Content Only Review of LoveUnchained.Com
Date Submitted: February 8
Date Completed: August 11
I’m sad to say that from first glance I can already tell that your review isn’t going to be very long or in depth. I will try my best, but it’s very difficult for me to review sites that I can’t read, especially for content-only reviews! As I say in my guidelines, I won’t comment too much on your layout except about that which applies to the content; your sidebar text is TINY and the color choice is awful. I have to strain my eyes just to see the text. On the right/main content side, it’s not much better, though the text is the tiniest bit bigger. Your colors go really well together, I’ll give you that, but not in the way you’ve used them. I realize that you didn’t design the site, but you should still be aware of how your layout displays your content. Okay, enough of that.
You have some unnecessary text laying around in your sidebar. For example, writing
Site Purpose: The purpose of this site is to provide all Romione shippers (persons who like Ron and Hermione as a couple) with a place to have fun, celebrate and learn more about the couple. We also strive to bring you up to date news on all happenings in the HP world.
You could easily shorten that paragraph by either getting rid of “Site Purpose:” or “The purpose of this site is,” and it would still get your point across. No need to bog it down by the longest possible thought you could get across. It’s also not clear what you’re “celebrating.” (Then again, I’m not into HP fandom, so perhaps it is just something that eludes me. :P)
I’ve been mousing over a lot of things on your sidebars which, it seemed, were not links even though they were the same color as your links. Please, having your links be all caps is not enough differentiation between links and non-links; your visitors will expect everything in that color to be clickable.
The blog portion is regularly updated — very commendable. However, the italics are displayed in a color so similar to your link text that I thought they were links too!
Not much else on the homepage to look at, but I’m glad to see that you have the copyright notice and disclaimer on the bottom in plain view.
Again, I’m not into the fandom so I can’t comment on the quantity of the photos or quality — Are they photos that you see on every fansite? Is there a large enough variety of them? I wouldn’t be able to answer these questions, but they are things I would suggest that you think about when adding to the gallery.
From what I’ve noticed, you have no note on your gallery page requesting that no one “steal” your images, which is good, since you don’t own them anyway. If you do have this or a similar note somewhere not immediately visible, I’d suggest removing it.
I’m beginning to see a pattern here. These main navigation links that open in new windows? Um. I highly discourage this. I don’t review subsites, and thus I will be skipping anything that opens in a new window. I would recommend that instead of linking them on the top bar of your layout, you create a section for “Features” or some such, then link the gallery, fiction, and anything else you happen to have opening in a new window from there. Then note on that page that they open in a new window.
Well, there’s a slight improvement here; I’m not taken directly to a new window, but all the links in this section are part of your gallery site. Again, as you are simply linking to pages on another website, I do not feel obligated to go through these images and comment on the quality of the graphics/layouts. Perhaps if you had given any indication that these would lead me elsewhere, I would be a little warmer to it, but I don’t like all these windows popping out at me by surprise.
First of all, why is your “coming soon” more important than the content that is already there? You may say, “No, Michelle, it isn’t, what gave you that impression?” I’ll tell you: it’s the fact that the text is larger and it stands out more than your links.
Wow! I half-expected these to open in new windows too. AND you note that they’re external links! I’m impressed, and not quite as annoyed.
As the essays were not written by you, I won’t comment on their quality. I will suggest, however, that perhaps you (or your staff) should write and feature a few that are hosted on the website as well.
You have quite a few interesting games which I’m sure keep your visitors happy. But there is something missing… The Caption Contest is on Round 2 - but where is Round 1? I can understand having no “prize” for the scripted games, but this one could at least list the Round 1 answers as well as offering the prizes you have selected. In any case, it would probably be amusing for your visitors to be able to see the captions that others came up with.
Well, I generally don’t like the whole “using celebrity images illegally” thing, but that basically means that anyone with a fansite is almost totally limited in what they can use (I imagine photography agencies don’t sit around all day approving requests for image use on fan-created websites). That in mind, however, allowing your visitors to “adopt” square photos of the actors/characters is pushing it a bit.
I never got the whole thing with blinkies and yours are no exception. However, from what I’ve seen, there are several ways to make an attractive blinkie, and pink on purple with scrolling black and white dashed border is not it.
Did you write the A to Z page? I enjoyed it very much! I’ve never seen anything like this on a website, especially not a fansite. Very original; I’d encourage more original content in this manner. I’d just like to note, however, that “ABC’s” is not the plural. When you add the apostrophe, you’re making the word possessive. What is ABC owning? “ABCs” is the correct form.
I am not sure why you have your review site linked here. If you were reviewing only HP sites, it would make more sense… But it’s just an external link to a completely different website. It’d be in better surroundings on your links page.
First of all, on each page, you should link your resources instead of just stating them, and pointing your visitor to the exact IMDB page of each cast member (not just IMDB in general). Secondly, once again, your italics are almost the same colors as your links, and even though I already know better, I still expected them to be clickable.
On the JK Rowling page, every paragraph starts with “Jo.” It gets a little redundant, reminds me a little of Dick and Jane. Jo does this! Jo does this! Jo also does this! Jo doesn’t do this, but Jo likes this. Jo, Jo, Jo. Use some pronouns, or even get a little creative and start the sentence with another word. For example, “Jo married Dr. Neil Murray in December 2001.” could just as easily be, “In December of 2001, she married Dr. Neil Murray.”
Also, unless you are on familiar terms with the person about whom you are speaking, you should not be referring to her by her first name. In this case, I would refer to her as “Rowling,” as that is her widely known name; if you continually referred to her as “Murray,” only the smartest of your visitors would catch on. It’s up to you, of course, but it’s much more respectful to refer to people properly.
Your Ron Weasley page is one big paragraph. Also can I say something? I just realized while trying to focus my attention long enough on this page (again, the colors), that the text size has changed. It’s larger than it is in other places on your site. Consistency, please!
Hermione’s page is also one big paragraph. Surely you can find places to break this.
I’m clearly already losing interest in this website. I’m not into reading your staff profiles. As far as I can tell so far, you don’t have a lot of huge grammatical errors so it’s clear that you have gone through and double-edited the website. I can probably assume that these pages I’m skimming through are relatively well put together.
On your awards page, suddenly you have bullet points that describe each section. While your individual pages look nice, so far your site overall is inconsistent. If you’re going to describe what these sections offer on the navigation page, you’ll need to do so also on the other pages.
Your review pages give layouts for the last three, but the first one makes no indication which layout was being reviewed. You might want to upload a screencap for that one, also.
All of these sections could easily belong in “Site.” It seems kind of silly to have a main navigation link for just three small sections.
I said this would be a relatively short review, but I still spent almost equal amount of time on it as I have on others (I got distracted by those games, which were actually pretty entertaining even to someone who isn’t too into the fandom). However, I regret that I couldn’t go through all of your content; this is definitely a short review. Either you have one big resource website, or you have a domain that hosts several small resource websites: make up your mind. And having links that open in new windows is not a convincing way to say, “But they’re all the same website!”
Since they aren’t the same website, I didn’t review them. As I’ve said, that pretty much killed any possibility of a longer review. The colors definitely hindered me, but the lack of things to comment about was evidently the biggest problem here.
Overall, it’s clear that you and your staff have put a lot of work into this website. I mentioned that your grammar is pretty wonderful; you don’t have a lot of glaring errors or annoying misspellings. Great! There’s also a lot here. It’s interactive and kept up to date. I’d only suggest to decide what to do about those pesky new-window sections and get a better design to hold how much content you have. There is a lack of consistancy throughout the site in many ways; most of them are minor, but they’re still noticeable. Minor errors across the board; you’ve edited the content, now it’s time to edit the structure and layout.
August 11th, 2008 at 1:00 am
Thanks for the review! I will try to make the changes that you have suggested as soon as possiable. Thanks for being so honest!