back to Completed Reviews
Site Name: Breaking Free Designs
Owner: Bridget
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 21st December 2008
Site Name
Breaking Free Designs.. firstly, I don’t see why people put ‘designs’ at the end of their site name. There’s gotta be something better. Even if you offer designs, you shouldn’t need to say ‘designs’. I do like ‘Breaking Free’ on its own.
Your URL is a little long, the subdomain bf.voltagebox.org would have been fine.
Coding and Validation
While a quick scan through your coding shows me that thinks look fairly dandy apart from a bunch of errors, I notice that the layout coding isn’t even by yourself. As a reviewer, I feel that your review is going to be fairly short. I guess I don’t have to point out every error, seeing as you might not bother fixing it because someone’s done all the coding for you. But still, it makes me quite disappointed that you haven’t even coded your own website.
When I check your coding in the W3C Markup Validation service, you have a lot of errors, 37 to be exact. I didn’t really expect this after looking at your source code, but you are missing some very important things.
You don’t have a doctype or a character encoding. These are really important to ensure your site is processed properly and can assist it in loading faster, preventing all those errors that can occur in different browsers. This is what you need at the beginning of every page. I see that HTML 4.01 Transitional is the best doctype for your site:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
Not only are you missing those, you don’t even have:
- an opening <html> tag.
- an opening <head> tag.
- closing </head> tag.
- an opening <body> tag.
- closing </body> tag.
- closing </html> tag.
All this just tells me that you really need to go and learn coding for yourself. Try Tutorialtastic for some great tutorials.
Essentially, whoever’s coded your layout is making a mistake with the line breaks. Using <br /> in your doctype should not be done; that’s only done for coding in XHTML, and all your line breaks should be <br>.
Your CSS has 3 errors. One is a lexical error, caused by a single < in your styling – possibly a typing error.
Also, in the following:
<div style="position:absolute;top: 408px; left: 256px; width: 240px; height: 2500px;overflow:">
you obviously have no value after the overflow attribute. The same occurs here:
<div style="position:absolute;top: 0px; left: 248px; width: 536px; height: 2500px;overflow:">
I am assuming that you put overflow:auto otherwise, just remove this attribute.
Your CSS is embedded and to make things easier you should put it in a separate file called css.css or something similar. You can do this by saving the document in Notepad as “css.css” (with the quotation marks). In your website pages, you use this to call on the file:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css.css" type="text/css">
I highly recommend coding your own layouts instead of relying on others. If you can’t even code yourself, it makes me feel inconfident with you keeping your own site. Seeing from your link button, you’ve obviously just copied the HTML coding from Photobucket which is generally undesirable.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
According to Browsershots.org your site looks good in all the common browsers, but unfortunately not in all resolutions, as I’ll be detailing in the layout section.
The navigation is fairly good. It’s in a good position, and the varied colours make it stand out from the rest. It’s very clear and aligned nicely and it’s not too big or small. I suggest changing ‘sitewww’ to just ‘site’. And I know the me/you/www thing is common, but to other people it would be a lot easier to write ‘owner’ and ‘visitor’.
The default text is legible but I’d suggest making it a tad bigger.
Layout
The layout at the moment is falsely centered. Tutorialtastic has a great tutorial on how to center your layout properly so it looks centered in all browsers and resolutions. You don’t need that whole part of your background colour to be part of your header image. Waste of space and takes up loading time.
There’s a little too much going on in the layout. I see a lot of graphics – I don’t see the point of the animated icon under ‘happy holidays’ in your sidebar. What’s the point, really?
Your header image looks alright apart from the fact that it includes part of your background. Heh. I think the image could do without the girl at the side; she looks rather saturated and distracts from the detail of the lovely night scene in the background.
Like I mentioned, I really like the navigation in the imagemap. The alternating colours are quite nice.
One other thing that bugs me about your layout is the very long div. I scroll down expecting some more content, but all I get is a seemingly endless div with the black background. No need to make it so high!
The image is not really of good quality. Next time try to use clear photos to start off with.
Content
Me
Only one link in this section. On the photography page, full should be full size, and coming soon should be are coming soon.
In my opinion, you should really add more in this section. It looks incomplete. Even a little page or paragraph about you would do, seeing as this section is clearly all about the owner.
You
I don’t like all your blends and signatures. The use of celebrity graphics is illegal. I doubt you took those photos of Ashley Tisdale yourself, so why are you editing them and offering them on your site? The quality of these is awful and the effects are too light or saturating. For example this Ashley Tisdale blend. Bad blending on the left, bad colours, and what is this dither all over her face?
Your icons are much less the same. Bad quality. The photos aren’t clear; they look very pixelated or have too many effects. And you’re using celebrity graphics again.
Your comment graphics look like rubbish – like you’ve just messily cut around a celebrity image and slapped ‘happy holidays’ on the side. The last one looks horribly pixelated – the face, the dress, the shoes.
The only premade layout you have is very boring. There’s a lack of colour and the header graphic looks pretty bland.
Your only desktop background looks okay, but you’ve chosen a bad photo of Hayden Panettiere that contrasts way too much with the text and bright background.
You didn’t have a lot of visitor content here. A lot of the content is bad quality or very minimal.
Site/WWW
Try to keep all your affiliates’ buttons the same size so things look more organised. And space the buttons out, ‘Regular Affiliates’ looks really squished.
It would be nice if you could customise your affiliate form to match your CSS. And don’t you have any rules for affiliation?
The reviews are self explanatory, but you should link the review that you have to the website you got it from.
You’re lacking a credits page. I know you have some layout credit in your sidebar but you need to credit your host, Cutenews, Photobucket, the programs you use and anyone who helped you.
Order
You should also customise this form to match your CSS. And what’s this page for? You have to outline what it’s there for, what service you’re offering. Are you making graphics for people? Layouts? What’s this ‘ordering’ for? Specify and explain.
I see you offer no coding, possibly because you are weak in this section.. or don’t know any.
Originality & Creativity
I see how creative you can get with some of your graphics, but a lot of them were boring and just bad quality or really overdone, or used blurry unclear images.
None of your graphics were original; they all used celebrity images. Using something from your photography section or something more original would improve your site, making it less generic and give something to visitors to remember about your site.
Organisation & Errors
Generally well organised. I didn’t find any broken links or errors.
No spelling or grammar errors as there wasn’t much written content.
I would suggest tweaking the layout a bit though.
Overall Comment
Your site wasn’t really a pleasant one to review, Bridget. I notice you work hard making graphics but they aren’t useful to people because a lot of them like to have the coding as well.
For the most part, I really think your graphics need more improvement. The quality is quite awful and I don’t know if you’re doing it on purpose to make people order and receieve one of better quality, but it isn’t the way to go.
Your site was small and seemed incomplete and new. I think you have quite a long way to go. You really need to start by tweaking your graphics and making them look more high quality, and really start learning some coding.
Good luck with your site!
