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Site Name: Bottled-Sunshine
Owner: Carly
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 13th December 2008
Site Name
Bottled-Sunshine is a nice and unique name, but too long. The dash is unnecessary.
Coding and Validation
According to the W3C Markup Validation service, you have ten errors.
You have several errors in your coding itself.
You are missing a doctype and character encoding. This is what you need at the very beginning of every document:
<!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" />
This makes sure your website is processed properly by the browser.
Secondly, your <html> and <head> tags are in the wrong place. They should be included right after your doctype and character encoding. Your favicon code and stylesheet code should be in between the head tags.
You end your HTML tag somewhere after your layout image. This is incorrect and should be placed at the very end of your document.
You don’t have <body> tags. You should have these, and place all content inside these tags.
Your CSS can’t be validated.
The reason why this may be the case is because your CSS file does not have a .css extension.
Overall I’d say your coding looks messy and you might need to touch up on some basic HTML. Tutorialtastic is a good place to refine things.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
According to Browsershots.org your site looks okay in most browsers.
What’s with the double navigation? The one in your sidebar has ‘comment’ in it, but the one in the imagemap doesn’t. You should just have the one in the sidebar, the header image is too big and would be nicer if the navigation wasn’t on it.
The default font is a tad too small.
Layout
It’s a nice layout and the CSS is great. Unfortunately you seem to be in the middle of fixing your site while I’m doing this review, and you have a gritty snowflake-green background instead of the nice brown one I saw yesterday.
Aside from my eyes hurting from seeing so much Katy Perry in the pink dress with the blue bangles and dark watermelon, the header image is well made. I would just say it’s a little large in height.
Now, I’ll be honest, your layout looks a mess. I know that you’re trying to fix it but you’re better off starting afresh.
You’re using iframes which is a little icky and stone-age, and your content iframe isn’t tall enough. Consider using divs at least! Iframes give browsers hell. And how would visitors bookmark a page on your site if they’re stuck in iframes?
This Tutorialtasic tutorial will tell you how to convert from iframes.
I am personally sick of seeing the same Katy Perry photos over and over! Urgh. I can’t blame you though; but really, I’m sure you know that using celebrity images is illegal. I congrautulate you on crediting Michael Elin though.
Your layout is falsely centered. I figured you’d have trouble doing it from the look of things. Just because your layout looks centered in your resolution, doesn’t mean it is in others. This tutorial will tell you how to center a layout – when you get there!
While your layout looks well-made graphically, the positioning and coding isn’t too great.
Content
Owner
A pretty neat page.
Just some errors:
Carly, my age should be Carly; my age
me and my bestie should be my bestie and I
photoshop should be Photoshop
And Ok should be Okay or OK.
Visitor
Right now I’ll mention your unnecessary subpages. I understand you’d want to keep things organised, but having to be taken to another subpage of links is a little annoying.
( unless stated other wise) should be (unless stated otherwise).
On your mini blends page:
preview below to come should be the previews below. To go
While these blends are really nice, they use celebrity graphics (which I am aware you know are illegal!), and they’re not really useful because they’re too small for a layout.
The icons are of fairly good quality. I hope you’ve credited your resources!
The banners are okay, but I personally wouldn’t use any. I’d prefer it if your copyright/name was in a corner, otherwise it looks specially made for your site.
The blank buttons are okay as well.
The colour palettes are boring; I’ve seen this sort of thing over and over, and people should be able to choose their own colours.
Backrounds should be Backgrounds. These are okay but you should make a greater range of colours and designs.
PNGs are good and well cut, but they’re really pointless. People should be able to cut their own photos and pictures and whatnot. Not to mention the use of celebrity images here.
On your tutorials, Learn to make this effect should be Learn to change this. These tutorials are okay. I recommend adding more.
Site
The link ‘Affiliates’ should be ‘Affiliate Application’.
The ‘Owner’ link is not needed, you already have it in your main navigation.
Consider using a form for the application rather than a guestbook.
The prizes page is self explanatory!
Good job on the credits page – capitalise the site names and make sure you credit what you use. And credit Freewebs/Webs, they are your host!
Originality & Creativity
You’ve got a creative streak going, but to be more original you gotta step out of your comfort zone and create graphics and content that is entirely unique.
Of course this is a section you could work on, along with your coding. I realise you had a non-celebrity layout previously, and personally, I think that looked a lot better than this eyesoring Katy Perry layout. Sorry, but it’s the truth.
Organisation & Errors
Fairly well organised, though I would cut down on the snazzy navigation and subpages.
Your grammar and spelling was fairly good, and I didn’t find any broken links!
Overall Comment
Carly, you’ve got a pretty organised site with a good amount of content, with variety too.
While your coding was a mess and I encouraged you to try new things, stick with what you’re comfortable with first. If you like the iframes, stay with them till you’re ready to move on. You have good graphic skill but I would obviously recommend trying something other than celebrity graphics!
I really like your icons; I think they’re the best part of your content. Your graphics are really great. More tutorials on graphic design would be great.
I look forward to seeing any new layouts you have in the future and for whatever you wish to try, good luck!
