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Site Name: Artificial Conspiracy
Owner: Diana
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 26th January 2009
Site Name
As much as I like the name, I have to say that Artificial Conspiracy is too long.
Coding and Validation
Your coding has 54 errors. You have a character encoding, which is good, but you’re forgetting your doctype. This is what you need at the beginning of every document, before <html>:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
You have the least number of errors in HTML 4.01 Transitional. I highly suggest you switch to this from whatever you are adjusted to. This means you will also need to get out of the iframes.
In your <head> section, you have trailing backslashes before the ending bracket, such as:
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”stylesheet.css” />
You should remove these as they should not be used with your doctype, only in XHTML.
With your first div, you have put in the wrong symbol and this is what it should have:
left:650; overflow:auto; background-color: transparent”
Unfortunately your music player is causing 22 errors. Funnily enough.
Your Freewebs sticker is also part of the problem, the script language should be text/JavaScript and not just JavaScript. Your other scripts like online users are also a problem.
For the remaining problems you should check that all tags are closed and you’re not using invalid coding.
Your CSS has just 5 errors. One in your stylesheet is caused by no hash in front of your f7f7f7 background colour.
The other errors are not in your stylesheet but on your main page. You have not added units (such as px) to your width, and from top and left values. Also, you’ve written 50x instead of 50px.
Just fix those and your CSS will be fine!
Browser Compatibility & Usability
According to Browsershots.org your site looks the same in most browsers.
Your navigation is an imagemap. Sometimes people have images disabled (as silly as it sounds). Consider alternate navigation in your sidebar, or try semantic CSS block navigation.
Your text is a good colour and size and it’s easy to read.
Unfortunately you’re using iframes which is not a good idea. I’ll be outlining this in the layout section below.
You don’t have auto-starting music (thank goodness) but the music player is eating up loading time for your site, and not many people like music on a site anyway. They usually listen to their own music.
Layout
You’re using iframes, which is a pain in the ass. They drive search engines crazy because it’s like choking a single page into a box. And how would I save a single page to my bookmarks if it’s caught in an iframe?
When you have a redirection URL, it isn’t great either.
You can achieve the same look with divs. Iframes are old and annoying and not the way to go. Your iframe has a HUGE height, obviously to prevent a second scrollbar – but the result of this is that your site takes longer than necessary to load.
When I’m halfway down a page and I press “Back”, I have to scroll up to see the beginning of the content. This kind of thing is not user friendly. Iframes are not very professional. Your site looks great, and you should consider converting to divs.
Continuing on the aesthetics of your layout, I really like the look. The colours, firstly, are a great choice. Everything looks good against the black. Your layout image is really nice. I like how the text follows the shape of the curves, and how the dim smoky-type brush adds contrast to the bold colours.
I think it’s great how you kept everything like your background simple because the image already has a great effect. However your background should be the same colour as your layout image background – #191919 instead of #131313.
The CSS looks great; no complaints there. It’s an excellent neat layout, apart from the iframes.
Content
Site
I’m really impressed by your autobiography. It’s written well but there are just a few things to correct:
much so should be so much
tv should be TV
all times should be all types.
Wahooo! I have to agree with you – Jonas Brothers – I cannot stand those unattractive guys any more. There’s nothing great about them at all. Humph!
On your credits page you have a ‘back to site info’ link. You don’t have one on your autobiography page.
The credits are great and neatly set out; you even credit what you’ve used. You should credit each DeviantArt user, not just DeviantArt. Also, you should credit Freewebs/Webs, and Co.Nr.
Your past layouts look pretty good from the shots. Maybe add a little information on each?
Tutorials
With these little image previews, some aren’t the same size so try and make them the same size.
We’ll look at your ‘Advanced Picture’ tutorials first. I hate being taken to another page of links. It’s like having unnecessary subpages and categorising way too much. You have ‘Back to Tutorials’, then ‘Icon Enhance 1′. Perhaps the link back to the tutorials page should be last.
Well, the first tutorial here looks good and it’s neatly set out with clear instructions. You really should mention the program you’re using.
The second one is also good and I like the effect of how the girl is highlighted as a result, but why didn’t you put the images up on the actual page?
You should give all these tutorials names, not just number them. With your icon tutorial, why does it say ‘add border’ as a heading?
Your CSS tutorials are not bad, but you should be teaching people how to use external stylesheets. Embedded CSS is not good.
Ditch the scrollbar tutorial. Coloured scrollbars are annoying and people tend to make the colours blinding or the bar hard to see, and they only work in Internet Explorer.
The text properties are nice but I can’t see the effect of indenting a paragraph or word spacing.
To your HTML tutorials. A lot of them are just JavaScripts copied off DynamicDrive.com or Javascript Source.
You shouldn’t have a tutorial on iframes. Not only are they annoying as I mentioned, they are also outdated.
The image effects are nice, but not all are handy. Also, not all work in every browser. Some of the transitions don’t work in Firefox. This also isn’t a tutorial, it’s just a bunch of codes.
Some examples would be nice on your link effects. This isn’t a tutorial either.
Ditto for your miscellaneous HTML codes, some of which are JavaScript anyway. And no, do not encourage the use of the no-right-clicking script. What is the effect of this? To stop stealing? People can steal without right-clicking, and there’s only 1% of visitors who are going to steal.
Page transitions might seem cool, but they’re not. They cause the page to load a lot longer than necessary, and are very annoying and hard on the eyes. These types of things are really outdated.
What are these symbols for? They look like normal letters – E, F, G, H, J, K, L.. And I can’t even see your textarea boxes, only the scrollbar. When I look at this page in Internet Explorer, it works fine and I see what you’re up to. Now the thing is, do not give out a tutorial if it’s not guaranteed it’ll work in every browser (or at least the common ones)! See what I mean by things being outdated? And the tiny font in the textarea boxes? Too tiny.
The text effects are silly. These are not tutorials, just copy-and-paste codes. They’re too simple or, like the marquees, annoying as hell.
The JavaScripts are alright but as I mentioned, they’re just copied.
The MS Paint tutorial is alright, even though people should already know the tools and what they do. Also, if you choose the right colour for Bitmap, it shouldn’t have that result shown.
The miscellaneous tutorials are okay. You have a warning on your bullets one, that they might not work in all browsers. This would be appropriate on a lot of other tutorials.
You don’t really need the Cbox tutorials. Cbox is pretty self explanatory.
Capitalise MySpace on your tutorials. These would be pretty handy for those obsessed; I’m not one of them. You shouldn’t put the code for hiding advertisements if it’s possible your profile can get deleted.
I’m now looking through your PSP tutorials. Your iframe is really annoying me. Every time I press ‘back’ to go to the list of tutorials, I have to scroll up. Bah. I know I said that, but I’m just making a point.
The ‘Add border’ tutorial is useless. On your ‘Basic Blending’ tutorial, it’d be nicer to show the pictures on the actual page. I don’t like clicking ‘this’.
On your ‘Color Plus’ tutorial, the colours don’t look enhanced to me. Things look smoother but it’s not so bright. I would think of a different name for this.
Ironic. On your ‘Glow Effect’ tutorial, you have a photo of the dreaded Jonas Brothers. Thought you didn’t like them?
Your layout image doesn’t appear on your ‘Halftone’ tutorial. Also, this effect isn’t nice on this photo.
Your tutorial on improving makeup is good. Gah.. saves my nightmares from that crappy tutorial I saw on another site some days ago that had this result for improved makeup.. gah.. anyway.. moving on..
‘Sepia toning’ looks great. So does ‘Transparent blog’ but it should be ‘Transparent panels’ or something. Not blog. A blog is an online-diary, weblog. Wouldn’t have any relation to the graphic.
Explain the effect of ‘Unsharp mask’. The result looks rather pixelated. Like a crappy JPEG.
Most of these tutorials are great. Others are just outdated, old, silly, or self explanatory. In a lot of them, the celebrity images should be replaced with legal images.
Resources
For your small text brushes, you don’t have a zipped download, whereas the other brush packs do. These brushes look pretty good. The link at the top of the back should be ‘Back to Resources’.
The colour palettes are nice but people should be able to pick their own colours. Again you should write ‘Back to Resources’ rather than “Visitor Content”. I think this needs to be fixed on every page.
It’s nice you’re offering these fonts directly to Dafont.com, but then again you’re wasting your time here. People can just go to Dafont themselves, and often redistribution isn’t allowed.
‘Free programs’ is just a page of links.
The icon textures are lovely but it would be nice to credit on this page where the stock images were from, unless they’re your own – you should state so anyway.
The backgrounds are nice but you should get rid of the animated fluoro ones. Since when were flashy GIFs in fashion?! And like I said above, credit your sources on this page. Did you really make every single one of these without using resources? You got some images from somewhere, right? 
The graphics are alright but music player skins aren’t good. Music on a website can be annoying.
If you don’t hold credit for your icon images, then credit them! Also, you have some celebrity images here, and I don’t know if you’re aware, but using celebrity images is illegal. As you’ll find from this article. You’re editing a photo that isn’t yours and redistributing it.
I don’t like the link rollovers at all. The colours are much too bright and animated things on websites are a big distraction. Yes, my eyes are hurting from looking at these GIFs all in one spot.
I can’t see any asterisks beside any of your pixels because the text is black. Black on black means I can’t see they’re there. Also, do not display and redistribute images on your site that aren’t yours! You should remove any of these images that you did not make. It’s not original and it’s not right.
Ditto for the photos. If you didn’t take the picture, don’t put it here without crediting.
I like the range of colours in the smilies. All these say ‘smiley set #1′ though. They seem rather ordinary, nothing too exciting.
This uncoded layout has celebrity images in it, which, as I mentioned, are illegal. It’s not a bad layout and it’s of good quality, but how is it supposed to work? As a header image, it’s too large. See what I mean?
Originality & Creativity
There were definitely some original things here, but that’s not to say they were good. You had a lot of content displayed that wasn’t even yours. You could really remove these. You should not redistribute content that’s not yours!
You’ve got a creative layout and your content shows how creative you can be. However you need to take into account that things like animated graphics and some tutorials and codes can have an annoying effect on visitors.
Add more original things like photography and use your own photos, or legal stock images rather than celebrity images.
Organisation & Errors
Your English (grammar, spelling, punctuation) was up to par. I’m impressed. I didn’t have to go through every tutorial knowing there’d be mistakes. They were well written!
Hardly any errors or broken links found. You did a pretty great job.
Things were well organised but some links like ‘Back to..’ could be placed at the end of the page.
Overall Comment
Diana, you’ve got an amazing site but you really need to get out of the iframes. They annoyed me a lot throughout your review. It’s hard to bookmark single pages, open more than one page, your tiny scrollbar was annoying.. they’re not very professional.
You need to remove all graphics that aren’t yours and replace celebrity graphics. It’s hard, but your site will be more original without them.
You need to also remove a lot of tutorials that are useless. They’re old or don’t work, or are annoying. People only look at tutorials they’ll use. And they’ll only use useful ones.
It’s a lot of work to fix, but it will make your site a lot better and more user friendly. Good luck!
