Content

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.

Gallery

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.

Fiction

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.

Media

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.

Extras

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.

Bios

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.

Site

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.

WWW

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.

Comprehensive Reflection

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.

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.

Content

Aesthetically your site is just a tad bit blinding to me; you asked for a content-only review so I’m not going to comment too much on the design, but as I have to read the words somehow, you should know a few things. The yellow on the brown would be fine for your links in the sidebar if the white wasn’t so bright under your content. I feel like I am straining to read some things, and that’s never good if you want people to continually visit your website! Issues arise with the yellow links (on the brown, but also below the content in your footer navigation), pink on pink, and that splash of pink in your “about” blurb that looks sickening with the yellow (again, the yellow), but also makes the black hard to discern. Otherwise, the font size is big enough and the fonts are readable. (Except when you mouseover the links in the sidebar; there you seem to have decided to throw readability out the door. What’s with the dark brown on dark gray? Bad choice.)

I’m going to start with your sidebar because, despite the fact that your content is on the brightest color shown in your page, your sidebar still manages to draw my eyes immediately. Let’s analyze why: First of all, it’s busy. Too busy. Is it necessary to have all that? And can’t you style the Google search bar to match the sidebar colors, rather than having a random white box among all the pink, yellow, and brown? Secondly, your tags stand out more than your subject lines in the blog, so when I landed on your page I was immediately drawn to those. Is that what you want? My suggestion is either to move them further down the page or make them smaller.

So you have lots of things going on in your sidebar. I don’t even know where to begin. It’s a nice wide one, which I suppose suits your purpose well as you have some things that apparently need to be wide (your tags, again, stand out more than anything else) and some things that apparently need to be squished just to fit in there.

I know that a lot of websites will tell you to put fun little activities on your site (such as polls) to keep visitors coming and whatever, but all I interpret from “What Color Should My Site Have?” is that you are totally ready to add another to your already confusing conglomerate of colors. Even if that’s not the case, is it really necessary to squish this poll in your sidebar? If you’re going to keep it, though, I’d like to point out that the header says “Polls,” even though there’s only one. Also when you click the link to go to the polls archive page, you get an error (more on your error page later).

You have your navigation now in three different parts of the site - the header, footer, and sidebar. Whoa, whoa. I know you’re eager to get people around, but it’s really not necessary to do that. And if you’re going for overkill, might I suggest creating a left-hand sidebar just for another set of navigation links? Because that would totally even out your website.

Your rotations section has a ton of holes. I don’t know if this is because you’re still displaying code for inactive rotations or because your coding is off. When I view the source, it seems to be the former. Clean it up a bit. You could save some space and visual impairment. Also, if you’re at all given the option of a non-blinky rotation link button, go with that one. You can’t control what other people’s buttons will look like, and trying to minimize the blinkiness will do you a lot of good. It would be better to have a thin, skinny non-blinky thing next to a flashy blinky thing, rather than a ton of blinky things assaulting your visitors’ eyes from all corners. As for the position, I would suggest first cleaning up the code a bit, and second putting this below all your sidebar content, giving it the space of the sidebar width. Less squishy that way.

Miscellaneous points so I can move on: Your “subscribe via email” box looks pretty out of place; not sure why - probably because your sidebar draws so much attention that I haven’t even gotten to your blog yet so I don’t know what I’m subscribing to. Also, I assume that “They Talk Much” means top commenters? What’s wrong with just saying “top commenters?” For a few minutes I couldn’t figure out why these links were separate from your blogroll. Other visitors might also wonder.

On to your blog. Okay. This is a personal preference, I realize, but one of the things that annoys me a lot is blogs that have “Read the Rest of the Entry” on every post. Especially when, after you click the link, there are less than 100 words under there. I could understand if it was a super long post that went into a lot of descriptive detail about something, but most of your posts are relatively short. Why the cut? What’s wrong with displaying your words in full, rather than forcing your visitors to go that extra step to read the rest? And it’s not like you even tease them into clicking the link, no, it’s just there, as if to say, “sorry guys, I accidentally pushed the button to make a cut, and I’m too lazy to take back this action.” For example, your “Unrequested Site Reviews” blog post has one measley sentence after the cut. I thought for sure it was going to be much longer given the length of text before the cut. Disappointed.

That said, I’m not going to read all your blog posts because I feel it’s way too much effort to have to click that link every time. Anyway, you’re pretty eloquent in your writing and you definitely seem to have a lot of good ideas. I’d only suggest that you expand upon your posts and write more article-like blogs. Your personal posts are about even with your ‘opinion’ type of posts and that’s really excellent! You don’t fall into that whole “went to the store with Sally and OMG Josh was there!” thing, which is always good to see on websites. You talk about things that your visitors can relate to (favorite movies, TV shows if they watch them, etc). Keep it up. Others might complain of an impersonal vibe, but I think that writing reviews and thoughts is more personal than writing about random people.

Overall my main complaints about the first impressions here: Sidebar is too busy, and draws too much attention. Blog is well done but underdeveloped and uses too many cuts. Expand on your ideas and you’ll probably feel a lot more accomplished (in addition to gaining more interest from your readers). Otherwise, your English/grammar is pretty great (with a few mistakes here and there, but we all make those), you’re interesting, and there is certainly potential here.

21 Girl

Er, still trying to figure out why this section is titled “21 Girl” and not just “Girl.” Was it “20 Girl” before you turned 21? It’s new, but uniqueness isn’t always necessarily good. That would be like saying mixing apples, strawberries, Oreos, and cardboard would make an excellent drink. It’s different! No one’s done it before! But would you drink it?

I want to stop here before I continue and tell you that your title bar says “girl | Dancing in the Rain.” First of all, the section is “21 Girl,” not “Girl.” Secondly, why isn’t it capitalized?

Your “about me” is a random assortment of facts that don’t really say very much about you. This is a problem on most personal websites. It’s revised every so often but it always says the same thing: Here is a bunch of random things about me which don’t really tell you anything about me at all. There’s no coherency - nothing connects with your last statement - so as far as I know you’re just a completely random person who spurts out random bits of information everywhere she goes. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s true of everyone on the Internet who doesn’t have a properly developed about page.

As far as this goes:

If you are creative in any way, I’m sure I’ll like you, but if you aren’t open-minded, you should go and visit other sites. Maybe Barbie.com .

I am not sure what creativity has to do with open-mindedness. I know a lot of people who are totally close-minded to TONS of things, but who can create such vibrant, excessively beautiful things that I would never have thought up. They’re creative with their lives and their ideas. Yet… Close-minded. So perhaps you’d want to explain a bit further on this point. Also, there’s a space after the .com in Barbie.com, and if you’re seriously suggesting that people leave your site because they’re not open-minded, you should probably link it.

Your “basics” are also lacking, making this a very uncomprehensive and practically useless page. Your sidebar says that your visitor can go here to “know you better,” but I still don’t feel like I know you at all. Your blog posts tell me more about you than this page does.

Romania

I love it when people have sections dedicated to their places of residence! Especially if it’s a place I’ve never been. Did you take the photographs? If so, they are lovely (if not, they are still lovely :p). You would probably benefit from a small section displaying some of your best photography - perhaps it is something you could tack on to your “about” page. Share your passions. (If you didn’t take those photos, your watermark should not be on them.)

You’re very open about your views on your home, as evidenced by the blog post you’ve linked here. It would be interesting to see more of your thoughts concerning your country, as it is clear from the comments you received that your visitors enjoyed it. You’re giving a glimpse into a country and life that most people would never otherwise get - take advantage of that, and use it to improve your website. My life? It’s pretty much just like everyone else’s. We all hate Bush. *shrug*

This page is overall a good idea, but I’d suggest expanding on it, perhaps by writing and linking more blog posts, photographs, or fun facts. Spacing would also greatly benefit this page. Right now, everything is squished. Perhaps try listing with HTML code; ie:

<ol>
<li>It’s a Southeastern European country. The neighbors are: Hungary, Ukraine, Republic of Moldova, Bulgaria and Serbia.</li>
<li>It’s cheap to make movies here, so this is why lots of Hollywood-stars started to come here and make high-quality films on low prices.</li>
<li>We have four seasons (summer, autumn, winter and spring).</li>
<li>We have the Black Sea, which has a dark color. We learned at school why it’s dark, but I don’t know how to translate. I can tell you that is not because people wash their legs in it :laugh:. We also have mountains, rivers, lakes, mounds and so on.</li>
<li>The video of Evanescence’s song “Bring Me to Life” was made here.</li>
<li>An actress from here, Monica Dean, appeared in Lost.</li>
<li>Do you know that movie with Borat in Kazakhstan? The movie was actually made in Romania.</li>
<li>Have you saw the horror-movie named Pulse with Kristen Bell, Ian Somerhalder and Christina Milian? Yeah, that was made in Romania too.</li>
<li>”Besame Sin Miedo,” the new song of RBD is made in Romania.</li>
<li>Guess from where comes Dracula? From Transilvania which is in… Romania.</li>
</ol>

As you can see, I’ve also taken this opportunity to point out a few mistakes (spacing errors, punctuation, etc). My list corrects them.

Links

This page looks a little plain but gets the point across. There are some spacing errors here as well (sticky spacebar?). Also, instead of writing “contact me at the email from the sidebar,” why not include a form, or for that matter just list the email again? Your visitor might, once again, get distracted by all the business in the sidebar and forget to contact you.

It’s weird that you have a link to Valentine’s Day ecards especially since it’s the middle of July.

All of your “listed” links are in lowercase - if you’re going to capitalize the first letter in the fanlistings links, you should also capitalize the first letter in your listed links (plus it looks better that way). There are also much better ways to format this page - an HTML list, for example (as seen above, except you could use UL for unordered list rather than the OL ordered lists - UL will give you the dots, whereas OL will give you numbers). I’m sure the fanlistings provide buttons from which to link, and though I don’t like seeing too many buttons, it would still be more visually appealing than this. I don’t even want to read through them to see what you’re a fan of, and what’s the point of joining them if you don’t want to show them off?

The Site

This is a very small section. Not much in the way of credits either, I’m noticing. You don’t even seem to have inspiration links anywhere!

There is no reason to have the crossed out “I don’t know where I heard this” immediately followed by the location at which you heard the name. Perhaps it makes sense in your head to edit that out and continue talking, but it’s pointless for your visitor to see it. Deleting this, of course, makes this section seven words shorter. Consider including sections about the current layout, past sites or previous incarnations of this website, whatever related information you will enjoy writing that would improve this section. Visit your blogroll if you don’t know what else to put - I’m sure people have shown tons of different ideas to enhance certain parts of their websites.

Paupergrrl.net is a broken link. You can still mention it (perhaps with a comment that it no longer exists) but there’s no need to link it.

Reviews

Always a good page for reviewers to read! I can get an idea here of what other people thought of your website and whether or not they’ve agreed with any of my points. (Maybe I’m just a sad loner on some of my opinions. :p) It’s great that you have a link to YourSite encouraging your visitors to sign up and submit a review. I am always happy to see people willing to put themselves out there and get reviews and comments on their websites. Makes it easier for me to review someone knowing that they’ll be gracious about it! There are so many people out there who will only accept a review as a “good one” if it’s 100% positive. It’s clear that you have a more realistic view on life.

I hope that if you post it my review doesn’t break your page with its length. My only suggestion is to create a separate page for each review as you gain more and link them all here. Perhaps you should consider making blog posts with the reviews and any comments or defenses you have about them, then linking those posts from here. Reviewers usually appreciate response posts like this (I do, anyway) because there is always a lot to learn about a person’s motivations with his/her website. In any case, as you get more reviews, this page is going to fill up. You’ll need to find a better way to display them.

Past Layouts (2)

Not one, but two past layouts pages? And for some reason the second one comes first… I can see why you’ve divided it; there are a lot of images on this page and some description on each. Might I suggest that instead of dividing it as such, you create one page called “Past Layouts” (no 1 or 2!) and from this single page, direct your traffic to two different pages. Your website is starting to look like a portfolio. That’s fine, but I didn’t get the impression that it was going to be one. (I couldn’t tell you what my impression was, though.)

Version 6 is probably my favorite on this page, but I prefer simple layouts without a lot of stuff going on (as I’m sure you’ve gathered already!). Your layouts generally improve from one to the next, which is good, though I see you went from a straight-forward, uncluttered sidebar straight into this one you have now. It’s certainly better than your first attempts, but a downgrade from the clean layouts you had before it.

Past Layouts (1)

I almost put “Past Layouts (2)” again. See? It’s out of order. Should be the other way around. I even clicked on “Past Layouts (2)” again thinking, obviously, the second one comes after the first one, and since I’ve already reviewed one I must be on #2.

You have an awesome disclaimer on this page. I especially like this part:

These layouts are examples of what you shouldn’t do. Sometimes you can learn from others mistakes. This time you can learn from my mistakes. Blending is fun, but it’s better if you don’t do it with celebrity pictures, or pictures that aren’t made by you.

It’s even double emphasized for the full effect! I love that you are completely honest with yourself about your past designs. I mean, mine weren’t all that great either, but I still sometimes lie to myself and say they weren’t that bad. You, on the other hand, are putting yours on display as an example of what not to do. Others (myself included) could learn from this kind of dedication.

As per your Version 4 comment - don’t worry, it wasn’t just the “blenders” who thought the left-aligned layout with tiny font was cool. I mean, I was usually all about Iframes anyway (see how silly I was?) but I wasn’t much of a blender. I visited those sites and thought, “oh man, I wish I could do that.”

In any case, it would be neat to see some of your opinions on trends as they come and go. Have you made any blog posts related to that sort of thing? If so, link them on this page! Even if you’re not commenting on your own layouts, at least you’re giving opinions on silly trends that you may have once followed. It’s more fruitful to hear from someone who has experience, rather than from someone who has always been perfect - people are more likely to listen to the former.

Plugboard

Pretty simple page here, no surprises. You say that broken images will be removed, but how often do you remove them? Lots of holes here.

404 Page

Thankfully I wasn’t sent here very much. Actually, I was only sent here once, which is very good! It means you’ve checked through your site for errors. You reference a lot of your blog posts in other posts and pages, and I would have been disappointed to see a bunch of broken links. It only seems to be your poll archive which is inactive.

First of all, your layout changes with your footer navigation now in your sidebar, which leads me to believe you have a coding error somewhere. Just pointing it out!

Secondly, there isn’t a lot going on here. There aren’t any suggestions - you can link related pages, for example, in case someone was looking for something else (Related Posts Plugin for WP). There is no way to get in touch with you to let you know about the error - even your sidebar disappears (which I’m inclined to think is a good thing), but that means the email address isn’t readily available. I’d suggest a form anyway. It requires the least effort from your visitor who may not want to go hunting for a way to tell you that a page doesn’t work.

Last - well, it’s just very plain. I don’t suggest by any means that you busy it up and clutter it with unnecessary information. But imagine if someone landed on a 404 by clicking a link to get to your website; for example, sometimes people will link a miscellaneous blog post erroneously, so it gets their visitors to your site but they’re smack dab in the middle of a 404 page. Did you take this into account? Who’s going to want to continue through to try to find what they’re looking for when they’re greeted with a message that basically says, “you did it wrong, now go away.” Just something to think about.

Comprehensive Reflection

Upon first visiting your site, I was distracted by the sidebar. I think I’ve probably mentioned this enough, but hopefully it’s imprinted on your brain and you’ll consider doing something about it. While I was going through your site, however, the sidebar wasn’t so much of a distraction, once I’d already gone through and seen all the things it had to offer (surprisingly, nothing much - there’s a lot going on, but nothing that held my interest).

A big thing I noticed while browsing is that your site doesn’t seem to have any kind of focus. At all. No, really, what is the point of your site? Is it the blog with its short posts? Is it to talk about yourself, but only a tiny bit? Is it to display your past layouts? I’m starting to think that last one is it. There are two pages dedicated to your past layouts, more content there than anywhere else. Did you enjoy making those pages? Perhaps you should consider making your website into a personal/portfolio site. You could keep the blog, of course, but the main focus would be your creative endeavors - design, photography, etc. At least then it would feel like your site had a purpose. Right now, it just seems like a random assortment of things you wanted to put on the Internet. (Kind of like your about page…)

Nothing wrong with that, of course, but remember in school when your research papers had to have theses, and each paragraph had to have a main idea? What is your website’s thesis, and what is the main idea of each page?

I’d do a once-over (perhaps a twice-over) for spacing and simple grammatical errors. You don’t have anything that blatantly stands out as “wrong.” Your English is very good, but there are still some plurals where there should be singulars and other little mistakes like that. Spacing is the biggest issue, though. Sometimes you need more paragraph breaks.

Overall, however, a very good site with (as I’ve said) a lot of potential. I don’t know how long you’ve had this site as it didn’t note that anywhere in the domain’s about page, but it seems like you haven’t been doing this for too long. If you’ve been blogging and creating websites for 10 years, take this impression into account. It says a lot about your website’s development. If you’re truly new at it, then the comment shouldn’t be taken to heart so readily. It’s a good website, just needs some tweaking here and there.

Thanks for the patience, a few waiting reviews will be posted soon.

I’ve also updated the queue. If your site was down or “couldn’t be found,” I deleted it; if you’re currently using a template for your layout, I switched you to a content-only review, and if you submitted for re-review and don’t have a link back here, I deleted you all together (as per the rules). If you notice any problems with the pending page, please let me know.

I also wanted to tell everyone who cares that I have a lot of fun reviewing sites - good and bad ones. Never fear, I won’t be one of those people who close the review site because of one negative response to one of my reviews, or because I just “didn’t feel like it” anymore. Though my posts are far between, no one in the queue will be left unreviewed.

I may not be the most excellent web designer in the world, and I may not always be right, but I have a pretty good idea for aesthetics and language, and that’s what I base my reviews on. No review will be half-assed and all will be completed in time.

You may now return to whatever you were doing before you decided to click the link that led you to this website!

Content

Looks like there’s a lot to get into here! Your blog posts are long and at first glance they don’t seem to be about random uninteresting tid bits. I’m not going to read all your currently displayed blogs, but I’ve sort of skimmed them and I can see that if I wanted to take the deeper time to read them I’d probably learn a lot about you in a short amount of time. You write very well with acceptable spelling and grammar (always a plus) and your posts are detailed with your thoughts and ideas.

There is a lot of information in your sidebar and footer. I like the ability to change the font size. I am okay with asides (or Twitters, or whatever you want to call them) and you’re not showing too many, but I would put the blurb about you before the asides. You should put sidebar content in order of importance - if possible, I’d even put the about snippet first or right after the font size changer.

It’s always interesting to me the about details people choose to put in their sidebars. Some people just list of some interests, some people define themselves with descriptive words. You’ve done a bit of both, though I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about the “random words” thing being chosen over an actual paragraph that sums up some basic facts. Some errors - You aren’t “17th” years of age - you’re either “in your 17th year” or “17 years of age.” Your “author” link leads to your blog, the page I’m on, and I’m not sure why.

Your recent posts list does not need to be in the sidebar and the footer. Pick one and stick to it. Your sidebar has too much information, so I’d go with the footer if it’s absolutely necessary. I’d also either nix tags or categories. You don’t need both. (I may be wrong on this. I personally prefer one or the other, though I know a lot of people like to have both. Just stating my opinion, however.) The archives by month also become unnecessary. A simple link to an archives page displaying the available months would suffice.

The subscribe header says “Subscribe2;” is that intentional?

As for the footer, you should open “about_text.txt” file in the theme folder to edit the footer text. The instructions are right there on the footer for everyone to see that you haven’t done that yet.

I also assume that the “Recently Reviewed” content will appear sometime in the future. I saw that you had opened a review website but have not yet performed any reviews.

Zwinkyness

You’re funny! This is surprising since I didn’t really see this sillyness in your blog entries. Perhaps it just wasn’t present in the entries currently on the index, but I hope to see more of it throughout the site. You have a few spelling errors such as “recommand” (you’re commanding me again?) under the “design” heading but instead of going through each one and pointing them out I’ll just recommend a quick spellcheck. It’s clear that your spelling errors are due to typo and lack of proofreading, rather than the inability to spell. :)

I love your “Zwinky Dictionary!” It’s very cute. Just a few things, though -

“I’m going to Zwinky all night long.
This means either: I am going to have sex all night long, I am going to drink (alcohol) all night long or I am going to dance all night long.

First off, this and the one above it are both missing end quotes. Secondly, when using “either” you’re expected to be comparing two things, not three. Use “any” for three, for example:

“I’m going to Zwinky all night long.”
This means any of the following: I am going to have sex all night long; I am going to drink (alcohol) all night long; or I am going to dance all night long.

Your “reviewed by” paragraphs has an error:

Although I uploaded my website to some review website, no review has actually been finished yet.

Either you’re saying you submitted your website to “some review website,” as if to say the name of the one website to which you submitted is not important enough to mention, or you’re saying you submitted your website to some review websites and forgot the S. I’d also recommend linking the words “contact me” to either a contact page or an email address.

I would just like to say that it’s not until I clicked “The Queen” that I realized that there is subnavigation in your sections. It needs to be in a more prominent position, preferably on a shorter sidebar and you may even want to mention on the main page that there is also subnavigation on the right. Otherwise, it’s completely overlooked.

Terms of Service. Don’t assume that everyone has a “red X” in the upper righthand corner of their screen. It may seem trivial to point this out, but it seems silly to have a terms of service if you’re not going to take the effort to be correct with it. Also it seems a bit rash to threaten to ban someone for not following your terms of service - how many people have you really banned? How many people have “broken” your rules for your website? And if it’s that important to include a list of guidelines for “using” the site, why isn’t this linked directly from the first page? Some spelling errors I won’t dive into because, again, I think it’s due more to typoing than misspelling. Just two things to point out:

6. Please restrain from posting links in your comments directing to +18 sites, graphic violence or other sites that may seem inappropriate for a public lets say 13 and up.

should look more similar to:

6. Please restrain from posting links in your comments that direct to 18+ sites, graphic violence, or other sites that may seem inappropriate for ages 13 and up.

Also,

7. This page can be updated whenever I feel like, so be sure to check it every once in a while, suppose anything has been changed. Thank you very much.

would make more sense as:

7. The Terms of Service may be updated whenever I feel like changing it, so be sure to check it every once in a while supposing anything has been changed. Thank you very much.

Your disclaimer is necessary to read, not necessarily to read. You’re submitting your email address (presumably), not your emailadress.

Even though all of your other pages have a nice blurb about the page, your “credits and resources” page does not - makes it look comparatively empty. I’d put something about it there. I know you have some plugins installed but I can’t tell what they are from this page, neither can I tell what anything is on this page. It looks less like a credits/resources list and more like a list of links. It wouldn’t make sense to have two pages with links, so I’m thinking it’s just not formatted in a way that would immediately give away the fact that these people aren’t necessarily friends. You have the right idea going with “Sarah (alittlelessordinary.com)” and “Dive Into Accessibility.” I’d probably suggest making the link titles more like “Dive Into Accessibility (Article)” and “Alittlelessordinary.com (X Plugin).”

Archives

See here, you have your archives page, which renders your sidebar monthly archives links unnecessary.

The Queen

Ah, so I see on this page you do have a list of links in the main content and not just in the sidebar! I’d suggest making this “shortcuts” thing a standard across your website. However, there are some things on your “shortcuts” list that aren’t on your sidebar. You probably want those to have the same links.

I can see by reading this page that you’re very proud of your home (and by the way, I really love the bit about Belgium), you’re funny, you strive to be well-spoken with proper sentence structure (always a plus!), and you really like fantasy books. I hope that’s the impression you were trying to give off because it’s what I’ve gathered!

Browsing further, I wanted to visit the links in the shortcuts that aren’t on the sidebar and I see now why they aren’t on the sidebar - they’re parented by your “about-me” slug, but they aren’t pages that actually exist. Either create them or get rid of the links!

Your “in depth” information just seems to be your results from a bunch of profile/personality pages. That’s fine, but you may want to mention it in a blurb above the quicklinks, because I expected to see something you wrote (and I was a bit impressed that you’d written so much) only to find out I was reading generic statements based on your personality types. Some people don’t like to read those.

Your internet history says that the year 2000 was seven years ago. If you’re not going to update it with every coming year, you may want to reword it. I love that you link your old sites and the website that got you into web design! A lot of people are extremely ashamed of what they’ve done in the past, and of those they’ve admired in the past, and it’s nice to see someone fully willing to admit their building blocks for a change. I do think it’s funny that most of your old sites are on hiatus, though. ;)

I’d just like to say that some reviewers suggest you write more on your “favorites” lists, ie, a sentence or two explaining why you like something, what got you into it, why it’s important that you’re mentioning it, etc etc. I’d just like to say that I like the short, sweet, simple lists displaying what someone likes and letting that be the end of it. Your “personal favorite” page is perfect just the way it is.

The Sims II

The only Sim game I’ve ever played was Sim City 2000 so I can’t give a lot of comment in this area except to say that it looks very empty and you could probably add more. From what I know about Sim players, it’s addictive. Suggestion: Other players may want to see profiles or life stories on your Sims? Your kitchens article is very in depth and it seems helpful. More of those would probably be awesome for your visitors who find this stuff interesting. Also, at the bottom of your Primrose page, it says to “click here” to download the house, but there’s no link.

Sitemap

Simple and to the point, although like with a few of your other pages, it looks empty without a little summary blurb at the top.

Subscribe

No need to have this on the sidebar if you’re going to have a navigation link to it. Look! Another way to reduce the size of your extremely long sidebar. I like the page better because it explains why someone would want to subscribe. As someone who doesn’t enjoy subscribing to things, I find this page to be very convincing… Although once again I see the word “emailadress,” which isn’t actually a word, and it makes me wonder how many other times this has shown up on your website that I’ve overlooked.

404 Page

I submitted an error report form for most of the errors I found (there was one that I closed before I realized I could do that :p) so hopefully you fixed those before this review was posted. You have a lot of options for errors though I’m not sure why the last 10 blog posts are available, especially since the last 5 blog posts are in your footer already. It just seems like a feature that you could implement so you did just for the heck of it. Also, what happened to your sidebar?

Also, in reference to your 404, I’ve just added a new part to all my reviews - 404 pages. It’s a good and a bad thing - good, because you are officially my first 404 page review, bad because the only reason I’ve reviewed it is because I was sent to it by a broken link.

Comprehensive Reflection

Okay! Phew! This is by far my longest content-only review (albeit, it is my only content-only review). You have a TON of content, literally. If I were to put your content into a basket, it would probably overflow and possibly break the basket, because a ton (in weight) is probably too heavy for something made of wheat.

May have been exaggerating there just a bit.

But really, there’s a lot to go through here and even though the Sims sutff is your only real “visitor” content, there’s still a lot to look through as far as site stuff and you stuff goes. By the way, I’m a bit confused now about your Terms of Service. It seems to exist only for your free layouts and giveaways… but where are they? If they’re no longer there, there is no longer a reason for the TOS page.

The only thing that concerns me with your content is that there seems to be a lot more about your website than about you. One could argue that the blog provides enough day-to-day information so that the about content doesn’t need to be so full, but your blog isn’t anywhere near day-to-day. This website strikes me as one that focuses a lot on, well, itself, and less on you.

Overall, a very well thought-out website. I can tell you’ve put a lot of effort into it, but it could definitely survive a spellcheck.

Design

Not entirely sure how I feel about this layout. Something is off - might be the dissymmetry of the header image, the color use, or perhaps it’s that the “About Me” link sticks out all the way to the left while the “Domain” link ends very close to the right side of the layout. Maybe it’s all of it.

The layout isn’t bad - it’s not very complicated, more or less easy on the eyes, and it looks perfect in both IE and Firefox. I don’t like what you’ve done with the header/footer images. I’m not sure I get the point of the “eaten out” look - that’s what it looks like to me. It looks like tiny mouths have taken chunks out of your layout. If it fit the theme (postage?) I’d understand a little better. Postage stamps have the riveted edges, but those bumpy lines are around the entire stamp, not just the upper left and lower right corners. It just seems like you threw them in there to avoid having a boxy layout.

Of course, I am one to think of layouts as “concepts” and if every element of the layout doesn’t fit into the idea, then there’s no point of having it there. It’s perfectly fine if you disagree.

As for the colors, there’s nothing entirely wrong with them, but the layout seems too dark. The top navigation is barely noticeable at first glance, and it seems that if you added some spruce of a lighter color -white, for example, or anything other than another shade of purple or grey - that would be a wonderful final touch to the layout overall.

Your postage images are interesting nonetheless. I hope that on your domain page you’ve described the text: “It takes some old to make you young.” That sounds very poetic and I imagine it has an interesting meaning behind it. Though it seems you’ve just thrown some brushes from inobscuro.com (nice crediting, by the way!) onto blocks just for the sake of having images on your layout, it was well done and hopefully not entirely pointless!

I’m not sure if you meant for the navigation links to align weirdly but they do. With my vision on your dark layout it’s hard to tell if they’re actually centered while the layout isn’t, or if the layout is centered while those are askew. Either way, it doesn’t look good. I’d suggest keeping the words within the confines of the layout’s width or at least make it so they don’t pop out so unevenly. If the “n” in “Domain” is out five pixels from the edge of the layout, then the “A” in “About Me” should also be.

I’d also suggest including a “Home” link above with the others so that your visitors can go back to the blog without having to manually erase whatever page they’re on in their browser’s address bar.

It would also be very helpful if your links were a different color. Right now you just have them black and bolded, which means that if you bold any text for emphasis, your visitor may wonder why it’s not a link. I’d suggest changing the color and adding an underline or other style to set it apart.

Content

It looks like you’ve just put this layout up. When I initially sat down to do your review, the site didn’t work, and I suppose this is because you were changing layouts? In any case, I decided to wait to start again at a later date, so I’m lucky I caught you when I did. :)

Your blog post, however, is very short. I’m not going to go back through all your posts but if they’re all as short as this one, you might consider displaying more than one entry at a time. It’ll just give the layout a more “fuller” look and, in my opinion, be much more intriguing to the first-time visitor.

There isn’t a lot of information about you on the index page, which I suppose is okay, but as someone who regularly blog-hops, I find I’m more likely to stay on a website and browse if I learn a bit about the owner on first glance. I could read everyone’s about pages if I wanted to, but I frankly don’t want to unless they’re something pushing me in that direction. I’m willing to bet a lot of other first-time visitors turn away when personal websites don’t have anything, well, personal on the index page. Just a suggestion!

About Me

This page is relatively short but it’s to the point. If your blog was more involved, I’d say that this was fine, but so far this seems less of a personal website and more of a place for you to put down sporadic updates.

You have some unnecessary spaces before and after parentheses. For example,

DOB: 18th October ( makes me a Libra)
Ethnicity: South East Asian ( some people mistaken me with Jewish or Spanish )

should instead be:

DOB: 18th October (makes me a Libra)
Ethnicity: South East Asian (some people mistaken me with Jewish or Spanish)

If you’re going to destroy the language and put spaces before and after the parentheses, fine, but keep it consistent if you do.

I can’t tell yet if English is your first language, but I’m guessing it’s not. I won’t be too hard on your grammatical & spelling errors - I’ll just tell you there’s more than a few. We’re all learning, though. :) For example, the first line should read something similar to:

Let’s say you see someone walking down the street wearing a striped shirt and jeans and never having an interaction with the person next to them. It might be me. I’m quite quiet, but not shy. I’m very outgoing, even though I can’t be loud.

Emphasis added to show what was changed. I also deleted some unnecessary commas. It looks like you just forget to put in some of the verbs (as I said, we’re all learning something, and I’m sure no one expects your English to be perfect). It does, however, make it very difficult to read. I had to read your about page a few times just to understand it all.

Your about information is creatively presented. It does seem to just be a random assortment of facts about you. Of course, so are all about pages. We pick and choose what parts of our lives we want to share with the world. However, none of your points seem to connect in any way, and so a few of your paragraphs should instead be one-liners. Either make a bulleted list of these items about you, or string them together, connect them, make real full paragraphs about you.

I see that we learn at the very bottom of the page that you write English, but you don’t have as much confidence in your ability with it as you do with other languages. I hope that you’ll improve, though, because from reading your visitor content I can see that you’d be a pretty good writer if you got the grammar rules down.

Visitor

Just from a glance, there’s more visitor content than there is personal content, so I wonder if the reason you have a website is to get out your writing. That’s fine, of course, but I’d change the “Visitor” header into “Writing.” Nowadays when people see the word “Visitor,” they expect pixels and free layouts, not articles and poems.

Your article on eCliques was sort of interesting. Though I’m well aware of the eCliques around, I don’t think I’ve ever visited a site that laid them out. There are a ton more, of course, but you know that. To puff up this article a bit and make it more fun for the reader, I suggest laying out more examples for each type and outlining the good and bad points of being a part of each group. Though the “Lames” are apparently “killers,” there has to be something adventageous to using a free service and having absolutely no skills. There are pluses and minuses to everything.

The 5 Things article has a clever title though poorly executed. I’d suggest “5 Things that Make Your Site Real Shite.” Taking out that “a” doesn’t harm the idea, but it makes it readable. I just want to say that I love your comment about “l33t speak” and Russian war codes. It certainly made me chuckle. I hope there’s more jest throughout the rest of your website as well. However lovely I find this article, it’s not unique. Add some points that you believe in, personally. Not that I think you wouldn’t put this on your site if you didn’t believe in it, but these are the same points that I see on every website. There has to be something that you don’t like about websites which isn’t mentioned on every other site in the world.

Now, as for your “Fixed or Fluid?” article… the large purple boxes take much away from your text. They’re distracting. It’s fine to have those on the content index pages but to include them also on the articles themselves? Not a good idea. For that matter, because they’re present on this page and not on the other article pages, your site doesn’t match. You should always go for consistency when creating content. The other articles were perfectly readable and fine without the giant purple boxes. Consider bolding the headers and leaving it at that.

Your poetry is lovely and my adoration of mythology puts “Aurora” as my favorite one. I don’t go in for poetry that much so I won’t critique any of yours, but you’re very talented with imagery, description and flow.

Contact Me

I suggest this for everyone: Please include an email address as well as the form. Sometimes forms don’t go through because of any number of errors. If you really want your visitors to be able to contact you, just add an email address below the form, and tell your visitors where the form will take them if it works. That way they’ll know whether or not they should send an email.

Domain

Your website history is concise but well-written. It’s almost like you’ve told a story. I would recommend linking Rachael, your host where she’s mentioned. You link her on the credits page, but why not the domain page also? It’s a nice courtesy. Hosts love that sort of thing. :) I’d also be really curious to see why it’s called “Backstaged,” and as I said at the beginning of this review: what inspired the snippet in your header image?

Comprehensive Reflection

Your design is simple but could use improvement. I don’t recommend a really complicated layout; I like the straight-forwardness of your layout, but I don’t understand some of it, as outlined above. Your content is organized but there isn’t very much of it. Every page loads quickly, your site is more or less visually appealing, and you don’t promise more than you offer.

However, I’d consider putting up more content and going through your website for an extensive grammar and spelling correction search. Even if you recruit a friend to do it for you, it would improve your site just that much more! English-speaking visitors will be very thankful. Sometimes the language hurt my brain while I was reading. With that in mind, though, don’t lose your voice! You’re clever and funny and I’d hate to see that disappear with a few verbs and noun endings.

Design

Your design is very clean, simple, and with colors that go well together. I’m not sure I would have picked a pink/green combination, but to each his own. Except for the error at the bottom of the page, your website looks fine in both IE and Firefox.

The error is as follows:

Warning: main() [function.main]: php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: Name or service not known in /home/finalst/public_html/wp-content/themes/watermelon/about_text.txt on line 4

Your image, however, doesn’t look like it’s of the best quality; you’ve saved it as .gif. I’d suggest next time going with .png or .jpg if you must. As it is right now, the header image looks grainy and a bit ragged.

As far as loading time goes - your site takes more than a few seconds’ time to load each page. I’m not sure if this is related to the error above or if you just have too much going on, but I’d look into that. It seems you want to have this website open as a community resource, and one important thing to keeping your visitors happy is to allow faster loading times. If that means getting rid of the bulky header image or unnecessary scripts, then it might be a worthy sacrifice for the happiness of your visitors. Personally, because the pages take so long to load, I wouldn’t stick around if I wasn’t here to review.

There isn’t a lot else to comment on as your layout is simple and straight-forward. It’s a little boring; you see the same layout so often these days. There don’t seem to be any creative elements that add a unique touch to this website. However, if the two-column same-old, same-old layout design works for what you have to display, then I guess you should stick to it. I’d try going for something a little different next time, though.

Content

Because your blog entries are so short, I’d suggest displaying more than your three most recent ones. It’ll add a bit more to the first page everyone sees, and if anyone is a first-time visitor they may want to read a few more entries without having to get too involved in the site.

Your updates are far apart and don’t ever seem to have any kind of “theme” to them… Yes, there are categories, but it seems you’re just coming on to say one thing - anyone who is interested in your chocolate covered strawberries would probably want to see more personal posts, and it seems like all of your site-category posts are just small bits of content here and there that you’ve updated. Why not try to think of something more substantial - tutorials, for example, or your thoughts on certain issues?

In other words, if you’re going to have a blog on this website, have a reason for it.

As for your sidebar, the welcome snippet isn’t long enough to justify the “More?” link. In any case, it’s a bit annoying to click on that link and find that it just expands the welcome bar by four lines. When I click “More?” I expect to find a whole page with more information about the webmaster or website. Plus the fact that the “More?” link stays there after I’ve clicked it keeps it out of place. Either replace it with “Less?” or get rid of this feature all together.

Also, “…but counts with some ocassional contributions from Karen” makes no sense. It “counts” with occassional contributions? Maybe you meant to say that it “includes some occassional contributions from Karen.”

About

If you can have subpage navigation, then you can take the welcome message out. It’s only necessary to be visible on the first page. I’d say the same, even, for the categories, but to each his own.

In your about descriptions you use the word “we” a lot, yet at the bottom there appears to only be one “Web miss.” The sidebar said that Karen sometimes contributes, but I wouldn’t think she’d deserve to be part of “we” if she doesn’t deserve an about snippet.

You’re a bit semi-colon happy, and you’re using it wrong. A semi-colon (;) is used to join two sentences. As “final stop and first aid,” “helping other people,” “beginners or experienced,” etc., are not sentences, they should not be preceeded by a semi-colon. You were probably looking for a colon (:) or even just a comma (,).

You may want to link “Digital Guilt” since it hosts your site. There are several things wrong with the the last sentence of that paragraph. It’s choppy and doesn’t read clearly and you’ve placed the link in an awkward position. I would suggest the following:

The only other active site hosted on this account is ZombiesAttack!Designs, a.k.a. ZA!D.

Your “Web miss” paragraph is missing some commas which I’ll let you find… And I’m just curious - what makes music and the beach “basic” but arts and crafts not?

I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised when I found link buttons on the support page and not donation buttons! However, I’d suggest getting rid of the textbox codes and instead using the <code></code> tags. Not only will your visitors be able to see the whole code in front of them, but it’ll also look much nicer on your page.

On your subscribe page, you should include a little text that notes what, exactly, people are subscribing to. Are they getting emails verbatim to the blog updates? Are you going to send out updates to the website only? Why should anyone give you an email address?

Your plugins page has a lot of spelling typos (”pulgin,” “teh”). I won’t go through all of them, but be aware that a second look-through on this page might be helpful.

It’s excellent that you have a comprehensive credits page; however, I’d suggest linking the full names of each resource, instead of an asterisk. It’s as if you don’t want your visitors to go… But you do, don’t you?

Content

I honestly won’t be able to go through all of your content pages because as I said before, the loading time is horrendous. However, I’ll go through a few of each section provided and review the things I do visit.

First of all, I don’t see why you have to have such a huge graphic that says “Content Menu (subpages) is on the sidebar.” It’s on every page except the Tutorials. Your visitor may need a reminder to look to the right, but they don’t need a big graphical one. Some text would be just as fine.

You have some interesting resources which I haven’t stumbled across on other websites. However, for pages like “Test Your Design Knowledge,” I’d suggest a little more text. Credit w3schools for all the quizzes. Show what your score was. Explain a little bit about each test before your visitor clicks on them. Provide something other than just a list of links.

Your tutorials are many and as I’ve already said I won’t visit them all; however, I’ll let you know what I think of the Wordpress ones, and you can judge your others based on this.

First of all, there are plenty of spelling typos and grammatical errors - some which I’ve mentioned before (punctuation use), but others as well. If you aren’t confident in your own English to keep your pages grammatically correct, have a friend go through them before you launch your websites. It looks sloppy with all those errors!

Secondly, it’s a bad idea to use the lightbox for your images. It’s something that personally annoys me, but even putting that aside, it’s not helpful to browsing the tutorials. You could have just resized the images so the width matched your content box. Your visitor has eyes, presumably, and doesn’t need a full-size image to function properly. Most eyes can see similarities between two images that are not the same size. Not to mention the awkwardly shaped images do come up looking like this:

I don’t have to tell you how unattractive that looks.

Your tutorials seem helpful for absolute beginners, but do you plan on having any other tutorials? You have a lot of very basic things to say… I know that not everyone knows how to delete the “Hello World” post, so your tutorials would definitely be helpful for those people, but you seem relatively advanced at Wordpress - why not make a tutorial on modifying or creating Wordpress themes? If you really want this to be the “final stop” or a comprehensive resource for designers and websites, then you’ll have to cater to all levels, not just the starters. The pagination tutorial is a start - even non-beginners don’t always get that - but if I were a regular visitor to your website, I’d want to see more.

I won’t be able to visit all of your graphics pages either but I’ll try to get more than just one in… Really, the loading time is ridiculous, and you should look into that!

I like your cute little “new!” badges although I’m not sure why anyone would use something so huge on their website. Consider making smaller images to match; in my experience, people like to have the “new!” icon next to new content, and these are just too large for that!

Your 404 error banners are… interesting, but again, I don’t see why anyone would use them. If someone is creating a 404 page, chances are they can also stick some fancy text that says “404 error, page not found” on their website. You’re not offering anything that someone can’t do; perhaps you should make some that are a lot less basic - more brushes, an edited image, a witty phrase, etc.

The download buttons are also colorful and cute! I have no complaints or suggestions (except maybe to make smaller ones) because you have a variety of options available.

And a final word on your graphics - if you ever want to be taken seriously as a graphics resource center, don’t have glitter-graphics! I’ll admit that some of yours aren’t entirely distracting (the first three, anyway), but just remember that glitter-graphics are usually frowned upon.

I want to make a quick comment on your free layouts. They look pretty ordinary. That’s not a test to your coding skills - I didn’t download and view the coding or anything - but they look generic and as though you put as little effort into them as possible. If the numbers in parentheses indicate how many times each layout has been downloaded, then obviously your visitors disagree, but my suggestion is that when you offer free layouts, put a lot of yourself into them. Don’t offer anything that you wouldn’t use on your website. It shows that you care and are more willing to put in the effort for your visitors. It may just be because they were made a while ago, but as evidenced by your current theme & header, I know you can do a lot better than what you’re offering!

Your other downloads are very colorful but I don’t generally use patterns or gradients so I wouldn’t find them useful. I can’t determine whether they’re “good ones” or not, but I’m sure you put a lot of work into gathering them.

As for your “Free Stuff” content: I think that this whole section would go better under your resources content. Just like with that, all I see are lists of external links. Yes, it’s all free, but it’s also very resourceful! I’d move the hosts and software sections to resources, and change the “Free Stuff” section to just display your free services.

On the services page, you again use “we” a few times where it is questionable. Installations only by one person, but “we” might ask for other things? Interesting.

Contact

Just as a suggestion - I’d include an email address separate from the form. Sometimes forms don’t go through due to server errors. If you make a note of your email address “just in case” the form doesn’t work, your visitors will be able to get in touch with you no matter what.

Comprehensive Reflection

Your design is simple, straight-forward, and easy to follow. Your site is also very organized for how much content you have, and I commend you on that - some people can’t seem to get organization together and end up having a lot of out-of-place or confusing links. Final Stop is clearly a website you’ve put a lot of time and effort into organizing, and it shows.

However, your loading time is significantly slow. I couldn’t even go through the whole website (and I kind of wanted to!), because my patience was growing thin. I can’t imagine that any of your visitors appreciate it, especially since they are probably going to your website for tips on how to improve theirs.

If your intention was to create a resource site for web designers and graphics creators, you succeeded on the beginner’s level. From what I could tell of the tutorials I visited and skimmed through, you offer the very basics. There’s nothing wrong with that, and of course you should only give tutorials on what you know well, but once your visitors master those levels of introduction, they’re going to come back for more. Your tutorials are easy to follow, so your visitors will probably stay loyal, but if you don’t offer higher-level help, they’re eventually going to have to go elsewhere. Just something to keep in mind!

It is clear that you’ve put a lot of effort into this website. On your next redesign, I’d suggest higher quality graphic images, something a little more unique for your design, and a full-site spelling and grammar check. Otherwise, it’s lovely just the way it is, and jam-packed full of interesting resources.

Design

I was going to try to put off this review until you got your new self set up but since you’re next in line I had to go ahead and do it now. I’d hate to give you all kinds of comments on a layout that you’re about to get rid of anyway, but here goes anyway!

I like what you’ve done here, except for just two things: There’s a lot of space to the right and I don’t understand the bubbly thing going on behind the content. It would be cool if you had some kind of theme going and I personally like to add a little flair here and there, but it draws attention and I don’t quite “get” it. As for the space to the right, either the text could go all the way to the end (padding included, of course) - but that might look sloppier; the layout could be centered - but that might ruin your left sidebar idea (and by the way, I like your sidebar, it’s straight-forward and minimal and fits well with the coloring)… I honestly don’t have any suggestions as far as that big space on the right goes, but I’m sure you have some things in mind by now based on your recent review.

Your site loaded very quickly which, of course, is always lovely, and the colors were well chosen to produce a visually appealing layout. I am a fan of the more “bland” colors - dark blues, purples, etc, so you’ll find a lot of praise from my end if you keep your layout from being too colorful; though of course, as long as colors are chosen well, anything can be pulled off successfully.

Your copyright info under your thumbnails on the portfolio pages is just a little too squished up onto the thumbnails. Try a paragraph break - or better yet, to follow suite with the rest of your website, introduce the info with another header.

There aren’t a lot of problems to speak of so I’ll get on with the content.

Content

Your blog is interesting but the updates are sporadic. I don’t mean that they’re “few and far between,” I mean that you seem to only use the blog when you’ve realized that you haven’t said anything about yourself in a while and should probably mention school life or home life or your thoughts of the day. There’s nothing wrong with this, absolutely nothing, unless of course you want regular visitors who continually enjoy your posts.

You don’t have to update every day for that, you merely have to have posts that connect in some way - your blog, if you choose to use it in this manner, should be the story of your life or at least one aspect of your life. Coming back to say “hello, I’m updating again about something random and unrelated to all of my other updates” is a respectable approach, but as a reviewer I feel inclined to tell you that I’m yearning for more debatable posts and discussion questions because you bring up interesting topics.

Portfolio

Beside the spacing issue (mentioned above under design) these pages look decent. I am not at all a fan of the lightbox effect (or whatever it’s called) and it tends to eat up a lot of time to load but it all depends on preference. Your illustration is very impressive and makes me want to break out some markers and color inside the lines (because this is the most impressive I get when it comes to drawing). I’d like to mention before I forget that the thumbnail on the “Portfolio” page says “Illustration,” whereas the sidebar links to “Drawings.” No need to confuse your visitor!

As far as your flash section goes, I think the point of flash is the interactivity it provides. By giving only screenshots, you defeat the purpose. I’d suggest uploading your flash designs into folders and actually linking to them; no one is going to be impressed by your “flash layout” if they can’t do anything with it. As it stands, all your flash items look like your illustrations.

Again the Portfolio page says “3D Images” while the sidebar says “3D Art” - “Web Design” and “Web Layouts” - “Misc.” and “Miscellaneous.” Consistancy can go a long way, I promise.

Your portfolio is impressive; I would especially like to see more photography. It’s comprehensive and clear that you’ve put a lot of work into it. I do wonder often if people ever add anything to their portfolios once they’re established on the website… Because it’s so much easier to keep things the way they are than to continually add and change elements. Not a comment on your site, of course, but just something that I wonder about.

About Me

It’s clear by the size of this page and the fact that it’s second in the navigation that it’s not the most important part of your site. Some people will tell you that it’s not necessary to have the subsection links in the sidebar as well as on the index page of the section, but I certainly didn’t notice that there were subsections on my first overview of the website. In any case, if you’re going to have the subsections highlighted on the Portfolio page, you should keep it as consistent as possible across the website. Looking ahead, I see that subsections are highlighted again on the Goodies page but again not on the Links page. By putting your subsections in easily viewable thumbnails right off the bat, you’ve trained your visitor to look for them on all the other pages. Thus, content may be missed simply because the visitor doesn’t know to look at the sidebar first.

You have a few comma errors on your opening about page and your summary paragraph sort of gives the feeling that you put a load of facts of yourself in a hat. You then pulled out two or three of those facts and put them on your website. They’re related because they’re about you, but no one can figure out why they’re in a paragraph.

Site-Realted

should be Site Related - two separate words, and one of them is spelled incorrectly.

It’s main purpose is to demonstrate my creative work, an insight into my interests, plus provide a few nifty little resources.

should be “its” main purpose. Every time you write the word “its,” you should think in your mind “does saying it is make sense here?” If it doesn’t, write “its.” If it does, write “it’s.”

Generally this is a wonky statement that doesn’t seem to make sense. Try something like:

Its main purpose is to demonstrate my creative work, provide insight into my interests, and hand out a few nifty little resources.

This statement

I do however know a great deal about CSS and HTML,

needs more commas. Whenever you use the word “however,” some kind of break in the flow needs to be provided. “I do, however, know a great deal…” “However, I do know a great deal…” Whichever way you put it, there has to be a comma.

Your interests page needs to be viewed for grammar.

I love drawing in cartoon style, making pixel art, and sometimes experiment with Flash and 3D modeling.

You’ve started out with a lot of “ing”s and ended with no “ing.” Keep it consistent (”drawing,” “making,” “experiment”).

When you click on the “ball-jointed dolls” link, it takes you to an old layout with no information.

Under “favorite musicians,” you should have more than one. Otherwise change “musicians” to the singular.

Your other about content has similar minor grammatical errors - prepositions at the end of sentences (though we all do this), tense changes, commas needed or unnecessarily placed, etc. I won’t go through all of it (unless you’d really like me to - wouldn’t mind) in the interest of avoiding a review filled with smaller details. I want to mention that they are there, and a quick proofread may improve the readability of your site.

Gift Art

I’m reviewing this as its own section because it magically becomes one when I click on the link. The about sidebar disappears and I’m suddenly “sectionless.” I’d suggest either adding “gift art” (or “guest art” - make up your mind) to the top bar and making it a section, or keeping the about sidebar along with the new gift sidebar. It’s clear that you have a lot - enough to split it into years - but unless you’re going to add the link to the top bar, there’s no reason to take away the about navigation from the left.

Goodies

Your sidebar, first of all, is a little out of order according to your thumbnails. “Pixel Patterns” (”Tiled Patterns,” I presume?) should come after “Emoticons.” And, as your sidebar illustrates, there’s no reason for the article/tutorial thumbnails to say “article” and “tutorial” because it’s already obvious this is what they are.

The graphic giveaways are plenty and of good quality, so I have no complaints there.

However, it’s complainable that your goodies list disappears when I click on the tutorial/article links. Like the “gift art,” the web design article magically becomes its own section. There’s plenty of space in your sidebar to include the goodies & other links that were on the goodies page. I can see that they are blog posts; perhaps you’d like to mention that, so when the sidebar navigation disappears entirely your visitor knows they’ll have to push their back button a lot.

Okay, okay, I see what the issue is here. In your sidebar you have the articles linked as “index.php?id=##” whereas on the web issues index (as it were), the articles are linked as “tips.php?id=##”. With the “tips.php” there, the sidebar remains, but it disappears when the “index.php” links are clicked. Something to think about changing.

As for your Cork Texture tutorial, I don’t see why you can’t just have the example images included directly in the page (looks like this: [picture]) rather than making your visitors click the links to view the lightbox which takes a rather long time to load. (Well, not a long time, but the images aren’t large enough to bombard your tutorial page with terrible loading times, so I’m sure your visitors wouldn’t mind the ability to view the result immediately rather than having to click and wait. It’s an extra unnecessary step.) In any case, it’s inconsistent to have the final result shown “like this” while having the steps to get there linked “like this.”

Linkage

Why is it that I can click the “Linkage” item on the top menu while it is active, but I couldn’t do that with any of the other sections? On that note, if your general list of links is going to be an actual section, it should be linked in the sidebar, rather than something that I can only access by clicking the “Linkage” menu item. It’s great that it’s clickable (I think they all should be), but if the others aren’t, this one also shouldn’t be.

Your “contact me” bar on the side also disappears with the linkage page.

As far as your Awards page goes, I think that if you’re going to include quiz results anywhere, they should be in your “about” section. I don’t think they’re relative but they’re sometimes fun, so if you want to include them, stick them in there somewhere. I’m not sure they count as “awards.”

Your credits page looks pretty comprehensive. I wouldn’t be able to tell if you’d left anything out, and that’s always a good quality on a website.

Comprehensive Reflection

I don’t see a lot about your website as a whole. You have a bit on the about page and some in your past layouts portfolio, but nothing that really says a lot about your website. The credits page, as I’ve said, is impeccable, but a personal preference is to see one page dedicated to all sitely things. It’s strange placement for it to be on a page where you probably intended to talk more about yourself. I also saw nothing that explained the current layout (I like those sort of things too).

Overall, your website is easy to browse with semi-decent organization. Except for a few instances of re-labelling (that is, same sections having different names) which can be confusing, and the occasional subsection that randomly became its own section, I was able to get through your website easily and view your content accordingly.

I like the layout and though I couldn’t find suggestions for the white space or an explanation for the bubbles (which, by the way, still draw attention), it is clear based on your portfolio that you’re talented with coding and graphic design and any future layout that you make will probably improve on this one.

While you are revamping and moving, I’d suggest going through your content a bit for errors - grammatical and otherwise - and when you’re finished, take just one more sweep of the site to make sure everything connects. If something is