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Site Name: December Love

Owner: Caz

Reviewed by: Georgina

Reviewed on: 1st August 2008

Site Name

December Love is something very original, and really matches your style of graphics. I enjoyed reading your site history to see how you got it. =)

Layout

I didn’t like how your ‘enter’ was just a link. It ought to be an image because the focus on your page is your host’s button as it’s really big. I also don’t think you should put a tagboard on your splash page. It invites people to leave a comment when they haven’t seen your site yet. There isn’t much on your splash page either. Some people are fans of splash pages, some despise them. I’m in between, I only see it useful if you have a lot of rotations to display, or if your site’s a collective, or you have skins to choose from. All in all I didn’t think yours was absolutely necessary.

On to your layout. It’s a bit odd how I have to scroll down a bit to see your whole layout, considering my screen resolution is huge – 1152×864 (I can’t remember it myself so I always have to check =P). I don’t know if you did it intentionally but if you did, I don’t see the point.

Anyway to your layout. I can tell it’s original and you’ve done it yourself because it’s got a few flaws. I like it, overall. The cuteness, mostly. I like how it’s a little book! And the use of day/night contrast – the colours in particular are quite good. I think the positioning of ‘December Love’ is a little too close to the middle of the book though. The update box is a cute idea, but I came across one on another site, and I had the concern that if you had more updates the speech bubble wouldn’t be big enough for the updates. It might not be much of a concern for you if you regularly update and if you update little by little, but I just thought I’d point it out.

The pink stripy background is good, it works well with the layout. But I think that the shading and the choice of colour for your ‘day’ part of the layout is too bright. A pale sky blue would be a lot better.

Overall I like the concept of the layout, it’s cute and simple and works with your content as you don’t have large pages. Your CSS and text is okay. Your navigation is a little small but it’s alright.

Content

YOU:

The text on your rules sign is a little hard to read. Your adoptables are so adorable! I love the toilet paper. xD You’ve only got one scribble on the one page, it would be nice to see more because that one you’ve got is not bad.

Great website tips, but I get a blank page when I click the link on it to see how to code a layout.

Your downloads seemed okay but when I tried to download the ‘Stickypaper’, it didn’t work when I tried to extract – said ‘no files’ to extract. Don’t know if this is a problem with all of them. The web design toy did the same. It probably wouldn’t bother most people but I really wanted that Stickypaper! Please get this error checked out.

Your reads were interesting, even though I’d seen them somewhere else before.

You’ve got nice content but it’s pretty minimal.

ME:

Wow, you live in Australia too! That’s awesome – most webdesigners I meet are from the US. Your links don’t appeared outlined in your toybox like you said. Not in IE or Firefox. So that seems fine. I also couldn’t see your handwriting – I came up with a dead image.

SITE:

Your rules state to ‘link back to http://www.december-love.webs.com’ but this is not your site URL – you need to update this! I loved reading your site history though – I started out on Matmice too. Gosh, it was awful! I also think you don’t have enough link back buttons – but at least you’ve got two of the more common sizes. You didn’t have a credits page either which I found odd, as these are usually common. Everything else here was generally fine.

Originality

Everything’s had a lot of hard work put into. But I think you could also try making more graphics using your own ideas rather than characters, like the toilet paper! I’ve also seen a great deal of sites like yours.

Errors

Your homepage states that your navigation is ‘the chalkboard above’ which I think is invalid and from your previous layout. This needs to be fixed!

I got a dead image when I wanted to see your handwriting. And with the downloads maybe give them a check too.

Rating

(out of 5)