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Site Name: Unique Magic
Owner: Asmiya
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 8th March 2009
Site Name
It’s a little strange but it’s okay and easy to remember.
Coding and Validation
Your coding has 63 errors and 17 warnings.
Now let’s see what’s wrong. Firstly, your stylesheet include is the first thing on your page, and you’ve repeated it. It should actually go between the head tags (not before). It also needs the trailing backslash before the >. Some of your other pages are correct – it might just be this one.
Your character encoding should be in the head tags too. You should therefore end your head tag after it.
You’re writing a lot of tags in capitals, for instance <IMG SRC. That’s incorrect, and in the XHTML doctype, you should be writing tags in lowercase.
At the end of a lot of your images, you’re forgetting the trailing backslash. Because the tag isn’t ended, you need to place that backslash before the >.
And whether you like it or not, all images must have an alt attribute.
If I went through every single error here, it would take a long time. Instead I’m going to advise you to read my validating XHTML tutorial.
Your CSS has is valid. Thank goodness..
Browser Compatibility & Usability
The site looks the same in most browsers according to Browsershots.org.
The navigation in the image map is extremely hard to see. The use of dark colours everywhere isn’t good, and the text on the mesh background clashes. it’s also hard to read the site name.
I don’t like the hover links. An underline appears and it dodges text most of the time. If the colour of the font changed only, that would be fine.
Similarly the text colour is dark purple on black – hard to read. White would have been preferable.
The layout is falsely centered. It might look centered in your resolution, but on smaller or larger ones (not everyone has the same as yours!), it won’t. This is what it looks full size on mine: Layout screenshot.
As you can see the background is also cut off; it doesn’t tile properly.
You should center your layout. Try this tutorial from Tutorialtastic.
Layout
I don’t like it. You’ve used dark colours with dark colours – dark blue and purple on a black background. It’s hard to see things.
I don’t like the mesh background or the star background. They really clash. The star background should be removed. All the mesh background should be removed from your header background and content background, and that should be the main background.
You just have too much going on in the layout, and the colours are not good at all. These colours are very limited – blue and purple – and don’t go very good with black at all. You should have used grey or white instead.
The CSS is boring. You need to vary your fonts and vary the colours more. With a lighter background and a layout not so busy, you could use lighter shades of blue and purple nicely.
Content
Visitor Content
The first entry on your icon challenge is a dead PhotoBucket image. You need to specify how the icons will be judged.. and when the due date is.
Most of your button bases are fuzzy and pixelated. Some contain celebrity images, which are actually illegal unless you paid to use the images or received permission from the person who took them.
The title of this page should be Button Bases, not Icons.
The enter signs are boring, and having an enter sign is pretty pointless. Most people just want to see the site!
The female celebrity icons are of celebrities. This isn’t very original either, and if you didn’t get permission from the owner to edit and redistribute their images, you shouldn’t be!
The icons are pixelated and of low quality.
I can’t really read the text on that. The colours aren’t too great either.
The male celebrity icons page is titled Female, which should be fixed.
Again these are boring and pixelated or blurry, and they just look like cropped images with text slapped on them.
I expected your “blends” or uncoded layouts to be horrible and pixelated, but they’re actually not bad. In a few of them, like the Emily Osment one and the Selena/Demi one, you should have chosen a better colour for the text. It’s hard to read.
These are fairly good, but they’re not great. In some of them you’re overdoing it and adding too many photos. You should also reduce the opacity of some, like in the Vanessa Hudgens one. Having bold-looking Vanessa Hudgens appear three times next to herself looks very weird.
Again these use celebrity images and I’d advise against them. They’re no original and I’ve seen similar images used many times elsewhere.
The male blends are pretty much the same and I have the same comments. I really don’t like the Tom Cruise one because of the artistic effect you’ve used for the background. It doesn’t look very good at all.
The ones under ‘other’ are very simple and I don’t really like them. They look blurry or of bad quality and don’t look very optimised.
Overall, you need to work more on these “blends”. Work on optimising them and using more suitable effects that are less rough.
The brushes don’t look too great. The previews should be in full so people can use them as an image if they wish. And they look a bit odd. I can’t imagine them being used.
Some of your textures are quice nice, others just look like weird patterns, like the pink one with the butterflies.
All these should really go on one page. Your thumbnails take a long time to load and you should resize the textures and save them as separate files for the thumbnails, so the thumbnails themself don’t load so slowly.
For the texture http://i391.photobucket.com/albums/oo353/UniqueMagic/Textures/Texture20.png, you have linked the thumbnail incorrectly.
I don’t really like your blending tutorial. I don’t like that you’ve replaced the background with a solid colour. That looks really odd. But I guess, your choice. I think you should actually show the images as thumbnails rather that writing ‘here’ to click on.
I actually think your image editing tutorial is good. It should be renamed to ‘make up editing’, though.
I suggest you remove the iframe tutorial. Iframes are not very good at all – people can achieve the same look with divs. And it’s not a good idea to encourage its use. You can’t bookmark single pages, search engines skip them, they can cause a browser to lock up and freeze – and that’s only a few of the problems.
Site
Haha, you made me chuckle in your site history! This was a good page with no problems. Well written too; impressive as I hadn’t seen any writing from you yet.
You’re really a great writer! I’m wondering what to expect from your portfolio now that I’ve read quite a bit about you. I think you should italicise things like the Westlife songs.
The affiliates page is pretty self explanatory.
So is the past laoyuts page. Unfortunately I don’t really like your past layouts either. You haven’t chosen very good colours for all of them – you have too much of one colour, particularly your previous three.
Portfolio
I really like your Morning poem. That one was beautiful. And the one about the mermaid left a nice image in my head. On your poem The Witch – tought should be taught.
Your poems are great – but they don’t always have to rhyme. I’d love to see some freestyle ones or ones with different rhyming patterns.
I like your photography. The photos are really nice, but they’re blurry. You should try out another camera!
Originality & Creativity
I see you’re a creative person, but a lot of your designs seemed very rushed. The textures and blends need more time, and more importantly, more thought, put into them.
You definitely need to be more original. Using celebrity images is not original and after a while it can get boring. Try some legal stock image sources.
Things like your poetry are original and those are things that should be added.
Organisation & Errors
Firstly, you need a credits page. The credits link you have in your sidebar doesn’t work and leads me to a blank page. You must credit everyone and everything and why you’re crediting them!
There were a few other errors which I mentioned above. Your spelling and grammar was great and made me feel relieved!
Overall Comment
Asmiya, your site didn’t give me a very good first impression but left me with an okay impression. I don’t like the colours you use in your layouts. You need to use bigger (figuratively speaking), bolder, brighter colours, and think about how the visitor will view them.
For instance, your current layout. There aren’t many colours and it’s all dark. Nothing for poor black to contrast with! And your previous layout I see was blue. All blue. Having another colour in there would really help.
Don’t blend too many images. Too much is not very good. And don’t use effects just for the sake of them (the Tom Cruise one still gives me nightmares) – use them appropriately and keep them to a minimum!
Your coding needs a little bit of work – run through some tutorials on validating, that’s all.
Overall I think you need to improve on your graphics and their quality. Spend more time thinking about how parts of a layout look individually.
Try using stock images rather than celebrity images as well. You’ll no doubt find some nice ones of there, of people as well.
