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Site Name: Clompish
Owner: Clompeh
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 16th July 2009

Previous reviews:

Extract Of Insanity

Site Name

Many websites have the “ish” ending, but despite that it’s still a nice catchy name.

Coding and Validation

Your coding is valid. Obviously the warnings are from FanUpdate.

Your CSS is valid. The warnings here are related to the colours of parts of your CSS so try and clean it up a bit to avoid those. Also, you should use an external stylesheet for your CSS.

Browser Compatibility & Usability

Browsershots.org tells me your site is fine in most browsers.

It’s terrific to see you’ve centered the layout; as you have produced yet another uniform layout, this is a great change to see. The layout is of a good width, and it’s put together very nicely with the correct container coding.

The sidebar is very narrow compared to the content area. I know you’re one for narrow sidebars, but when you have relatively small text in the content area, it looks messy and can be hard to read.

Layout

The header image has been nicely edited. This reminds me of your previous layout on your website Essence of Insanity. The header image is of high quality.

The container background isn’t quite the same colour as the background of the image. This is quite obvious in Internet Explorer; not so obvious in other browsers. Instead of #404040, I think the colour you’re after is #3F3F3F.

I really like how you have brought out some green in the eye of the cat, and used the green in the layout. It’s quite hard to pull off a mostly greyscale layout, but having that splash of colour really works.

Content

Admin

It might be better to name this section “owner”.

On the page “the person behind the screen”:
strait should be straight
catagory should be category
ficton should be fiction
I hear it it should be I hear it, it
saddness should be sadness
fufilled should be fulfilled.

Website

On the acknowledgements page:
stubborness should be stubbornness
descisions should be decisions
infulenced should be influenced
occured should be occurred.

On the contact form page, a larger space for the message (perhaps a textarea with a few rows) would be more appropriate.

Graphics

As I mentioned previously, the animations aren’t too interesting. Again, the avatars could do with a bit of a clean; remove the ones of low quality.

The banners are impressive, as they were the first time I saw them.

I didn’t notice this until now but your graphics have an extremely large file size, and because you’re resizing the image for the thumbnail with height and width, it takes an extremely long time for your graphics to load as it has to load the entire image. You should resize the image and create a new image for the thumbnail.

These images all take a very long time to load. Most of the files are up to 500 kilobytes in size, which is half a megabyte. Therefore, loading a small bunch of these on your website has taken me about ten minutes. My connection is not up to speed at the moment. Think of all the people on slower connections trying to load these large PNG files. It is the equivalent of downloading an audio file.

The Twilight blend is almost a whole megabyte in size. You should save your images as an optimised JPEG instead of a PNG, especially when the PNG is so large in size.

The preview for the userlookup can be on the same page as the code.

Resources

The emoticons don’t have a transparent background and they should, so that they can be used on a background of any colour.

The stock images should open in a new window using target="_blank". Also, this image loads as a thumbnail. This image is also quite blurry. Otherwise, the other stock images are of great quality and very useful.

Writings

I won’t be going through this section as I have already seen a lot of it.

Hosting

This is a separate site so I won’t review it.

Originality & Creativity

You’ve got a lot of original content but there’s a few celebrity images that can still be removed.

A lot of your graphics are creative but try and create some variety in the images that you use.

Organisation & Errors

Fairly well organised. A few spelling/grammar errors here and there.

Overall Comment

You should do something about those images that take a while to load. Create proper thumbnails for the images, so that whole images don’t have to load. Also create the links so that they open in a new window.

Try to save images as optimised JPEGs from time to time as they can be a lot smaller in file size. A lot of your graphics pages exceed the limit of this analyser.

I think you could design a layout that’s a bit more interesting with a bit more colour. You have done a good job with the elements of this layout such as centering, though.

I don’t feel that much has changed since your last review overall, but do keep up the great work.

Rating

(out of 5)