Review of sami.sophistichiq.com
Reviewed: Sami
Site URL: sami.sophistichiq.com
First impression: too much text. I like reading websites — they’re quite interesting — I don’t like being chucked in at the deep end though. An introduction should be a few sentences maximum, preferably with a few keywords nicely highlighted for me to pick up as I scan. If these keywords are repeated in your title and meta keyword tag, they will help raise your search engine ranking for those particular words too. (And yes, I’m blatently ignoring your Note to Reviewers.)
Your top image is somewhat odd. I like the ‘old’ style of it — the greyscale, the building in the background with the newspaper guy adding a focal point — and then the girl throws it all off. She doesn’t ‘go’ at all, and I’m not sure what point she serves.
I think your content area would be better with a left and right black border to ‘carry’ the top image down the page. At the moment it stops quite abruptly giving the eye nothing to visually follow.
Your text, headers and links are clearly distinguishable from each other, but I think you should go for a darker link hover colour.
On to your content, and back to your introduction. I find that it quite ‘rambly’ — you talk too much, and at times often contradict things you’ve already said. In the first sentence (”Vanishing Glass is a personal site in which writing makes up most of the content.”) you are telling people it’s a personal site, and then a writing site (then again on the Reviewers Note page) — which is it? Your visitors don’t need to be told in the intro’ that the site is cluttered, that’s off-putting. I consider “I tried to make this site …” a description of the site, best served under your Site section. You don’t need to explain your navigation in such detail (”navigation is above” would be sufficient) and descriptions of what is in each section could go in a title attribute for each link.
“of a ex-hippy” should be “of an ex-hippy” and “I want people to enjoy but” doesn’t explain what it actually is you want people to enjoy. You don’t explain what a fangirl is (nor fanfic earlier on), and your statement about enjoying reading would be better suited to your Girl section.
Be careful when labelling your updates “10-05-06″: while at the moment it obviously means 10th May, later on this year it could mean the 5th October.
In your Girl section, girlpics.jpg and girlpics8.jpg are not aligning to the right because you’re using the ’special’ quotation mark character instead of the plain text ” after the alt attributes.
“I’m Sami as you can read above” ..actually, it says you’re Samantha. “I gobbled up books” makes me think of somebody eating books, hm! Oh, and if you’re in to fantasy, you might like Terry Pratchett books (that’s if you’ve not read ‘em already). You have an interesting outlook on history, and you’re definitely more active than I am — not sure about your taste in TV shows though. Talking of which “I heart TV. I really do. I love television, I really do.” bugs me, the last bit seems so redundant: you’ve already said you love TV! I empathise with your feelings about music. It’s something I just never really got into as a kid, and when people ask me what I like I say “anything I can sing along to”. In fact, I’m singing along to Nina Simone at this very moment.
I find it quite surprising that you have your rejection letters typed up — that’s incredibly personal. Were I in your shoes, I don’t think my ego would let me do that. Still, I found it quite interesting the difference between each slip (the fact that the latest was quite complimentary and the others so blunt) and at least it shows that you’re pursuing your hobbies.
Collective would probably be better under Site and “quite a bit” on that page seems ..wrong, in some odd and completely anal way. Quite a lot, would be better (although I’m guilty of saying the former). On this page, it’d be better if you linked the URL as well as displaying them as it wasn’t immediately obvious that the thumbnails were clickable.
In the first paragraph of your NaNoWriMo snippet you use the word “Succubae” far too many times (and my spelling checker says it’s “Succuba”). Now, I’m no expert when it comes to writing but when I’m reading I like a little variation. When I was at school we were told to avoid using the same words closely together as often together (obviously this doesn’t apply to the lines of ‘the’, ‘they’, ‘and’, etc). The rest of the page was quite an interesting read, although I must admit to skipping over a few bits (I’m a very impatient reader). I did notice the Latin thought — does that mean anything in particular or did you make it up?
Under Writing, none of your Rants work; rants.php apparently doesn’t exist.
Still in the Writing section > Published Works > In The Queen’s Sister, “thankfully it was just a bic not one of the shiny” would probably have read better as “thankfully it was just a bic and not one of the shiny” and “how his eye followed her hands” sounds like he only has one eye. On Teenagers, Wake Up “They electing a leader whose inflexible” would be clearer as “They elected a leader who has inflexible” (although the entire sentence sounds funny read out loud — perhaps you should look at that and be more specific about your point?) I am pretty sure “internet” (3rd paragraph) should be capitalised.
Your writings are quite creative — you have some good storylines. However, I find it incredibly hard to read through your writings and start scanning. A lot of your sentences are awkward and your grammar is lacking. I know you’re aware of this, but I feel that it’s quiet important you hear it again. The way I see it is that if people constantly nag you about it, you might work on it. I will say that you’re definitely not the worst writer I’ve seen though (I cannot get over J.K. Rowling’s use of commas personally, but there we go).
Regarding your Copyright, Plagiarism, and Distribution piece — it’s not entirely accurate. For starters “Did you know that everything on this site is already copyrighted?”: the images in your layout, did you take those pictures yourself or did you obtain them from somewhere else? Assuming they’re not yours, they aren’t protected by copyright, not yours anyway. Likewise, you state that your avatars are yours and can only be used if you are credited, and yet without even looking at the avatars I can guarantee that they contain celebrity images that you don’t own. You really ought to link to more reputable sources at the bottom of the article too, and can find some at the bottom of my piece on Copyright Violation.
Moving on to HodgePodge, “full of things that doesn’t fit anywhere else” should be “full of things that don’t fit anywhere else” (do not instead of does not). The ‘in’ is not required in “I love entering in icon contests” and shouldn’t “so I will have a bunch of avatars” be “so that’s why I have a bunch of avatars”? The introduction to this section is far more wordy than it needs to be.
I find it amusing that you’re being defensive about your own copyright and yet, you’re not respecting the rights of the celebrities and celebrity photographers by using their work in your wallpapers and avatars?
I’m not qualified to comment on your Fanfiction/Drabble tips because I know nothing about them. You meditation techniques seem interesting enough, and your Reading a Website Review article is quite accurate. Theoretically you should take everything any reviewer says with a pinch of salt though. Taste, is after all, objective, and despite many objections to the contrary this is all reviews really are: the reviewers taste in website expressed in writing.
The top paragraph of the Site section would be better separated into two (starting with “The programs used …”), “Helpful sites are” would sound a little better as “Helpful sites include” and “it has the first time Harry talks to snakes” makes more sense as “it is the first time Harry talks to snakes”. I don’t really get why a personal site needs affiliates and Reviewed appears twice in the bottom link list.
Your coding is tidy enough. In fact, for the most part it’s pretty decent, so I’m not sure why you’re sticking with HTML Transitional and not Strict (or even XHTML for bragging rights). There are a few errors here and there:
- You’re using the
/>style end tag for your stylesheet link which is invalid in HTML (remove the space and forward slash) - You have paragraph tags around your Updates header on the index that shouldn’t be there.
- Your layout image is missing the alt attribute. I can’t remember for the life of me if this is required under the HTML doctypes but it’s good practise to include it anyway.
- The images on your Girl main page are all also closed using
/>and shouldn’t be. - You’re missing the opening
<p>under Name in the Site section.
You seem to have a case of div-itis too. Your layout image coding for example, looks like this:
<div id="picture" class="centered">
<img src="layout.jpg">
</div>
But could be switched to:
<img src="layout.jpg" id="picture" alt="alt text here">
You have two <div>s around your navigational list (bravo for using lists, btw) both of which are unneeded (the styling could be applied directly to the unordered list). Talking of which, #navcontainer ul { } has an incorrect } on the same line (after list-style-type: none;) and a redundant { on the next line, after that.
Because you’re using absolute positioning and trying to use the ‘center cheat’ to center your layout, your layout is way off to the one side in Internet Explorer. Remove the absolute positioning: it’s not needed at all. You may need to do a little fiddling to get it to sit in the middle, but it the code looks pretty accurate.
Your site is not bad. There was plenty for me to read which keeps people like me going for a few hours, and you have the right idea when it comes to functionality (right text size — although it’d be better as a percentage — clear headings, links, etc). I think the real let down is the awkward phrasing which could probably be sorted simply be reading your pages out loud. Overall, it kept me busy, even if I spent every few minutes correcting your grammar in my head.