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Site Name: Teendown
Owner: Alyssa
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 13th November 2009
Site Name
It’s easy to remember but personally, I don’t like the use of the word “teen”.
Coding and Validation
Your coding has 38 errors and 144 warnings.
Overall your coding is a huge mess. You have multiple <html> and <head> tags, no <body> tags, no ending tags, no doctype and no structure whatsoever. You need to look right back into the basics of HTML.
You’re using <br /> multiple times for links in the sidebar when you could just create an unordred list with appropriate styling to remove the bullets, or, use vertical navigation.
Your CSS has 29 errors and 12 warnings.
You have multiple parsing errors in your stylesheet. It’s no wonder – you have a clunk of styling that is impossible to dissect:
line-height: 28px;font-size : 40px;letter-spacing :-3px;text-align : center;
text-transform:uppercase;} body { cursor : ;} a { cursor : ;} b { color : #036C86;} u { color : #5A9FB0;
border-bottom: width:1px #5A9FB0 dashed;} i { color : #1A7A92;} textarea { border-color:000000 !important; ...
Not to mention – what is !important;? – obviously no real form of CSS whatsoever. If you’re going to make notes in your CSS, do them properly.
Attempt to use <strong> instead of <b> and <em> instead of <i> from now on, for semantic – more meaningful – purposes. Screen readers for the blind will be able to provide more meaning if you do this.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
Your site is navigable and functions in Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer. However in Opera and Internet Explorer, the sidebar doesn’t appear in its correct place and is off to the right. This might be explained by the broken divs in your coding.
The animated favicon is extremely distracting while I’m reviewing your site, especially when I choose to open a few pages at a time. An animated icon is fine when the animation is small and subtle, but your entire icon changes.
The navigation could be improved by using text links rather than an imagemap. Some systems do not display images in their browser, some people choose to browse the internet with images turned off, or some people just have a slow connection and might not be able to view images straight away.
On the navigation, “Content” would be better expressed as “Visitor”. “Content” generally refers to all the content on your website.
I’m finding your text extremely hard to read. 13px or thereabouts? It wouldn’t be acceptable to submit a piece of work to a teacher with text of that size, so it isn’t going to be suitable for a website either. You need to increase the line height and the size of text. By convention people read from left to right, so the body text should also be aligned to the left, and not centered.
Layout
I like the general design and colours, but because of the background and the static whitespace used for content, the layout would look so much more impressive had it been centered.
The effects used in the image are alright. They are creative, as is the positioning of the site name. However, because of the elaborate style, the navigation would have looked nicer if it was toned down a bit – not using an image, but simple text. All in all, simple styling would have complemented the scrapbook-collage look of the layout.
The colours of the layout are very nice and work well together, though they could have been incorporated more subtly into the CSS. Kudos for keeping a plain background for both the body and the content section.
Content
The Site
A major flaw in the readability of this page – no capitalised Is. Each one needs to be capitalised, as does French. Correct punctuation, especially regarding the first person pronoun, makes paragraphs written from this view easier to read, not to mention doesn’t look childish. Additionally, “I love you” should be appropriately quoted.
Cutenews and Photobucket should be on your credits page.
“MySpace”, “The host” and “My other site” links should be differentiated somehow, or placed under a heading, so it can be seen that these are external links. Your “other site” doesn’t seem to exist.
Content
As mentioned above, “content” would be better as “visitor”.
Despite being unfazed by your note on your brushes page (which should be reworded in a more professional manner), you have unique brushes. Often, people have drawn brushes yet they weren’t drawn by them. Nice to see that you have drawn these yourself. Perhaps having the brushes in .abr format would be helpful – not just an imagepack.
The button bases are okay. People generally make their own buttons though.
The edited pictures aren’t useful. What can they be used for exactly? The edits are nice but the image quality is slightly blurry. And putting your own credit on – where’s the credit for the image source?
The favicons aren’t that interesting. Softer colours and more variety are needed. You are also displaying the code incorrectly. Your code should be displayed with <code> following conversion with a converter to convert the HTML into its entities – like so:
The fonts are just being redistributed by you – “i simply found them and put them here for you to use”. So, I can take your layout and put it on my site and say “I found this so you can use it”? Not only did you not create these fonts, but you didn’t credit the creator, and you are redistributing. What makes this right in any way?
And… same thing goes for the photography. You’re not even going to give credit for them? And you edited someone else’s work with nothing more than a bit of colouring and rounded corners that aren’t that neat? No one likes it when someone edits or uses their work and puts it on their site without credit or permission.
The layouts generally have a nice design (don’t know why they’re called “domain” layouts though – nearly any website could account for layouts like these) but why on earth is “WELCOME TO MY SITE” plastered across practically the entire header on each one? You don’t need to welcome someone in a layout on every page.
Additionally, the CSS needs some sprucing up and much bigger text to support the large scale of the layouts.
You might have thought up the “site name premades”, but what say you if someone happens to have thought it up before you or as well – and it’s pure coincidence? It’s fine to be original, but trying to claim an idea wholly as your own isn’t terribly reasonable.
Site names… “damaged”, “escape” and “vertical”, along with some other site names you have here, are simply words. You can’t ask someone to credit you for using a word that you didn’t even create!
Great, so you think you can redistribute graphics you found on Facebook too? Why should people give you credit for anything if you’re offering graphics that aren’t even yours?
The content graphics are not very useful.
Nothing much to say about the lyrics and name tags – but you probably didn’t make up the lyrics or names yourself either.
The MySpace graphics and codes could be useful for people who use MySpace, but some colour theory needs to be adopted. Pastel colours on a generally light background – no. And the codes need to be displayed correctly.
Tutorials
I don’t know why you have your tutorials as images. They take a long time to load, the capitals are hard to read, and it just doesn’t look impressive.
Kerning text is a very simple thing to do. There is no need for a tutorial on it, unless it’s outlining other simple Photoshop functions. The other tutorials are relatively simple as well.
Hosting
Quite a few mistakes:
url should be URL
myspace should be MySpace
freewebs should be Freewebs
recieve should be receive
i’m should be I’m
friendss should be friends
And, every I needs to be capitalised.
Originality & Creativity
Your brushes were original, but a lot of other things on your site weren’t. Fonts? No. Your graphics should be more original. Celebrity images aren’t original. The photography was probably original, but you didn’t even credit the sources. You have left a lot of sites uncredited.
Your graphic skill isn’t impressive, but it isn’t terrible. Your free layouts and your current one showed a bit of your more creative side. Rather than simply editing photos and images, you should design them and use them as a base. To have more original graphics, use something other than celebrity images, find some good quality stock images (here are some free sources) and perhaps use your own brushes, textures and other resources.
Organisation & Errors
Organisation was not that good. I don’t know why you choose to display some links as images and some as just text. You also need to organise each page and the homepage neatly. You can do this by working on the styling of your site with appropriate sized headings and so on.
Overall Comment
There’s a lot of work that needs to be done on your website. Nothing much on your website is original, for starters. You should remove all the content that doesn’t belong to you, and make sure you credit appropriately and where credit is due.
Your coding needs a lot of work. It needs good structure. Especially your CSS – all your coding is a mess that is hard to pick at. You’re going to be working with coding so semantic, clean coding would be an advantage. Minimising the errors that appear through validation will also reduce the errors that can occur across different browsers and systems.
Your website can be better if you offer graphics that are more unique and could be more useful – such as more free layouts – and if you clean up coding, organise your pages and correct your mistakes.
7 Comments so far — leave one?
Sarah says:
I like the premade layouts but I think they should be easier to download. People are going to find it hard to split up all the coding if they’re using PHP.
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Sarah replied:
And also instead of ‘welcome to my site’, there should be a spot to put their own site name
:)
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Georgie replied:
Yeah, that’s what I thought too – forgot to actually mention the suggestion.
I really liked the third premade. I think the CSS could be improved though.
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Meera replied:
I love the premades. Like Sarah said, it’s going to be hard to split up if they’re using PHP.
Lots of ‘preppy’ sites ten to put ‘Welcome to my site’ on their premade layouts.
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alyssa says:
Thanks so much for this review, it helped me a lot! I really appreciate you taking the time to do it (:
I’ve recently attempted to make improvements to my site if you would like to take a look and let me know what you think (:
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Georgie replied:
Hey, no worries!
I am liking the new layout a lot, actually. I still think the header image is a bit big, but it’s lovely. I like how you’ve centered it as well. It looks great in terms of layout. I think that all you need to work on at the moment is the content and the pages within.
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alyssa says:
Thanks so much! and yeah, I’m working on the content, I’m putting up my own photography, recently made a new premade layout, new flair buttons, and new icons, so I’m really excited about them lol (:
I’m also working on new brushes and blends possibly?
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