Review: Chelsea @ Off White

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Site Name: Off White
Owner: Chelsea
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 20th February 2010

Site Name

The site name is fine. However, not all redirection URLs work and some people can have problems with them. Also, when linking to a single page on your website, it can be a hassle to find the exact link, so keep this in mind.

Coding and Validation

Your coding has 32 errors and 39 warnings and your CSS 29 errors and 42 warnings.

It would be a good idea to use strong, em, and ins instead of b, i and u. This is because screen readers for the blind will be able to put more emphasis where it is needed.

You really need to work on your coding. Starting with the stylesheet, you have a lot of errors simply because you have left values blank. You cannot simply write px – you need to delete the entire line of code to prevent it from causing parsing errors and for affecting the way your CSS is displayed – most likely not the way you want.

Your coding is missing an important structure – the character encoding, which should go in the <head> section.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

Since you are not quoting attributes in your HTML, such as target=_blank, and not keeping it consistent, you are getting errors in your coding. Also, in all doctypes, image tags must have an alt attribute specified, for example <img src="http://site.com/image.jpg" alt="an image" />. Alternate text should be included whenever there is an image tag present.

Browser Compatibility & Usability

Your site is navigable and functions in Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer. Your site looks the same in these browsers with the exception of the coloured scrollbar in Internet Explorer.

Perhaps the “host” and “domain” links in the sidebar could be moved down; they aren’t really part of your site so they could go in a different section under a different heading.

I think the font size is exceptionally small and hard to read. You should make it bigger. Your <h1> line height should also be increased and the text looks squished when it goes over several lines.

Layout

I don’t have much to say about this layout – it’s really simple. The colours are nice on the eyes and not too blinding. I like how the colours aren’t overused in any way and are balanced by the whites and greys in the layout.

The elephants are quite unique since I don’t see them used too much on layouts, and again, they are simple. The different colours are interesting and definitely stand out. I like how they run across the edge of the layout instead of being in a typical header image.

I like how the affiliates are at the top of the layout and are subtly placed. The layout looks good overall. I think the stylesheet could be improved a bit. Some of the bold and italicised text is hard to read because of the colour, and the font size.

Also, there is a large white space under your layout which I don’t think is necessary.

Content

Site

These link buttons don’t look too bad… but you should be displaying the codes properly. <textarea> is not the right way to go about it. Textareas are intended for user input and not for displaying code. You should be using <code> or <pre> as outlined in this tutorial.

The “contact” link leads to the homepage.

On the FAQ page, affies should be affiliates. “Affies” is not a word. Also, thankyou should be thank you.

I don’t think it is appropriate to display a (frequently asked?) question such as “Your site/graphics suck”. It’s not necessary and these sorts of comments should be ignored instead. Saying that the person sucks as well is only stooping to the same level as they are.

The first credit link on the past layouts page has not been coded properly, so the link does not work. It would be more appropriate to use text for linking people rather than crosses and other dingbats; not only are they easier to click but they are obviously more appreciated.

Webmiss

On this page, “Sydney town” doesn’t make sense. Do you mean “a town in Sydney”?
to follow rules should be following rules

As opposed to a “3cm book” (and not all people measure in centimetres), perhaps you could state how thick the book is and how many pages it has?

Visitor

On the top of this page when you should be if you.

I’m not really a fan of the brushes. The imagepacks could be improved. I notice that some of the brushes are actually cut off on the edge of the packs, such as on the fireflies and paint roller ones. This isn’t too great if someone wants to use the brush in the middle of an image. Also, the clouds don’t look like clouds at all. They just look like a bunch of circular brushes stamped together. Most of these brushes could be improved. It would be a lot more useful if these were offered in .abr format as well, so that the users don’t have to crop the brushes themselves.

Since you don’t claim to have created any of the fonts, why redistribute other people’s work? This should be removed, or at least, link to the sites you got them from as a resource.

Besides, some of the links to the downloads don’t actually work. I am encountered with a page of gibberish.

The count you have on your PSDs is incorrect for the celebrities under “A”. There is nothing to these PSDs despite a cropped shape of a celebrity on a transparent background. A lot of people can do this themselves; the magnetic lasso tool or the magic wand tool in Photoshop can easily assist with this technique. I have seen many “PSDs” on graphic websites and they are simply a “cheap” resource.

I also doubt that the pictures you have edited are for free use, either. It is not right to edit and redistribute someone else’s work. Some people/companies require you to credit, especially for the use of celebrity images. Also, why celebrity images? Why celebrity images like so many other typical “graphics” sites out there? I’ve never seen PSDs of other people – people sitting, dancing, what have you. There is definitely room for originality and creativity here.

The icons are okay. Some of them could be improved – a few of them look pretty washed out – the really white ones.

I don’t know why the bullets are all in the one .gif file. What does this help? It only means extra cropping and saving and editing for the user. There’s nothing wrong with offering bullets on their own. I don’t think many people would bother using these because of the extra work.

The trophies look better than the bullets, pixel-wise. The colours are less harsh and they’re done very well. I don’t think there is a need to include the code. But if so, you need to display the code correctly, as I mentioned earlier.

Tutorials

On the page tags tutorial:

These codes aren’t fully necessary, but I always use them.

Wrong. Completely wrong. How can you say that the html tags aren’t fully necessary? How can you even call your code meaningful when you haven’t declared it as being in HTML?
Meta tags don’t always assist the appearing of your site in search engines, either. Google works by finding inbound links from other sites, and often ignores keywords.

It might be a good idea to mention the use of <strong>, <em>, <ins> and <del>. Especially since <s> is deprecated and the better options lie for these alternatives. They are much more useful especially for screen readers for the blind, which place the emphasis on these bold, italicised and underlined words as they should.

Seeing as you quoted some of the values in your codes in this tutorial, it would be nice to keep things consistent with the width=100 and target=_blank that aren’t quoted.

You refer to the “ugly blue or purple border” – this doesn’t appear in all browsers, and is not always blue or purple. It is the default colour.

If you “don’t know why” – perhaps it’s just better you delete this tutorial since you have not provided much that is semantic or correct. Not to mention textarea, yet again, is not used for “showing codes”. It is intended for user input. As quoted by W3 Schools:

The <textarea≶ tag defines a multi-line text input control.

Additionally, <xmp> is deprecated. It is no longer considered correct and as I mentioned earlier, <code> and <pre> should be used.

The “let me know” link leads to the homepage… as does the same link on your other tutorial pages.

I don’t see the use of all these Javascript tutorials. Most of these can be found on Dynamic Drive and are ridiculously outdated. Not only is Javascript not available on all platforms (meaning that the “no-right-click” will be a breeze to fly by), but it might not even work.

The following tutorials only work in Internet Explorer:

Mirror image rollover
Shaking image rollover
Negative image rollover
Spotlight image rollover
Grayscale image rollover
Upside down image rollover

And the whole world doesn’t use Internet Explorer – there are at least 4 other browsers out there including Google Chrome, Safari, Opera and Firefox. I think that should be enough grounds for you to decide whether these “fancy” tutorials are really useful or not.

Getting to the Freewebs footer… so everyone hates advertisements, but it doesn’t mean you have to break the rules even if it is with some nifty code. The advertisements are there for a reason.

I’ll be skipping past all the Cutenews tutorials. Cutenews is a very insecure and unsafe script that has many holes, and malicious PHP code can easily be injected into your pages, and is extremely vulnerable to spam, and was dubbed “shite” by Jem. You might not have personally experienced a problem with the system but it doesn’t mean others have not. I personally have.

Not to mention most of these tutorials are in the documentation. The CHMOD/FTP tutorials are a little useful, but the tutorials on Cutenews should definitely go.

I can’t review all your advanced picture tutorials, sadly, because the first eight look like this, as the account associated with the images is inactive.

The ninth one doesn’t have such an obvious effect but the tenth one does – which is pretty nice.

In your first article on “Starting a Site”:
but I wouldn’t would be better expressed as but I personally wouldn’t.

Ever heard of an “icon website”? Naturally, sites live up to their name. No one has to make “content” for their site if they just want to have a blog to update friends on, or if they want to create a portfolio of their photography. An important thing you neglected to mention in this article is site purpose.

I think that your writing is great and very well structured. I can already see that I will enjoy looking through the rest of your articles after reading this one.

Regarding your “getting more hits” article, I don’t think it’s true that “no one” clicks the buttons on a plugboard. I do.

I have seen the tutorials on fonts many times on multiple sites.

Regarding the “tips for your site” article – you have made some similar points in this article as your “starting a site” article. Perhaps you could clean up both and either have them separate or combine them somehow. And capitalise “URL” too.

The sidebar tips are quite good. You certainly are vehement about the creative navigation being a little off. Instead of saying it’s “unreadable” – perhaps say it’s hard to understand or confusing? Also try to use “affiliates” on this page instead of “affies”.

On the “writing tutorials” article, unclutter should be declutter, and moreso should be more so.

Originality & Creativity

I think you could do a much better job here, especially with your visitor section. The PSDs, as I mentioned, aren’t really original or creative. I really like some of the icons, but some more would be great because I didn’t get to see the best of your ability on your website. You could offer some better resources.

A lot of the resources in the visitor section could be improved – the brushes and the bullets for example. However I thought that all your articles were very well done. They were well structured, had good points, and barely any mistakes. I think this changed the bad impression I had of your website after looking through your coding tutorials and your graphic tutorials that weren’t fully working.

Organisation & Errors

Everything was pretty organised. However you do need to look into your pages; there are many links to “contact” you which simply lead to the homepage.

Also, on some of your tutorials the images did not display so you need to fix these up too.

Overall Comment

I think you’ve done an okay job on your website. Your writings and articles really stood out to me. You’re a great writer and I think this is the best part of your website, and writing appears to be your strength.

I’m not a hundred percent sure about your graphic skills since I didn’t see very much of it from your content or layout, and your tutorials need some fixing. I think you do have potential but you need to really clear out some of your coding tutorials. Javascript can be nifty but it does not always work and is not very user friendly. Cutenews is unsafe. This cuts out a lot of your tutorials, but perhaps, had your images worked, your graphic tutorials might have been better?

I think you do need to work on your website a bit more and clean up a few pages, check that things are working, and remove the content that isn’t very useful. Good luck with your site.