back to Completed Reviews
Site Name: Astro Zombies
Owner: Alice
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 28th January 2009
Site Name
Astro Zombies! Haha it makes me dance and laugh. Now that’s original. Your URL is a little long though.
Coding and Validation
Your HTML coding has 12 errors – but that’s in HTML 4.01 transitional, and you’re trying to validate in XHTML.
Your doctype should be first thing in your document. You’ve incorrectly put in a body tag and a stylesheet. You also have no character encoding. This is what you need at the beginning of every document after your doctype:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" >
You have over 80 errors if we look at your coding as XHTML. You have many common errors such as using capitals in your coding. You cannot have any capitals. For instance:
<u>text</U>
is incorrect and should be:
<u>text</u>
That is one error I notice you’re making. For other errors, try this TutorialTastic tutorial.
I understand you’re trying to validate in XHTML for the sake of FanUpdate, but it’s best to make sure everything is okay in HTML, before validating to XHTML.
I can only tell you to have a read through that tutorial and learn from your mistakes by running your site through the validator as you edit. Things you should also know is that <br> must change to <br />, and you should have the backslash in images tags too.
Your CSS has 4 errors and 1 warning. You have extra } in some places and you’re forgetting one at the end of your stylesheet.
You also have a link to style.css which doesn’t exist. Your warning is caused by you using the same colour for a font and its background. All you have to do there is change the colour.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
Looking at your site at Browsershots.org, your layout is looking consistent in most browsers, but your text isn’t. I’ll talk about that in a moment.
Your navigation is clear but ‘About’ appears on the next line – in Firefox. I also don’t like the hover effect. Without the dashed border would be better – just the same solid border.
Your default text is rather large in my browser, which makes things a little hard to read when your line spacing is very small – all the lines are squished. Either increase the line spacing, or just make your font a little smaller.
You haven’t customised your text, which is probably why the errors are coming up. You need to edit the text using CSS to make sure it works all the time! Don’t expect that it works in all browsers just because it works in yours.
Layout
It looks really cool and original. But the photos (I assume you took them yourself) of the paperclips aren’t so clear and the photos are quite dark. Increasing brightness before changing the colours would have been good. You need to work on optimising graphics here.
The layout is really original and cool apart from the quality. When you use different colours the layout should be nice and bright, but yours looks dark.
I think you need to cut the width down, to below 800px. Some people, especially on laptops, do use a resolution of 800 by 600 pixels.
Your CSS colours are nice, but the headers don’t change much. In your blog the text is boring and quite the same for everything. It would be nice to see different fonts and styles. It looks quite messy with some of the borders; when everything is put together it looks like there are so many lines everywhere.
Content
Pop your name under ‘Me’ in the sidebar! I don’t see ‘Alice’ anywhere else. And remove the welcome message, no one needs to know you’re putting pictures up soon.
Inside
The nature photographs are beautiful. However the thumbnails take a long time to load. You should really make separate smaller images for the thumbnails. I know it takes a long time but it really saves loading time!
Also, instead of linking to the following:
http://s492.photobucket.com/albums/rr290/2010alice/flowers/?action=view¤t=walks014.jpg
link to the actual image, which is:
http://s492.photobucket.com/albums/rr290/2010alice/flowers/walks014.jpg
It’s much nicer than seeing all the Photobucket ads and whatnot.
The random photographs are also nice. You take great photos and they’re of great quality!
‘Instrument photographs’ leads to a broken link because you’ve typed the link wrong, as instuments.php instead of instruments.php. Nevertheless, the photos are really good.
About
On this page you need to capitalise HTML, PHP and CSS. And “Astrozombies”!
Well, pretty simple story. Quite hilarious too, I remember dragging a lot of my friends to make a site, even just a blog!
And ‘Monster Mash’ by the Misfits is awesome, as is ‘Vampire Love’… Remind me to download ‘Astro Zombies’!
Also, pop up some proper credits and credit everything. Not just Sophie, but FanUpdate and programs you’ve used, Photobucket – you get the drill.
Originality & Creativity
Wow, already here? There isn’t much on your site. But I have to say you have one creative layout and definitely some original photography. Awesome job there.
Organisation & Errors
Well organised but you really could refine your CSS. There was that error in linking to your photographs of instruments page.
There weren’t many grammar or spelling errors since there wasn’t much writing (apart from the blog). Heck, there wasn’t even a page about you! 
Overall Comment
Alice, I can tell your site is quite new and you’re new to webdesign. Your coding isn’t bad but you do need to fix some things. Also, you need to fix your layout a bit and make your CSS more interesting. USE the CSS! And work on user compatibility.
I really like your photography. You could really have a portfolio-type site; your photos are great! But at the moment you need to fix your coding and the aesthetics of your website.
It would be nice to see some pages such as an ‘about me’ page. I wish you all the best!
