back to Completed Reviews
Site Name: Empty Pride
Owner: Eliza
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 16th September 2008
Site Name
I really like the name Empty Pride. It’s creative and really suits your layout (this, obviously from first impressions), not to mention is quite a mature and unique name. I still get a little confused as I look around and think your site name is ‘pride’. I assume that you didn’t want a long URL, which is a good thought; though without a whole word in the URL it can get a bit confusing.
Layout
I like the header image and how there’s variety of colour without too much clash. The tan/brown shades are nice and contrast with the splashes of blue and pink. The font you’ve used for the layout name is nice, as is the font for your URL, which is a nice touch. I particularly like how your navigation is blue which brings out the blue in the layout, and the hover is brown which is really good!
I think you’ve also done a good job with the edge of the layout, making it less obvious, and your background is consistent and it doesn’t show evidence of tiling which is excellent. Considering my screen resolution is quite large, too. I like the way the bottom of the header fades into the sidebar.
The site looks good in the common browsers Firefox and Internet Explorer, so I won’t run your site through browsershots to check for the rest because I’m sure they’ll work – you can try it yourself if you like, though.
Onto your CSS now. The brown background for your content is a little too dark. I’m not sure how the layout would look if you didn’t have a background (like on your sidebar); probably not that good. I think the background just needs to be a bit lighter.
The headers are good. I really like how you’re picking colours from your layout. Again though, they’re a little dark. I would suggest using an image as a background for the header, something with like a simple brush or blend of colour.
Other than that, excellent job!
Content
In your sidebar, your credits link confused me because it was so close to your buttons for w3 counter and spam poison. Perhaps you could move it up a line and write ‘Credits: here’ (change ‘here’ into a link).
GIRL:
Your mini-biography was interesting! I find that I’m also quite quiet around new people. I think you’ve done a good job here, shame you couldn’t find any songs starting with Q, X and Z (that you like, anyway).
STUFF:
I’m not really sure if you should put a link to your ‘Terms Of Use’, I suggest putting them at the top of this page so people see it before scrolling down. You know visitors, they just grab, and the silly-minded ones just grab without having common sense not to steal.
I don’t use AIM, but I always wonder why the icons for AIM are usually animated. It’s sort of distracting seeing them all in a clump and animated, but they all have a nice animation individually. They’re well made.
Animated avatars – nice that you’ve separated them from the non-animated ones. Your non-animated ones are also nice, it’s good to see you’re not using mass amounts of celebrity images too. Top job.
Nice wallpapers! I downloaded the ‘Wonderwall’ one. It has your old URL on it though. I’m also curious as to why you moved, because people usually prefer a domain to a subdomain. 
As for the signs, I know the cropped thumbnail looks nice, but I’d prefer to have the whole image as a thumbnail. I have no idea what the whole image looks like from just a cropping. Other than that, your signs were well made; I liked the use of brushes.
Ah, so your backgrounds are for icons. I personally don’t use these and don’t find them useful, but your icon backgrounds are quite good.
Your brushes are very nice and colourful, and I think you’ve really done a good job with it! More variety and sets with similar colours would be nice to see.
Your fonts are nice but a few of them have broken links – fonts from Carpenter right through to Zebra are all leading me to 404s.
Your layouts are great. I think you should be more specific, instead of just telling people to comment you, let them know why. Because you want to know who’s using your stuff, etc etc.
PSDs and stock images are good, I like the tree ones. Once again with the thumbnails, it’d be better if they were of the whole image.
I loved your tutorials, there were quite a few of them and they were all well set out and informative. Your screenshots were excellent.
WWW:
A brief history to the site – good! And it’s nice that you offer the code for your link buttons. Your past layouts were good but I expected to see some more information on them and what they included. I was very impressed with your credits.
I had a few issues with your WWW section though. Don’t use Paint was stated in one of your affiliation rules. Why not? I understand that you may not be able to make good layouts in Paint, but sometimes they are needed! Sometimes for pixelling – good sites out there use Paint for that. Your rule seems a bit strict, so maybe you should just mention having a good quality layout is necessary.
Another issue is regarding your layout coding. You mentioned not to steal your coding. Someone may choose to copy your coding to use for their own layout, just replace the images or something. Your layout coding is not yours, because it’s written in HTML, a language. You didn’t write the HTML codes, and people may have the same functioning styled layout as yours, meaning you’d have the same or similar coding.
I just wanted to point that out; because even if someone stole your source code, it would be very hard to find out. Previously it was a massive issue on the web, but now it isn’t, so you shouldn’t worry too much if you are.
Originality
In terms of what sorts of graphics you offer, they’re not really that original; I’ve seen them on sites over and over. However how and what you include in your graphics is original. I did like your layouts a lot, they were unique, and so too was your current website layout.
Errors
Your PSP tutorials page was titled ‘html/css tutorials’. And you’ve spelt ‘skills’ as ‘skillz’ in your ‘www’. And just those minor errors I mentioned above – the whole heap of fonts.
