Obiter Dictum

Combined Review of Stand-in-the-rain.net
Date Submitted: Jan 27
Date Completed: July 15

Design

Ohh goodness. As you can see from the screencaps, your site looks different in IE and Firefox, and I can only imagine the differences in other browsers. I don’t know if you use IE or Firefox (or something else)… I just hope it’s meant to be centered. That said, you might want to revise your code a bit. Clearly, some of your visitors aren’t getting the full experience.

My “ohh goodness” has many layers. Hilary Duff is one of them. So are your font size, spacing, and color choice. On first glance, this design isn’t overall bad - it centers, it’s clean with straight edges, and it holds all your content pretty well. That’s just the first glance, though, and on second glance I see everything annoying about it. I’m not going to say that things are “wrong” - I’ll give you that much. Obviously everyone has their own opinion of “right” and “wrong” and I won’t overstep my bounds as your reviewer to tell you your ideas are “wrong.” From my first glance I can see that you could probably make something pretty awesome if you put your heart and head in it, but that perhaps you’re just not going that extra step.

Point by point.

Hilary Duff. Well, there’s nothing wrong with her, per say. I guess if she’s an actress you admire, good. But… Well, I doubt you took those photos. I really doubt you paid the copyright holder or got express permission to put them on your website (if you did, you should probably post that somewhere visible). I know you’re thinking that Hilary Duff isn’t going to sue you, neither is the photographer or the publication for which these photos were taken. That’s an iffy thought. You never know who is going to see what and whether or not someone will be in the mood to take action. I made the mistake once of using a friend’s photograph without her permission in one of my layouts. I thought it was beautiful and fit the theme wonderfully. She cursed me from hell to high water and said she would take action if I didn’t remove it. A friend. Just goes to show that photographers are pretty sensitive about their works and the rights attached to them. Think of how many websites you stumble across daily - it’s totally possible for that person to stumble across yours.

So do I encourage Hilary Duff? I don’t really care about Hilary Duff. What I don’t encourage is the use of copyrighted material on websites. It’s not yours just because you blended it. You have to get permission to blend it.

Your font is small. It’s not “weborexia” small (term shamelessly stolen from PSGR where you can read all about weborexia), but it’s still leaning towards causing blindness. At least the content text is really small - your headers? They’re huge, comparatively. Is there no compromise? Huge headers, tiny text… Well, it’s not visually appealing, and I also don’t want to coninue reading. But I’ll sacrifice my eyesight just for you.

You’ve this weird spacing thing going on with your text. You’ve defined line height and letter spacing in your CSS. Please excuse me while I curl up and DIE. I don’t want to make a comment like, this is so 1999, but… well, it is. I used to do this too and I don’t know why, because I also couldn’t read my website. And because I have to highlight the words just to read them (see color choice below), I’m also having difficulty because the words are, in fact, squished together. Try highlighting them and you’ll see what I mean - they overlap. Readability is at an all-time low here.

I’ve mentioned the color use a little bit - your text is a little less than readable merely because of that (nevermind the spacing, which also contributes). It’s not that the color use is bad, it’s just not ideal. The pink on white isn’t working out, and the links are so close in color to the text that I have to squint to make sure that is, in fact, a link. But then you’ve confused me. Italicised words are the same color as the links! Though I suppose I’ll know it’s a link because when I mouse-over it, the word disappears. What am I clicking? I forget. Let me mouse off and then mouse over again, adding two seconds to my time on your website. Beneficial for you, maybe, but a waste of my time.

You’ve got the right idea. All of your colors come from your layout. I would suggest, however, pulling colors only from your header image, and making your background conform to that as well - instead of pulling colors from both your header and your background. It makes your background seem much more important than it is. It shouldn’t be that important. It is the background afterall. It’s too dark and demanding of attention, which might also have something to do with how small your layout is.

You’re squished. Your layout is small which doesn’t allow for a lot of writing, which ends up being okay since, so far, you don’t really write a lot. The sidebar looks a little bit cluttered, though, especially with those big boxy headers. It’s true, my eyes are immediately drawn to your background and header image, not because they’re attractive, but because they are both much more bold than your text. Shouldn’t your text draw attention too? Shouldn’t it draw more attention?

I wanted also to point out that I was afraid you didn’t have any navigation at first. It’s buried there. It stands out, which is good, but you could probably combine your welcome message with your about blurb, shorten them, then put the navigation under that. I like what you’re thinking, though, by having the navigation below the stuff about you, but it should also be viewable immediately, as soon as someone enters your page. At least, the top of it should be, if you can’t fit it all in. Right now you’re giving the impression that Hilary Duff, your background, your first blog post and welcome message are the most important bits of your website. The other stuff is just there for show.

Finally, the header image. I’ve addressed the questionable use of a celebrity image, but let me get into the image itself. Your site name seems insignificant compared to the actress’ smiling face. It’s not bold, just sort of blends in at the bottom there. Your blending isn’t that bad, but I can still see some edges, primarily along the far left Hilary Duff. It’s clear that it doesn’t belong; perhaps you didn’t put enough feather to the selection… Whatever it is, I can see that there is a different background color there not just around her hair, but down her arm also. On your next layout creation, nix the celebrity, make the title larger, and for that matter, make it smaller.

I’ve said some bad things about your layout, I know. I want to stress that you’re on the right line of thinking with your clear, simple structure, but you’re just putting a lot of flighty elements in there. Images that aren’t copywritten to you are always something to avoid, as are light nearly invisible text colors on top of strong, outstanding images. Think about the fact that I’m more interested in being mesmerized by your background than I am in reading your content.

Other themes: I’ll touch on these quickly. I will be reviewing the site in the aforementioned Hilary Duff theme, however, so take my comments into account only while thinking of that theme.

The second skin is much better than the first, though overwhelmingly pink. Where you had too much color in the first one, you now have too much of one color in this one. There’s a balance somewhere in there, you need only to find it. The font is still small, but the spacing is much better. Again with the celebrity graphic - but at least this one is smaller.

Indiana Jones! It’s too bad Harrison Ford can’t make up for the convulsions this layout has given me. Too blue, and white on blue doesn’t work, and your italicised words are nearly invisible. Same problems with font and spacing.

Skin four is a bit of an improvement; at least you made the graphic yourself. It’s stuck to the left side, as if it were a fly that got too close to the sticky paper and is now struggling to get out. Again, italics are almost invisible. Why change the colors of the italics anyway? Doesn’t the fact that the words are crooked emphasize them enough? I definitely like the color selection in this layout better, but it needs more contrast. Everything looks pretty dull.

Do you even want me to comment on the last skin? I don’t think I can say anything nice about it. I don’t even think I can stay on it any longer.

Content

As I’ve mentioned your blog posts are pretty short. The few that are here give the impression that you really want to blog but you don’t have time - they are all “sorry I haven’t posted in a while” kind of posts. It’s okay if you don’t have time, but I think your visitors would rather come by and see a post worth reading rather than just an apology. There is no reason to apologize every time you remember that you have a website. By this point, any regular visitors you might have know that you don’t update that much, so there’s no need to acknowledge it. Just jump in, speak your thoughts on life or whatever, then go about your day.

Where is your previous posts link? As a first-time visitor, I would be more interested in reading into the past and seeing some posts that say something other than “sorry I haven’t been around,” but I see that I’ll have to search for an archives link and hope I end up where I want to be. That’s assuming that you have an actual blog here. Would you consider it as such?

I promise I don’t want to say bad things about your sidebar, but I do have a few questions.

Welcome to your domain. This is your personal space on the web. I might know you from a previous site, but this is your current home. Within I’ll find things about you, things for me, the visitor, the one visiting the site, in case I’m not clear on the subject. If I don’t like you, I should leave.

Seems to be a lot of filler material in there, and considering how small your sidebar is you might want to get rid of it. Try something like this, which takes out all of the unnecessary mumbo jumbo.

Welcome to stand-in-the-rain.net, Courtney’s personal space on the web! The website has been open since December 2006.
Listed:

Cleaner, don’t you think? The visitor will know what to find in your website by seeing the navigation links. And everyone already knows that if they don’t like your site, they can leave, so why are you telling them? I’m not really sure what’s up with the Ashley link. It doesn’t appear to be a link that rotates with every refresh. Perhaps you’d like to explain that a little better, as the heart just doesn’t do justice there.

Courtney, we already know your name. You told us before, remember? So “You can call me Court” would probably work in the about blurb, since we already know your name. You seem to have thrown proper alphabetization out the window after that; the following words should be capitalized: Capricorn, German, Finnish, Wisconsin, Supernatural, Smallville, Avenged Sevenfold, Simple Plan, Good Charlotte, Linkin Park, Plain White Ts, Superchic[k]. I’m not a huge fan of the whole “italicize the things I really like, strike-through the things I hate” thing that you have going on, but I suppose there really aren’t a lot of creative ways to do this in such a small space.

Now, if you were to take my suggestion and combine the welcome and about, you’d find yourself somewhere in this area:

Welcome to stand-in-the-rain.net, my personal space on the web! I’m Courtney (aka Court), and I’ve been running this site since December of ‘06. I was born on Jan 10, ‘86 (making me a Capricorn) and here’s some stuff about me:

You’d then continue with your list. It’s not the best, but slightly better than what you have.

Your “loved ones” section on the sidebar seems small. Add more links, perhaps, or nix it all together. Your “nerdiness” section seems off as well. Those links are for you, so why do you want to draw attention to them? It’s just in the way. Take off the header. It’s not going to kill you to have those links a paragraph space away from the ones above them with no huge indication of where they are.

Your “Valid CSS” link just leads to the W3C CSS Validation form. It’s true that it is valid CSS, but consider making the link this instead:

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer

Anyone who’s checking (reviewers, for example) would not have to copy and paste the URL to your CSS file this way.

On the sidebar, you have a few broken links to look into. Every once in a while - it doesn’t even need to be that often, twice a month, perhaps - you should go through your site and click all the external links to make sure they still lead to websites.

The Webmistress

First of all, you haven’t updated your blog since June, so I’m inclined to believe the flashy little “updated” sign means you updated that section way back when. Secondly, what do I care if you updated a certain section? I’m not going to go through your site looking for updates. Make a passing remark in your blog of the sections you’ve made major updates to (no minor improvements, please) and let your visitors find them that way. These graphics just get annoying.

Why did your text shrink? Or, it seems, that the link text is really tiny, while the descriptive text is very large. You’ve an odd way of interpreting text use. BIG HUGE TEXT FOR HEADERS, tiny itty bitty text for content, BIG HUGE TEXT FOR DESCRIPTION, tiny itty bitty text for links. Boggles the mind. Why not make sizable headers and readable content, sizable links and readable desriptions? You don’t have to make everything the same size, but you’re drawing attention odd things.

Oh God, your spacing is still killing my brain. I’m not sure how much of your site I can ge through page-by-page, but I’ll give it a go.

Your basic page is indeed very basic, but there are more basic things you could add. For example, since your “favorites” page is formatted in the same way as your “basics” page, you could just combine them and save your visitor the trip.

As for your goals page, an interesting idea. I’ve seen goal pages before but usually they involve really outlandish activities and things you know the person will never do. You have outlined goals that are not only accomplishable, but some of which you’ve already accomplished. Have you ever heard of 101 Things in 1,001 Days? Might be something of interest to you.

Your eye candy page is really hard to look at, probably because of the effect added to all the photos. Why not just link to the actors’ websites or IMDB pages? Much less illegal that way.

I see now that the flashy updated sign is on your movie collection page because you added three of them. Right. Instead of drawing unnecessary attention to such a mundane thing, have you thought perhaps it would be better to create a blog post about the three movies you’ve recently acquired, describing why you like them and what made you buy them? It would keep your blog updated more often and help you avoid “I’m not dead!” posts.

The Visitor

A lot more here, I see, than in the about section. Strange, your “welcome” blurb in the side bar said that there was “a bunch of stuff” about you and “some stuff” for the visitor, implying that the site was more personal than interactive. Another reason to change the wording there.

Your free layouts are all illegal. They use celebrity images for which you do not have permission to use (and, again, if you do, it should be visibly stated on your layout and on each layout that you offer). Aside from that obvious comment, however, I can see that you haven’t really put a lot of effort into these layouts. It seems like you’ve just thrown them together so that you’d have something on your websites for your visitors. Your visitors probably found much more creative/better free layouts elsewhere.

If your intention is just to have “more content,” then fine, quality doesn’t matter. But if you are truly trying to help out someone who can’t do it on their own - first of all, use original or stock images, secondly, be a little more gracious in your coding and design. You can do better than all of these. They are almost entirely unimpressive. Where you shine in layout design, the header image is awful. Where your header shows some potential, the design fails miserably.

The same goes with the Myspace layouts. You’ve just added a background and changed the colors of the boxes. There are so many other ways to make a Myspace layout, changing even the order of the displayed content and the feel of the entire page. Do a little research, help your visitors out a bit.

The prospect of someone stealing your graphics really annoys you, doesn’t it? You’d really hate to see one of your PSP scripts or layouts on someone else’s website, being given away for free, even if it looked different. Even if they recolored the image or tweaked the coding a bit. Yeah, must suck. I wonder how the people who took the photography in the first place feel stumbling upon websites like yours and seeing their artwork redistributed without permission.

The font downloads always seem unncessary to me on personal websites, because of all the free fonts available everywhere, but that’s up to your discretion. You obviously have created a site that you would like to be viewed as a resource website, and fonts that are free to distribute are much better than celebrity graphics and layouts that seem to have been made in ten minutes each.

Your wallpapers are generally unimpressive - I get the same feeling as I did with the layouts, that you just threw them together so you could add more content to your website. I’m not going to suck up and ask you not to take that as an insult, but do take it into account. If you spent hours on these things that resulted looking sloppy and unworked, perhaps you need to find a different method. Again, I don’t condone the use of celebrity images, but I also recognize that the quality of the images is just as important to point out.

You’re on hiatus so there’s an excuse as to why your challenges are long overdue. However, if you find that keeping your challenges open for a month (or however long you do) only gets you one submission, perhaps you should consider keeping them open longer. More exposure would also be beneficial - remind your visitors in your blog, make a link from the side bar, or plainly advertise more often.

Readables? Reads? I can’t even comment here. I’m too shocked. You’ll hear it in detail from someone else, I’m sure.

I do like all your activities where your visitors can voice their own opinions. You might want to look into a script that posts the results automatically, or allows you to approve them before they display. It’ll save you the trouble of copying, pasting, and coding out their responses. It’d be something similar to those FAQ scripts.

I’d have liked to comment more on the grammar and sentence structure, but again, the tiny font and color choice has made it hard for me to concentrate on every page. Please consider darkening the font and making it a bit larger, so your visitors don’t have the same problem!

The Site

Hey, you know, is the word “the” really all that important? Couldn’t you just say “Webmistress, Visitor, Site, Blog?”

I see that there is probably just as much site stuff as there is personal stuff, confirming my suspicion that you have geared this website more towards people who want resources and things to do, rather than a more personal nature.

In your site history you say that you’re not sure how it all started but that you started in Geocities (which, by the way, should be capitalized, and probably linked also). It’s like you have taken my head between your palms and rocked it violently back and forth. I don’t really know how it started, but this is how it started. When did it start? And no one knows why they named their first site what they named their first site, so no need to say “not sure why…?” at every turn. There are all kinds of grammatical impossibilities in this section that hint at errors throughout the site where I’ve been too unconscious to read. Might want to consider proofreading, or even getting someone else to proofread (I charge hourly).

Since you don’t have any affiliates yet, it appears, then you might want to change “Affiliates: the wonderful sites affiliated with mine” to “Affiliate? how to get in touch to become an affiliate.” Right now it seems silly to be led to a page expecting links but only finding a form.

I love reading hosting pages! It’s strange that you require people to update at least once every two weeks and yet you rarely even update your own website! Do you enforce that? Do you threaten to kick people out if they go a while without updating with no discernable reason? I wonder about that sometimes when I see this requirement from people who rarely update themselves. You even have a hidden “agree” link, which is something the Internet used to do with fanlistings. Awesome.

Your link buttons are pretty nice, or at least the first three are and #4 and 5 in the larger size. I’m sure you could implement the same idea in a layout and it would be lovely.

On your lyrics page, I suggest linking the band’s website. As someone who has never heard them, all I’d like to know is that the title of the website came from lyrics. It’s not interesting to me to see the lyrics in front of me. If you added a link to the band, however, I might feel inclined to browse a bit further and familiarize myself with them.

Um, your past layouts seem to mostly consist of your other themes. Perhaps you would do well to note that. I also think it’s strange that my favorite layout out of seven is the first one. Why is it that the first layout shows the most potential? Your layouts should improve as you make them. Your formatting on this page is inconsistent. Make up a form of what you want to show for each layout and follow it.

Why is your credits page more visually appealing than any other page on your entire website? You have divided sections and two-column links. Spacing is a little weird - spaced evenly for the two-column links and irregularly for the single-column links. Text is, again, too small, but you knew that. And there are TONS of broken links here. You might want to consider checking for those more regularly.

There’s a lot here. You have a pretty hefty site but it’s not all impressive. I wish I could have gone into more depth about your words, but I am starting to get sick of the color combination. Theoretically, you’ll want your visitors to go through most of the website, right? Do you want them also getting sick of the color combination?

Comprehensive Reflection

I can see where your passions lie. You like to create things for other people, presumably useful things. You want to give your visitors something to do while they’re on your website. You want interaction and you want your visitors to be happy with your resources. This is a wonderful goal! But you seem a little confused on how to present it. You’ve set up your website as if it is a personal blog with some visitor content. Clearly, it has turned out to be visitor content with some personal blogs.

I’d sit down for a while and try to remember why you’re keeping the site open. What do you enjoy most about it? What delights you when you’re adding content? Would you rather focus on upgrading the graphics and free layouts, offering truly unique and worthwhile resources to your visitors? Or would you rather focus on updating your movie collection?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but once you find it out, I think it would be more beneficial to focus your website on whatever you decide. If you want it to be more personal, great! But start focusing more on interesting blog posts that say more than “I’m still here.” If you want it to be more about the resources, that’s great too, but then you might want to rearrange things a bit, putting the ‘visitor’ section in a more prominent light. As it is right now, your website seems a little unfocused. It’s great once you get into each section; everything is explained thoroughly and well, but when I sit back and look at the website overall I wonder what your purpose is with it.

Not a big fan of the layout and I certainly don’t approve of the celebrity images, but I know that me saying what I’ve said about that isn’t going to change anything. It’s just something to keep in mind. I’ve said several times that you clearly have a talent in this, and it seems like you enjoy it; you just don’t appear to be putting as much effort into it as you could be.

Overall, it’s a pretty entertaining website. What held me back was the “surface stuff” - the design and how you’ve chosen to present the website. If I were browsing under a better planned layout, I probably would have been able to read more, comment on more, maybe even praise more. But it’s honestly difficult to see the good in a website I can barely even read.