Review: Emily and Josie @ Teenage.Kicks

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Site Name: Teenage.Kicks
Owner: Emily and Josie
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 11th March 2009

Site Name

It’s alright. Sounds a bit corny but it’s okay.

Coding and Validation

Your coding has 27 errors and 1 warning.

Your CSS has just 1 error being in your coding – you should write <style type="text/css"> instead of just <style>.

After that your CSS will be validated! Also, to make things easier, I suggest you try external CSS. It puts your style in a separate document so pages are easier to edit.

Back to your coding. In your coding you have the following for an image:

<img src="http://i461.photobucket.com/albums/qq340/teenagekick_2008/TK11.png" position:absolute; left:0px;">

You’re forgetting a small part which I have indicated in bold below – you’re specifying a style! Also, you need an alt tag on your image. This is what it should be like:

<img src="http://i461.photobucket.com/albums/qq340/teenagekick_2008/TK11.png" style="position:absolute; left:0px;" alt="layout">

You are forgetting to end the link tag after Emily’s name. This:

Made by <a href="http://walkinthesun.webs.com">Emily with <b>with alot</b> of help from <a href="http://distance.embrrace.com/">.</a>

should be:

Made by <a href="http://walkinthesun.webs.com">Emily</a> with <b>with alot</b> of help from <a href="http://distance.embrrace.com/">[name here]</a>

The following needs to be edited so that the text in bold is added:

<script src="http://www.freewebs.com/p.js" type="text/javascript">

As generally you need to specify JavaScript types.

With your Fast Online Users script, place the URL in quotation marks. All links in your coding should be quoted, just like many other values. You also need to add type="text/javascript" to that.

In your Cbox code, allowtransparency="yes" is actually invalid coding. Your choice to remove that or not. Since they gave you a snippet you might not want to.

You have a bunch of line breaks and then an ending div, when you’ve already ended it before the breaks. You should remove the one before the line breaks.

You need to add type="text/javascript" to your Freewebs sticker code as well – unfortunately they have given you an invalid code.

You’ve put a </center> when you haven’t begun to center anything, so look at what you’re centering and make sure you put that code in.

You also have </div></div> when you only need one.

If you fix all these errors, you will have validated CSS and HTML (and you can stick a fancy badge on your site to show it off).

Browser Compatibility & Usability

Looking in Browsershots.org, only your header image is centered. Your actual content isn’t centered. Thought it might look fine in your resolution, it doesn’t in others.

Your header image is way too big. I have one of the biggest resolutions, and still, your header takes up my entire screen. Your header needs to be resized. BIG TIME.

If I was using a small laptop, your header image alone would take up my screen. It’s just too big and will take a while to load because of that.

Navigation’s in a nice spot, but it would be nice if the links were a bit bigger and centered. Try semantic CSS block navigation.

Font size is good – I can read it.

I mentioned your content isn’t centered. Have a go at using div containers, which will center your layout altogether.

Layout

Like I mentioned, you really need to cut down the size of your header. A large image can take a long time to load as well as being in the way of things. I don’t like to scroll a lot to see the content on your page, so it’s best you resize it.

Personally, I don’t like Zac Efron and the image of him with his shirt half-off is a bit uncomfortable – also because it’s a large image.

Using celebrity images is not very original. Too many people use them. And if you’re not getting permission from the person who took the photo of him, it’s considered illegal to be using it.

The layout isn’t horrible though. I like the blending of the photos and the font – but the image on the right doesn’t match up at all, because it’s not from the same shoot. It looks out of place and the layout would look neater with just the photos of Zac in the stripy shirt. And of course, if the image was resized.

The image of Zac on the far left looks a bit pixelated. I don’t know if it’s because of the stripy overlay or just the image quality.

The CSS is okay but I think the blue for the links could be a bit darker. Try #6090B8.

Content

Resources

Resources are divided into Emily’s and Josie’s resources. The ‘about me’ headers by Emily are plain. I was expecting something with backgrounds and more colour. These just look like ‘About Me’ written in funky font.

On the backgrounds page, you’ve written:

I Made Most Of These Others I Just Edited
Upload Them To Photobucket To Use :)

You don’t need to capitalise every word in what you write.
If you just edited someone’s backgrounds and you didn’t make them – you shouldn’t be redistributing their work after editing it. You wouldn’t like it if I took something belonging to you, edited it and distributed it on my site, would you?

So try making your own backgrounds. The ones you have here are okay, but I don’t know which ones are your own. These backgrounds also won’t tile properly.

On your brush packs page, the first link is broken. Also, when you write:

Made using & for photofilter but you could use on ps/psp ect
Give credit if you use & comment c-box!

“Made using” doesn’t make sense. And you should capitalise Photofilter (I think it should be Photofiltre), and PS/PSP.
ect should be etc

The second set of brushes (the only one that works) is rather plain. I don’t really like the jigsaw puzzle piece; it looks cut off, like you’ve just copied and pasted it.

On the layouts page you don’t need to capitalise every word of every sentence. It looks silly, not to mention it’s incorrect.
These layouts are just MySpace layouts. They’re simple and don’t require much knowledge of coding at all.

Moving to Josie’s graphics now.

Josie’s ‘about me’ graphics are much better, they look smoother and have a shadow effect on them. I still think that having this sort of thing is too simple, and most people don’t use signs anymore.

I don’t even know what these comment boxes are. I’m guessing they’re for MySpace or something like that? Well, not everyone uses MySpace, so clearer instructions on how these work would be better.

Josie makes layouts for MySpace as well. They very simple and the only thing that seems to change is the background. (Sorry, I’m unfamiliar with how MySpace works.)
The backgrounds are very nice though, and it’s nice you made them yourself, Josie. I think they could be offered as backgrounds alone.

Sammii’s Corner

I’d like to make a note that this link is off alignment.

I don’t know who Sammii is or if you’re actually referring to a person here. The images made by “Sammii” are well made but the quality isn’t good; the images are grainy.
Brittney should be Britney
Aguleria should be Aguilera

Fiction

I’m looking at the only ‘fiction’ piece here. And I get a popup when I click it. Popups are very annoying. What kind of fiction is this? I thought I’d be looking at a story.

Well, it’s one of those fill-in things that make a story for you. Nice. The story isn’t my style. It’s not badly written, but you could do a proofread and correct some grammar/spelling mistakes.

Website

There’s nothing much on this page. It seems pretty much like the statistics in your sidebar.

You’re lacking a credits page. You only have one credit in your sidebar. You haven’t credited your host, or Cbox. Make sure you credit everything!

Originality & Creativity

The story was original, that was about it. You had quite a bit of content that I’ve already seen on other sites – nothing too original.

There was only a bit of creativity in your layout. I think you could try coming up with more original things. More fiction would be good, but make your own character names instead of getting the visitors to fill it in :)

Organisation & Errors

The ‘more’ in your sidebar for affiliates is a broken link.

You have the following written in your site statistics in the sidebar – and I mentioned in your coding how to correct that.

Layout: Made by Emily with with alot of help from .

Also, there are spelling/grammar errors on your pages and in your fiction that you need to fix.

Overall Comment

Emily and Josie, your site isn’t horrible, but it needs to build up on content. Try making more graphics that are more original and perhaps, if you’re really into writing, write more articles, or stories, things original like that.

You don’t have a great deal of coding errors and your coding seems to be quite up to scratch, but to get it full validated you obviously have to fix those errors.

Please, please, please, please make your header image smaller. It’s just much too large and I’m not really liking scrolling on every page I navigate to.

That’s all the suggestions I have. You just really need to make more content that’s more original. I’m sure you’re a fan of the celebrities, but there are legal stock images out there that are also very lovely.

Good luck with your site!

Rating
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(out of 5)

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