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Site Name: Kimchi-Ramen
Owner: Erica
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 28th January 2009
Site Name
While Japanese-related things usually interest me, as a site name, Kimchi-Ramen doesn’t. I know ‘ramen’ means noodles or something of the sort, but having such a site name..
Well, it’s hard to remember. My rusty Japanese means I don’t really get the name of your site, and people who don’t know Japanese won’t even get it at all.
Coding and Validation
Your HTML coding has 20 errors and 8 warnings.
First, you have no doctype or character encoding. This is essential for your site to load smoother. The right doctype for your coding is HTML 4.01 transitional, and this is what you need at the beginning of every document:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" >
You also need an alt tag on every image, even if it is blank.
Other errors are caused by your ShoutMix widget and your counter. The & signs should be changed to & to prevent errors.
Notably, the pages that open in your iframes don’t even have proper coding. No <html>, <body>, not even CSS. It’s no wonder your pages look messy and just displayed in default browser text.
Your CSS has 2 errors and 10 warnings. The errors are easy to fix. Simply put px (a unit value) on your div. The warnings are caused by using the same colour for similar parts in your styling.
Your CSS is embedded in your coding. You should (well, must) put it in its own file called css.css or something like that, which you can do by opening Notepad, then saving the document as “css.css” (or something.css, including the quotation marks).
Then you will need to use a code on your page to call on the CSS file:
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”css.css” type=”text/css”>
Browser Compatibility & Usability
Looking at your site at Browsershots.org, things are looking consistent in most browsers.
Your navigation is very annoying, and so are your link hovers. Firstly, why is some navigation for your site in the sidebar, and the rest of the navigation at the top of the layout? Why not just keep it consistent and put all the ‘site’ links on a ‘site’ page?
And secondly, why must you make the link text so large on hover? You can make it stand out by simply changing the colour. By making the text bigger, it dodges the rest of the text, making things look a mess.
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?
You can achieve the same look with divs. Iframes are old and annoying and not the way to go.
Layout
What sort of a layout is this? Maybe the placement of things are alright, but what is with this brush-infested background on top of the stripes? Surely, the stripes were just fine. But this image on top looks like it’s been slapped on randomly.
This “thing” you have in the corner is just annoying. It doesn’t match with anything and it’s chopped off at the sides. How dodgy.
The site name is in rainbow colours. This really does not go with the stripy background. Now, things may have looked simple with just the stripy background, but the truth is, simple doesn’t mean boring.
This <3 thing doesn’t look great on your layout; it looks messy.
It’s a messy layout. That’s all I have to say about it. Even though the CSS colours look okay.
Get out of the iframes, or get rid of them.
Content
With your affiliates, why have so many pending? It wouldn’t look good if all of them rejected you, would it?
Site
I’m going through this section first so I don’t forget anything in your sidebar.
I don’t know why you need to keep this ‘staff’ thing on the top of every page with all the little icons and the annoying scrollbar. Who cares? Why can’t you just stick a list of everyone’s names in the sidebar instead?
On your ‘affiliation application’ page, you don’t even have your CSS customised. Why not?! I also get the feeling things are like this on every page. And in Internet Explorer, your iframe isn’t transparent. Not good. Not good at all.
Instead of having all these “copy and paste and email” forms, you should have an actual form. Try Allforms.Mailjol.
All ‘login’ is is a Cutenews login. Bleh. Who’s going to use this? The staff? Get them to memorise it, then.
The forum is an external link and won’t be reviewed.
Artworks
Needless to say, the default font here is quite boring, because you haven’t used the CSS here. How ugly.
Nice photography! This better be your own. If not, humph; and it shouldn’t be here because it’s wrong to distribute work that’s not yours.
Well, the doodles are more interesting. Even though things are disorganised and you’ve arranged things messily. You all doodle well. Hah.
The sketches are also quite good. ‘Danny’ leads to a broken link.
You guys have such great artwork, it wouldn’t hurt to use these for a layout, you know. 
Graphics
The wallpapers aren’t bad, but they should be of a standard size like 1024 by 768 (pixels).
The icons are okay but pretty simple. Also, these graphics aren’t your own, so credit where you got the images from! You need a proper credits page, and you’re lacking it.
Layouts
Iframes are dodgy. You should code the layout in divs. And your coding for the layout isn’t great. No <html> tag; who knows what other errors there are? Without a proper layout preview, this isn’t great.
Tutorials
Pff, what’s with the navigation? HTML leads to an iframes tutorial, PhotoShop leads to another link.. you can remove these unnecessary and annoying subpages. Visitors don’t like clicking a whole lot of links to get to where they want.
The iframes tutorial isn’t bad, but it should be removed. You can make websites and “display Cutenews” using divs.
The PhotoShop tutorial is okay, but it’s nothing special.
Originality & Creativity
Well, your art was creative and original and I can see you’re trying to be a little ‘different’ to other sites out there, but everything was really boring! You didn’t have much content and your layout was messily put together. Your layout wasn’t creative at all.
Organisation & Errors
Very badly organised, with several errors. Your site looked pretty much a mess and it doesn’t look like there was much time put into it at all.
Overall Comment
Erica (and all your other staff or whatever), your site needs to improve by a long shot. Get the coding up to scratch and make each page look nice.
Work on creating a neater and better set out layout. Use divs instead of iframes. It would be a great idea to use some of your drawings in your layouts. It’s original and no one will have anything like it.
Add more original content and seriously, add CSS to those pages. Organise things more, instead of just sticking divs and iframes everywhere. Good luck with your site.
