Review of band-o.org

Reviewed: Kathleen
Site URL: band-o.org

I seem to be reviewing the skin “RockyBliss”.

My first impression involves the word “cack” so I’m not sure if I should continue. The background colour, while obviously selected from the top photograph, is tediously plain and doesn’t compliment your layout like it should. A pattern, or anything to break up the solid colour, would be better. Likewise, I still don’t understand the trend of having a border around the container when it sits against the browser anyway — if you have a border you should have a top/bottom margin — and think this also negatively effects my thoughts about your layout.

The typical content + sidebar style layout makes it easy for me to instantly recognise how to get around your website; sod originality, I like familiarity. I find your top image to be rather too large in terms of area (not physical size). If the photo were cropped just above the three chunks of rock at the front of your photograph it’d retain the focal point but get rid of some of the redundant blue. Alternatively you could put a title or something similar on the blue area to break it up a little. I am curious as to why there’s no border underneath the photo to break it up?

Your links are clearly distinguishable from the default text but are quite pale on my screen — a darker shade such as #694843 would be more appropriate. Also, I would remove the font-weight: bold; from the a:hover pseudo-class, or alternatively, make the a:link pseudo-class bold too otherwise the links ‘jump’ and disrupt the flow of text when I hover over them. I would recommend making the link hover colour darker too.

I found it quite annoying reading through your entries on the front page. Not necessarily because there’s anything wrong with the entries themselves, they just have no distinction from one another. There is equal spacing between all of the headers and paragraphs and they appear to run on and on and on. I would find it much easier to read through if there were some sort of divider between each entry and spacing between the date and the post title reduced — perhaps they’d even be better on one line.

I think your navigation is in the wrong order. That might seem a bit of a strange statement but I believe that as this is a personal-blog site, your information (”Girl”) would be better listed at the top. If you are relying on wp_list_pages() to generate the order of your pages for you, I would suggest looking at setting a page order in the settings of each individual page and then using wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order') — this just gives you more control, and adds more sense to the navigational list.

In IE, your content div seems higher than Firefox. This is causing the top of the content to brush against the photograph and could be sorted by adding padding-top: 10px; to the #content { } selector.

Moving on to your content, I’ll start with the first page of any relevance, Domain. Under Basics I found exactly that, basics. While there are no major, glaring errors there are a few things that I think could be reworded to read better. For example: “evil javascript alerts and marquees” sounds to me like you’ve used JavaScript marquees despite <marquee> being an HTML tag. Next: “I then traveled to geocities.”. Geocities isn’t a place and you can’t exactly travel to it. It is however a name of a service and therefore should start with a capital letter. “It introduced me to new and exciting things, such as css and weaned me off page builders” makes no sense to me. How about trying something like: “It introduced me to new and exciting things such as CSS, as well as weaning me off WYSIWYG pagebuilders.” The referral link to the LissaExplains forums using the word “post” isn’t in the ‘right’ place — it would be more appropriate linked from the words “their forums”. You wrote: “have a good HTML and XHTML skills” ..what’s a good HTML and XHTML skill? Nobody really needs to know the intricate details of what plan you have with your host, and I feel the information on your current domain name would be better placed above your Web Design History.

My only thought regarding your Themes page is that the images are stupidly huge, and I’m not talking about area this time. Over 200kb for a thumbnail is obscene! It’s no wonder though — you’ve got full sized screenshots resized using the height and width attributes which I feel shouldn’t be used under the XHTML strict doctype (although are perfectly valid) because they are presentational and that’s what CSS is for. If I were you I’d crop the unneeded browser crap off the screenshots, resize them in a graphics program and save them again. I am physically cringing at the thought of trying to load that page on dial-up…

The Quasigeek.net Awards link on the Credits page is broken.

Biography should be Autobiography. “I have dark brown hair that is always fly-away” would sound much nicer as “I have dark brown fly-away hair”. Likewise, “My eyes are deep brown and are my best feature” could be “My best feature, my eyes, are deep brown in colour”. Under Personality I think you’re putting too much focus on your negative traits. Sure, they’re a part of you and people who admit their issues are probably more likely to solve them, but I don’t think people generally want to read about it. Certainly I find it depressing to read a page of “I suck at this” and “I can’t do that”.

Cast is quite interesting, although I find it quite annoying that I had to click a link to get to the Girl section, click another link to get to Cast and then yet more links to find out information on your friends/family. Some of them aren’t even worth clicking on — Corrinna for instance only has one line dedicated to her? I would merge the entire “Cast” onto one page, separate each person with a divider and then just get rid of the people you don’t have decent descriptions for. “She is boy-crazy” is hardly a biography.

I can’t critique an ask/answer section and poetry tends to bore me, so I’m skipping these pages. Wish Lists; why have an empty page?

The section Interactive is misleadingly named. When I think of interactive content I think of things that I can interact with — polls, memes, etc. You only have textual content so this section could be “Writings” or even just “My Content”. I would suggest that you make the form on the Opinions page a suggest box only — if a visitor wants to request a potentially controversial topic I have found they are more likely to do it anonymously.

Photos is an external link as should be marked as such, or placed away from the navigation so that it doesn’t appear to be ‘in’ your website. The same goes for Photoblog. Why is the Sitemap blank? ..and that is all of the content.

Coding-wise it’s fully valid, but then I expect nothing less from WordPress. I noticed that you’ve replaced the usual Transitional Doctype with the Strict — while this might make you feel like you’ve achieved more it’s still quite pointless as WordPress relies on CSS and structured mark-up anyway. I’m not trying to devalue any effort you’ve put into modifying WordPress, because I know a lot of people have trouble with the themes, I simply think I’d have more respect for you if this was hand-coded validated coding.

Summarising your website is quite easy: it appears dull. I think that if you were to add little tiny details here and there it would give immediate ’spice’ without requiring any major time. For example, you could customise the bullets in the navigational list or turn it into one of those trendy menus that changes when it’s hovered over. Break up the solid background colour to make the design more interesting and reduce the amount of clicks to get to your content and my attention won’t wither thus leaving me bored. Remove the redundant pages, make your descriptions more positive and sort out the spacing issues. Follow my advice and tada: you’ll have a great website.