I start it in the first place?” So, why? Because if there’s one thing that irritates me is amateurs claiming that they have X years of experience and offer reviews that do nothing but condone the use of deprecated elements and useless content which clutters up the Internet and restricts real creativity being recognised. If you’re want to continue reviewing learn the basics before you damage anyone else’s pages.