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Site Name: Rally
Owner: Alison
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 23rd July 2009

This is Alison’s re-review. View her first review here. Her previous score was 1.5 cookies.

Site Name

It’s short and it’s easy to remember.

Coding and Validation

You didn’t code the layout yourself so I don’t even see the point in going into depth with your coding.

Your HTML has 31 errors and 20 warnings. You need a character encoding. Most of the errors are caused by flash objects on your website.

Your CSS is valid. You have a number of warnings. Fonts with whitespace, such as Arial Black, should be quoted like so: "Arial Black".

You should use an external stylesheet and you shouldn’t have CSS embedded into your HTML:

<div style="position: absolute; left:214px; top: 217px; width: 160px;">

When you could be giving the div an id like so:

<div id="name">

And specifying it with CSS:

#name {
position: absolute;
left:214px;
top: 217px;
width: 160px;
}

Browser Compatibility & Usability

According to Browsershots.org your site looks the same in most browsers.

I have to scroll to see your navigation. It should be the first thing on your sidebar. The text on hover is much too big.

Also, because of the uniformity of the layout, the layout should be centered.

Remove the auto-starting music. Right now. Music is a huge no-no. It does not welcome your visitors. In fact, it can be annoying for the following reasons:

• people may already be listening to music on their media player and will be annoyed by a sudden burst of music coming from their web browser.
• people will have multiple windows open and will be surfing different sites at once, and trying to figure out which window the music is coming from is frustrating.
• the music you put on your site may not be the music people want to hear, or even like.
• it slows down your site loading time, and dial-up users will smack you.
• if you don’t provide an option to stop the music, people will just leave your site.
• if you make the music start automatically, people will just leave your site.
• if the options to stop or start the music are at the bottom of the page.
• if the options to stop or start the music are tiny frigging icons.
• if the music starts again on each page while the visitor is navigating, because, duh, it’s a new page.
• any of the above points, or any combination.

It is not a good idea to put music on your site. It is not welcoming, it wastes space, takes up loading time, and is not necessary.

I would gladly like to stop reviewing your website right now and just leave, because your music is ticking me off, but I don’t have a choice. I’ll just have to listen to this music I dislike, letting it interrupt Pink Floyd.

Thanks for ruining my Pink Floyd. Richard Wright would be rolling in his grave right now.

Layout

I can’t review this. You didn’t make the layout yourself.

The colours are a nice choice, but there’s too much going on in the header image.

Content

Get rid of the music. For Pete’s (whoever Pete is) sake. Every time I load a page I have to put up with this?

You need to capitalise the first letter of a sentence. Especially in your sidebar. You’re referring to yourself as “we” – you’re the only site owner.

Your blog has a scrollbar. I don’t see why you need it when the blog could just display straight down the page. It looks tacky.

Visitor

The “backgrounds” (the page reads “avatars” and “icons”) aren’t the best. They’re rather generic. The second avatar is probably the only high quality one. The rest look pixelated and bright.

The colour schemes are okay – the colours are pretty bright but there’s nothing much one can critique about colour schemes.

Get rid of the music, please.

The basic HTML codes are useless. I told you this in your last review.

The fades are an okay resource; they can be useful but they’re not really unique or creative. Do you mind removing the music on this page too?

The terms and definitions aren’t really useful. You should remove the music. I’m trying to listen to Pink Floyd here.

123cursors.com is credited on the cursors page – does that mean you didn’t even make this cursor yourself? You’re not allowed to redistribute other people’s work.

The affiliate images are just coloured squares. Please remove the music from this page.

The letter icons are boring. Anyone can make a coloured square and type a letter on it. I don’t see what these could be used for either. Please remove the music from this page.

The edited premades and pictures are of very low quality and very pixelated.

On your Photofiltre and Cutenews tutorials, you need to capitalise the first word of every sentence. On the Photofiltre tutorial:
i should be I
comment the blog should be comment on the blog
this help should be this helped.

On the Cutenews tutorial:
i should be I
step through should be step by
hosts should be host’s
loggin should be log in
seperatley should be separately
wont should be won’t
there appreciated should be they’re appreciated.
I recommend removing this tutorial; Cutenews is an unsafe script and there are other alternatives such as FanUpdate and WordPress, which are more commonly used. Adding emoticons to Cutenews is fairly self explanatory. It’s in the documentation.

Site

The following words need to be capitalised:
Welcome
This
Alison
April
May
Rally
MySpace
The
Unstoppable
Hayley-Morgan.
Funny you should bother capitalising Kat Deluna and not even your own name.

Originality & Creativity

You had a lot of content that wasn’t very creative at all. The backgrounds need some work, and the affiliate images and other graphics you have are boring; anyone can make them.

You didn’t have much content at all and it was all extremely generic, and not very useful at all.

You didn’t make the layout yourself – it would really do you some good if you created the layout yourself. When I previously reviewed you, you were using a premade layout.

If you can’t deal with coding, then at least make your own header image or something.

Your content is rather generic – the only thing I can deem as creative the sun vectors, which aren’t bad at all. The other graphics are tacky and I honestly cannot imagine anyone using them; they can make a lot of this content themselves – such as the affiliate images (which are incredibly outdated).

Organisation & Errors

You need to write properly. I already mentioned this in your previous review and you didn’t even bother to listen to me, to put it colloquially.

The music player causes errors on your website. It won’t load for everyone. It’s incredibly annoying to have the music starting automatically. I have to pause it every time I visit a new page. It plays like a pathetic echo when I open pages of your website in different tabs.

I apologise if music on a website is… part of your religion or something, but you could at least add it so that it doesn’t start automatically.

Overall Comment

You ruined my Pink Floyd.

Rating

(out of 5)