Review: Allie @ Shock Revolution

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Site Name: Shock Revolution
Owner: Allie
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 27th December 2009

Site Name

It’s catchy and easy to remember. I did actually like “Shockwave” better though.

Coding and Validation

Your HTML has an error because you’ve used this combination of characters in an emoticon: >.< – it’s nothing serious.

Your CSS is valid. There are some warnings from colours clashing but that isn’t such a problem either.

Your coding is neat and pretty much flawless! While some of your CSS is shortened, you can shorten some attributes further:

font: 14px Arial;
line-height: 18px;
text-align: center;
font-weight: normal; 

can be shortened to:

font: normal 14px/18px Arial;
text-align: center;

Browser Compatibility & Usability

Your site is navigable and functions in Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer.

The navigation is easy to spot and clear.

The text is a bit on the small side – perhaps make it a little bigger for your next layout. Regarding the size of your layout in general though, it’s fine!

Layout

The small font has been irking me a bit, because the layout image is so bold. “SHOCK REVOLUTION” is so bold and rather large in proportion to the main body of text. It almost seems as if the image is being swamped. On a general scale I think this layout wold look a bit better if the container div was wider and the text a bit bigger. A lot of the content just looked a little squished – the sidebar looks a little narrow and seeing as there is quite a lot of information on it, it could all be made bigger.

I really like the colours used in this layout. They’re not overly bright so they have to be supported with too many achromatic colours (blacks, greys). Rather you have opted for muted shades of green and blue, which give a rather calming effect.

I like the header image and its style. It’s creative that you have used a decorative font and a bold font to soften the layout, along with brushes. I think the image could have done without the “.org”; it looks a little out of place.

Content

Visitor

The animated icons are a little distracting when they’re all in one bunch. I like the avatars though. Make sure you credit for the base images!

On the premade layouts page off no any should be off for any. These layouts are beautiful! The Vintage one looks the best. I think the So-Lovely one could have darker links as they’re a little hard to see, and the Just Dance one could have a few more colours in it.

The third template preview links to the second one. I think you should use a less decorative font on the previews because they’re a little hard to read, considering they’re like instructions. Some varying fonts would be nice the layouts; you seem to use Arial a lot.

The wallpapers are very cute! Even larger sizes would be nice to add, like 1280 by 800 pixels or 1600 by 1400 pixels.

The pixelations are cute – there’s nothing much to say here.

On your scribbles page you state “I’ll get rid of them later today!” – I think that can be removed now. They are all very cute.

I’ve noticed that with larger images you have simply resized the image for a thumbnail by using HTML. The page would load a lot faster if you actually resized the image for a thumbnail. That way visitors also have the chance to click on something to load it in full rather than waiting for everything to load before they can see anything. Especially with photographs of 1600 by 1200 pixels (generally very large), people might not want to suck up their bandwidth unnecessarily in this way.

The stock images are alright. Some of them look pretty fuzzy. This is a nice effect on some of the images of buildings, but not so nice on closeups of plants and whatnot. Some of the images are also of a very small size, and some have a date watermark (which I’m sure can’t be helped in some cases).

Nothing much to say about the interactive content – I’ve enjoyed participating in these in the past.

On the hosting page need&why should be need & why.

On the request page don not should be do not.

The link to “Alternative Way to Log into Core FTP” is a 404.

The “Displaying Code Properly” tutorial is simple and well done – it’s a pretty simple tutorial in itself.

On the 3D text tutorial, “Here are my before and after” would probably be better phrased as “Here are my before and after pictures/images”.

On the image pack tutorial, the link at the foot of the page to request actually links to the contact page.

On the bullets tutorial, the link at the foot of the page to request actually links to the contact page.

The aMAILzing tutorial is easy to follow and well written. Personally I’ve found that the success message doesn’t actually work in aMAILzing though, and that the script has had a few bugs lately.

I think you could really write some more on your article about gay marriage and go over some points. It’s quite a short article.

In your recommended books article, resemblence should be resemblance and Artic should be Arctic.
Also, your semicolons on this page should really be colons, eg. Leap by Jane Breskin Zalben: It’s basically about…

Your swine flu article is good but you could write a bit more. Perhaps talk about how the symptoms for the common cold and the swine flu are similar, and about the dependence of the virus’s activation on the immune system of the person it attempts to attack. You could talk a bit about vaccines in your swine flu article; vaccines after all, being a weakened form of the virus itself, being injected in your system.

The article you have on “Social Classes” of the web is quite interesting, but I’m not sure where you’re going with it. It just seems to cut off at the end after an explanation. Perhaps talk about the judging people do on the web, and about stereotypes – seeing as people seem to think people with sites on freeservers have less ability than people with domains and subdomains?

Hosting

I’ve already gone through this as it was linked in the visitor section.

Ask Me

Self explanatory.

Site

On the main page everyday should be every day. You might want to remove Cassie’s link because the domain appears to be expired.

On the “contact me” page, the first paragraph is a bit of a jumble with all the different screennames – try separating this into paragraphs.

You have a wonderful credits page crediting everyone possible – great job.

One of the link buttons is 81 by 33 pixels, instead of 88 by 31.

Owner

Nothing wrong here!

Originality & Creativity

Your website is very original and creative. You’ve got an individual style and I think that all your content was very original. You’ve used a lot of brushes as resources but I think you use them very creatively.

You don’t have a great deal of graphics but I can tell you’ve put in a lot of effort with your premade layouts.

Organisation & Errors

Pretty well organised. I didn’t see too many errors either.

Overall Comment

You’ve got a very original style, Allie. I didn’t spot anything too generic or common in your website – it was original and you have some very original content. Your interactive section is also very creative.

I think you could improve on your articles a bit by expanding them. You could also add a few more graphics. I think you are best at avatars and premade layouts. You seem to spend a lot of time on your premade layouts.

You have had your current layout up for a while and it would be nice to see something new as well!

Rating

(out of 5)