Reviewed: Kayla
Site URL: fallen-rose.com

10 seconds.. 25 seconds.. 40 seconds.. 1 minute 20 seconds..

For crying out loud! I’ve been on your website almost two minutes now and your top image hasn’t loaded. I’d keep counting but I’ve forgot where I got to. And your top image is STILL loading, even after typing this.

Uh, STILL loading…?

Thank Christ! It’s finished! Over 660Kb for a crappy blue-black pattern with only your site name as a focal point. Having your site name as the focal point is not a bad thing, but it does mean we don’t need the redundant shite above your site title. Saved as a GIF your top image is a third of the size; pointless additional pattern-stuff removed and then saved as a GIF, your top image is just less than 60Kb. One tenth of the original file size — now doesn’t that make more sense?

There’s a problem with your website: I’ve been here three minutes (possibly longer) and I have no idea what your site is about. Bearing in mind that the average visitor has decided whether or not they want to stay in about 3-9 seconds, you should probably fix that. I shouldn’t have to click a link to find out the most basic information about a site, it should be immediately obvious (either in the title of a site or in an introduction). I asked “an outsider” (thank you Karl) what he thinks the site is about and he said “that person?”. Is this a personal site?

I am super-duper pleased that you’ve got your links underlined but incredibly annoyed that you’ve fiddled with the cursor property and got rid of my default little hovery-hand. Why do people, yourself included, feel the need to change that kind of stuff? It doesn’t add anything to a website; it has no aesthetic value.

Your links are too similar in colour to your text and too similar in colour to the background. I’m all for matching a colour to the decorative images used but there is such a thing as “contrast” and it’s not a bad thing. The same thing goes for the ‘headers’ which are barely readable on the patterned background underneath them.

In any resolution above 1024×768 your background repeats horizontally as well as vertically. This doesn’t leave me feeling confident about the standard of your tutorials, as the problem can be fixed with a single word in your CSS which you should know if you feel you’re good enough to offer advice. The background could also be fixed and made smaller in size, by using a small background for the body {} and then placing the repeating part in a container div around your absolutely positioned divs (which don’t need to be positioned, but I’ll get to that later.)

I am confused as to why your About FR dives straight into previous details about the website without even a “hello, this site is about xyz” — i.e. the important current details. No one cares what a site was, nobody sane anyway, they just want to know what a site is about and if it’s going to benefit them. As I’ve read a paragraph and still don’t know what your website is about, you’re not doing well so far.

“Fallen Rose” has more of a mature sound to it, and much darker and mysterious.

What has a much darker and mysterious name got to do with a website? I don’t think anyone ever visits my website because of its name! Anyway, if you insist on using that logic to justify your site name, the second half of that sentence would read better as “it is much darker and mysterious”.

It’s a website to hopefully be a graphics resource site

..makes very little sense. It’s either a graphic resource site, or it isn’t. If it is, try something like “This is a quality graphics resource website” instead. It ‘bigs up’ your website and clarifies the point of your pages. If it isn’t (which I’m still not sure about, because you’ve got content unrelated to graphics) then say so. Please, whatever you do, be more specific.

Another sentence that doesn’t sound right when read aloud is:

To me, although not more important, hits are pretty high up there.

Hits are not more important than what? You’ve not discussed something important previously and as such I think that this sentence should be: “To me, my website hits are quite important, although not as important as (whatever it is they’re not as important as here)”. Although if I’m being really picky, I would say that documenting your hits at all is pretty superficial. Don’t worry, this review will increase your total hits by loads!

I don’t know why you’ve saved the entire page set-up for your past layouts? Not only does Google see this as replicating content (which can negatively affect your search engine ranking); I certainly don’t want to click each individual past layout page preview. I would suggest taking a screenshot of each layout where you can, and then putting them on one page. If you don’t have past layout previews, don’t include the details — most visitors are only interested in seeing your learning curve and they don’t need 50 previews for that.

Received would be more appropriately named Awards or Gifts, and Stats.. well, I see no need for them at all. You’re also missing Review-You off your review sites list, which is just crazy because everyone knows it’s the best one around.

Your affiliates/hostees/network links would be better on a separate links page and the piece of JavaScript that creates the little buttons could quite frankly be shoved up a certain bodily orifice for all I care, but that’s just my hatred for pointless JavaScripts biasing my opinion.

Moving on to the actual content of the website…

It is frustrating to have to click the links in your sidebar to get to each content type, only to discover that I have to click another link to get to individual categories within each type and then click again to see the full-sized versions of each item. Of course — I’m not interested in downloading any of your generic, boring, unoriginal content — but those who are will have to go through this click-click-click procedure for every item they want to download. Add this tedious clicking to slow page load times (despite the images being cached; this is caused by the Haloscan comments and additional pointless JavaScript) and it adds up to one bored visitor.

It seems that the majority of your content, and the little buttons on the Link FR page, contain artwork, pictures, celebrity photographs/etc. that don’t belong to you and therefore you have no right to create derivative works of. Simply adding a “Credit” link does not excuse you from having to follow Copyright law and it’s websites like this that tempt me into ‘ripping’ the whole thing off just to try and see if you can justify your legal standing (you have none — you are breaking the law). I have an article on Copyright Violation, if you decide you’d like to educate yourself (what are the chances?)

Tutorials; I love it when people try and advise others when they can’t even get their own website in line. The lists tutorial is actually semi-accurate: “command” should be tag (”that’s what gives the computer the command that you’re making one”) and it’s not the computer that generates the page dependant on the HTML, it’s the browser. Also, you don’t need a line break in list items, you just need to close the items properly (</li>). I know this isn’t a requirement under the HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype but tidy coding is always better than untidy coding.

Under Showing HTML Code you’re demonstrating <textarea> as a method of displaying HTML. This is misuse of a form element, and I don’t get why you’re doing it as you clearly know how to use the entities (&lt; etc.) to show HTML ‘properly’. In fact, why haven’t you got one of my handy Code Converters? As for the graphics tutorials: no personal interest = no critique.

I’m not even going to glorify your Reads section with the profanity that it deserves. I will say though — I thought this chain mail-style junk had gone from sites like this years ago! Bullshit like “He Drank. I Died” that tries to inject the young mind with guilt and emotion to persuade them not to do one thing or another doesn’t work, and has only one place: in the bin.

Your coding is.. hm, not too bad (in places). I’ve seen worse, that’s for sure. You’ve probably ignored what I’ve said throughout the majority of this review because that’s what people do, but if you decide to read and take action on any one part of my review: let it be everything after this point, for the love of all that is Holy (like coffee, ice cream and cake).

Firstly, crop the diagonal pattern from your current background. Or, just create a new image in PSP 3 pixels by 3 pixels in size, fill the background in #7793A9 and draw a line from the top left corner to the bottom right corner in #1C4B70 (those two hex colours are the current colours in your background). Save it as an optimised gif and link to this as your background in the background-image property of your body {} selector. The blue column ’setup’ part of your background can be assign to your container div, which you’ll be creating shortly…

Next, still in you CSS, remove cursor:default; and the scrollbar colouring from the body {} selector, background-color: transparent; from the content class selector (.content {}). You can also remove text-decoration: underline; font-size: 11px; cursor: default; font-weight: none; from each link pseudo-class, and , a:cursor from after a:hover. You also need to swap the a:active and a:hover properties around as the pseudo-classes need to be in a specific order to work across all browsers: link, visited, hover, active (remember them as LoVe HAte).

Remove background-color: transparent; and font-size:11px; from the header class selector and give a measurement to the height property value(e.g. px — height: 20px;). Measurements also need to be given to the padding and border property values.

Talking of the border properties: you’ve typed out the values in the wrong order twice. Remove border-top: #000000 0 solid; border-left: #000000 0 solid; border-right:#000000 0 solid; border-bottom:#000000 0 solid; and re-arrange border:black solid 1; so that it says: border: 1px solid #000000;. Obviously you can change #000000 for whatever colour you want, 1px for whatever width you want, etc.

In the contenthead class selector you can remove background-color: transparent;, font-size:11px; and the four border-[side] properties. Fix the main border property so the values are in the right order and don’t forget to give measurements to the padding/etc. Lastly (in your CSS), you can remove background-color: transparent; from the select, input, textarea selector.

I have suggested you remove all of these properties because they’re all pointless. The reason being that they are either set that way “in” the browser by default or you’ve declared them previously and will be inherited in the rest of your CSS. The only exception to this is the coloured scrollbars CSS and I’ve suggested you remove that because it is proprietary (designed for one browser). This basically was just a CSS-optimisation exercise. Now, onto your HTML…

After <body>, put the following: <div id="container">. Then, place </div> before </body>. This is the container div that I mentioned earlier and will contain the rest of your layout which we can move where we want it, without having to rely on absolute positioning. Next, you need to remove all of the style="position: absolute; [etc]“ crap from your div tags because then you can follow my tableless three-column layout tutorial because I’m too lazy to explain it all again. Basically this will explain how to float your three columns in the container div.

You need to go through your HTML and change every instance of <p class="header"> </p> and change it to <h2> </h2> or <h3> </h3> where required (i.e. subtitles to h2, sub-subtitles (I made that word up) to h3). You also need to change <p class="contenthead"> </p> to <h1> </h1>. Once you’ve done that you can change .header { to h2 { and .contenthead { to h1 { in your CSS.

Instead of using double line-breaks at the end of each line, wrap your paragraphs in (wait for it..!) paragraph tags: <p> </p>. This will allow more accurate customisation over your paragraphs with CSS, and will ensure more consistent spacing between lines.

For future compliance and to allow for a possible change to XHTML (if you ever decided to go that ‘far’) I would recommend writing your HTML all lower-case, and using unordered lists for your sidebar links instead of link line break link line break link line break. I would also recommend removing the target="_blank" attribute from all of your links as this is a pain in the ass for people who use Firefox and prefer new tabs to windows (unless of course they’ve got the tabbrowser preferences plugin: hint hint people!)

You’ve got a redundant space before the URL to the image in the <img> tag that links to the Corrupt Me SOTM contest and you’re using <textarea> instead of the HTML entities on your Link FR page. You’re missing a quotation mark after the target attribute in the link to http://kaycar11.tripod.com on Webmistress, you need to change the & in the Yahoo graphic to &amp; and remove </tr></td></table> from after your Livejournal link (same page).

Almost every single image on your website lacks an alt attribute, and those images that do have them seem to be empty which is even worse. An expert (in my not so humble opinion) friend of mine has an article on “Using alt Attributes and Long Image Descriptions”. Read it, digest it, follow it, and then compliment my friend on her very lovely layout.

To sum up what I’ve said so far: your website is generic. It’s yet another graphics resource website (I think) in a sea of graphics resource websites that all offer the same crud — all featuring stolen artwork, stolen celebrity photographs, etc. Your coding is pretty average, as is your English. In fact, I skipped 90% of everything typed on your website out of sheer frustration until I reminded myself that this is a review (all be it unrequested) and I have to read.

Unless you can suddenly change your ways and become a magnificent artist overnight; using nothing but your own content and nothing but your own graphics, your website will not ever be any better than average.