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Site Name: Video Strip
Owner: Fairy
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 14th February 2009
Site Name
It’s cool, I like it! It’s easy to remember as well.
Coding and Validation
Your coding has 23 errors. Not bad but there’s a few potential issues you must fix.
No doctype and character encoding! You must have a doctype at the beginning of every page, before the <html> tag:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
HTML 4.01 Transitional is the best doctype for your site, and that’s the one I’ve given you.
In any place you have images, you should have alt attributes in them too. Like so:
<img src="http://yoursite.com/image.jpg alt="a photo of me">
It’s tedious and annoying but you must. Even if you have nothing to put, leave it blank as long as the attribute is there.
Your CSS is validated. Good job!
I won’t go into detail on coding. You didn’t even make the layout yourself. I’ll discuss that in the layout section.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
According to Browsershots.org your site looks the same in most browsers.
Pretty good! And the layout’s centered.. yep, yep.
The navigation’s pretty obvious and the font size is okay.
Layout
I can’t review the layout because it isn’t yours and you’ve credited Relentless Designs for it.
That said, you should really make your own layout because there’s a chance other people will have the same one.. which is drastically unoriginal.
Not to mention that using celebrity graphics is illegal.
Sorry, but I really can’t say more on it.
Content
The link button in the sidebar could really go on a separate page. And the tagboard colours and size could be adjusted to fit the layout better.
Webmistress and Site
On your About Me page:
arctic should be Arctic [don't want to offend the Eskimos].
On your My Video History page:
who this site is hosted by should be which this site is hosted on.
Your credits page is good.. don’t forget to link your host (even if it’s yours) and Cbox as well.
youtube should be Youtube
thankyou should be thank you.
Yes, a form would be good for your contact page!
Fanvideo info
On the backup account page, don’t use ‘here’ as an anchor text. It looks unprofessional.
Ditto for the contests. And perhaps it would be an idea to link Vimeo.
The fandoms.. well, I thought it would be nice to link to some videos you’ve made?
With your FAQ, capitalise Freewebs and Piczo.
Capitalise YouTube on your subscriptions. And why don’t you link all your subscribers like you link your subscriptions?
Everything else in this section is just information, and it’s all pretty ordinary.
Win an Award
This is really interesting.. a video competition!
You have a form to submit a video. Have one on your contact page too!
I really like the idea of these videos but why can’t the fandoms be of any movie, making it more broad? Maybe you’d get more entries?
Archives
Self explanatory.
Extra
Try and organise the affiliates page better. Make the buttons of the same size and align them nicely.
The rest of the links are pretty much self explanatory.
Originality & Creativity
I like the original idea of your site, but you need to express your site more in that way. I think it would be nice if you put the actual videos on your site rather than the links.
Having a combination of an info site as well as having different sorts of challenges is a nice idea.
Organisation & Errors
Fairly well organised, and I like how most of the links are in alphabetical order.
No huge errors or broken links/images.
Overall Comment
Fairy, I really like your site idea of videos and having video challenges but there’s a fair bit of improvement needed.
You need to start by making your own layout to make your videos more presentable and mean a lot more to your audience. Basically, the idea of your site being a video-related one needs to be expressed more. I recommend showing the actual videos on your site.
I didn’t really get any ‘wow’ out of your site. It didn’t really interest me hugely. Rather than ‘collecting’ videos, you should post them and write information on why you made it, how, and resources and such. As in, information on all your videos. An insight into how you made them and a commentary on it, something like that.
I have the issue with making fan videos because of copyright policies, but that’s really you taking your own risk. I personally prefer spoofs where the maker acts it out with friends – actually making and filming their own video and not just putting things together.
Your site is fairly well organised, but making your own layout and showing some videos would be better.
