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Site Name: Spin That Record
Owner: Caitlyn
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 18th April 2009
Site Name
Cute name! Creative and original. I haven’t heard of many short phrases with site names. I like records, personally. 
Coding and Validation
Your coding has 21 errors.
The errors are being caused by the code you’re using for your Twitter updates. Unfortunately Twitter isn’t very nice giving us an invalid code. So instead of using ul id for the twitter_update_list, use a div id for that instead. If you need help on customising an id, read this tutorial.
You’ve got some validation errors from the way you are setting out your WordPress templates. It seems that you’re putting the entire entry into a paragraph. You can see that you place a div code after a paragraph code for the categories. You can’t put a div in a paragraph – so what you can do is remove the paragraph tags, and customise the text in the div with your CSS.
If you have trouble looking for the beginning paragrah tag – it’s before your category. The end paragraph tag is at the end of your entry – you will see two </p> in a row.
This happens on all the entries so I am assuming it has something to do with your WordPress templates or something.
On the button you have under advertising, you have forgotten a backslash at the end of the image tag.
You have a stray </p> in the coding of your footer! And you also have an extra </div> towards the very end of your coding which should be removed.
Fixing all those will get you validated XHTML.
Your CSS is valid.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
Your site is okay in all browsers according to Browsershots.org. Well done!
The font size is fine, and the navigation is clear. The website is easy to navigate and is quite user-friendly. I hate ‘main’, though, I’d prefer it said ‘home’ – less easy to misinterpret.
The layout is centered – excellent for cross-resolutions, and it’s also not that wide, so small resolutions don’t have to suffer with a horizontal scrollbar.
Layout
Awesome! It’s yellow, which makes me feel bright and happy. I like how it’s a horizontal layout with the horizontal background. Very cool, very neat.
I like the intricate background in the header, and the fun font you’ve used for your site name. Everything looks simple and neat.
I like the colours in the CSS. There’s a good range of styling used, but a greater variety of fonts could be used.
The footer is a nice addition, but it doesn’t match up too well when there is less content on the page, because it clashes a bit with the sidebar.
Content
About
Well set out! The site history is a big paragraph though; perhaps break it up into a few?
Wow, you advertise a lot of people. There is no button for the first person though; it’s just blank. You have fair rules.
Affiliates – all good.
Credits – try not to just list the websites, but to write next to each one why you are crediting them. Brushes, textures, scripts? And so on.
Gifts – self explanatory.
Cool; you offer a code for the link buttons! Though I’m not a huge fan of animated ones. Some people might not like animated ones either – try making some unanimated ones.
On your past layouts page, one of your past layouts is up until.. now? Oops! Better change that.
And your current layout is already down? Oops, looks like you mucked up the dates there..
Please don’t link with the letter x. It’s tiny and if you’re crediting people they deserve more than a tiny x.
There’s nothing else wrong with this section, but since you have navigation links at the top of the ‘about’ page, they should be on the other pages in this section to be more consistent – and it won’t be so annoying clicking ‘back’ all the time on my browser.
I know you have the breadcrumb links at the top of the page, but since you have the navigation.. that would be nice to have on every page and not just one.
Resources
Nicely organised. Let’s have a look at the challenges.
Awesome awards for the icon competition! I think it’s rather creative that you have the icons in the background of the award! I hope you remove these awards when it’s time for the next round, or at least have a text link to them.
You still have the entries here and the old rules I’m assuming, even though the competition seems to have ended.
The layout challenge and hall of fame pages are all good.
I actually find it a little strange that ‘challenges’ are in a section called ‘resources’ – perhaps it would be better as ‘visitor’.
I don’t normally use PSP scripts, but these effects are nice. The last one’s quite funky. Thanks for using my photos!
The website layouts are nice and clean; nothing wrong there.
Blank buttons.. nice; and nice you see you have some effects on them. Though blank buttons are quite boring; people generally make their own.
Ah these bullets are cute. The hearts and squares are shaded very nicely, and I really like the detail on the first set.
The calendar icons are cute too. I’m guessing they’re the ones that are used on WordPress. So nice; makes me want to convert to WordPress!
Not much one can say about colour palettes; thank goodness your colours aren’t bright and blinding like a lot of palettes I see nowadays. Technically quite pointless pieces of content though; not too usable.
The icons are beautiful! I love the one of the ballet shoes, because I do ballet. Stealing it! I like the various effects used on all of these. Very nice. Good to see some very unique icons too.
Pixel text – fairly simple, but nice.
PNGs. Seriously, why are they called PNGs? They’re just the file extension of the image. They could be called cropped images really.
Nevertheless, while you recognise these are of images that aren’t yours, they’re well cut and you clearly have spent a lot of time on them.
I find it weird that some of the file extensions are .jpg, though. TinyPic is a bastard, haha.
Tutorials
You only have one advanced tutorial.. but cool!
mian should be main
your done should be you’re done.
Cutenews. Otherwise known as the holey CMS script that doesn’t use a MySQL database… these tutorials are alright, but they’re fairly pointless and anyone can figure it out from reading the documentation.
Fairly similar for the FanUpdate tutorials; particularly the one for adding categories.
On ‘installing FanUpdate’, you FanUpdate should be your FanUpdate.
The basic CSS tutorial is pretty good. You don’t need to do the whole “remove the asterisks” thing. Use the code < for < and > for >.
Also, textarea should not be used for displaying codes; rather, <code> should be used.
Similarly, on your bullets tutorial, don’t use textarea to display your codes.
On this tutorial, your codes are incorrect:
<li>TEXT
<li>TEXT
<li>TEXT
</li></li></li>
It should be:
<li>TEXT</li>
<li>TEXT</li>
<li>TEXT</li>
On your other tutorials, do avoid using textarea as well. You have a stray (and random) > bracket at the bottom of your custom header page.
Double underline.. gah, I have seen this many times already. An example would be nice.
The navigation tutorials could be improved by going into detail what the CSS means and such; they just seem like they’re going through something you’d simply copy and paste.
The button rotation tutorial could be improved. This is in fact a Javascript and not a HTML tutorial. There is also no need for this at the beginning of the code:
<style type="text/css">
You should also credit the source of the script.
The history links tutorial is also using a script so cannot be classified as HTML. This tutorial is also pretty superfluous; they’re just copy-and-paste codes, essentially.
Ditto for the redirect; which is actually a meta tag.
‘Text around an image’ is actually image wrapping. This could be improved by introducing the modification of the element with CSS; often this can result in better spaced wrapping and with more padding.
These PSP tutorials are nice. I have seen the antique and angel effect ones many times though.
The PNG one. Blah. I don’t know about PSP, but in Photoshop you could easily do this with the magic wand tool.
I like how these tutorials were set out. They were really neat and easy to understand. I’ve seen a whole heap of these tutorials on other websites though. The only one I liked was the selective colouring; haven’t seen many on those.
Reviews
Obviously I won’t review this section. Well organised though.
Hosting
It’s cool. No problems here.
Originality & Creativity
I really liked your resources. They were quite original. The icons; I just liked a lot. They were great.
You are definitely creative. I can see from your previous layouts as well that you’re trying out different styles.
Of course you have the celebrity images as a resource but at least you’re not claiming them as your own!
It was impressive how you credited everything in your tutorials, right there on the page.
Organisation & Errors
Well organised… but I have to say that a fair deal has to be improved on in terms of where you’re putting things – particularly the tutorials, and also challenges – which aren’t really a resource.
This might just be me, but the many subpages ticked me off, even if you did have the breadcrumb links.
Overall Comment
You’ve got a great site, Caitlyn. I think you offer some very handy and unique resources, however your tutorials could really be improved.
Many of your tutorials don’t offer correct coding, and many are just pointless and not really what you call ‘tutorials’. I think these could be improved or just removed until you touch them up.
Your resources are very good, and your spelling/grammar wasn’t a huge problem. I could spend quite a while on your site (well, I just did) exploring.
Just fix up the problems I pointed out, and things will look a lot neater and fresher. Keep up the great work.
