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Site Name: So Lovely
Owner: Ivy
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 20th April 2009
Site Name
It’s easy to remember and it’s nice; no big deal.
Coding and Validation
Your coding has 172 errors 7 warnings.
I don’t know why, but you’re using a doctype of XHTML 1.1, when XHTML 1.0 is a lot easier to validate to. First you should change your doctype to this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
Perhaps that is why you are having so much trouble with validation.
And as for a character encoding, you should place it in the <head> section:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
Those are the major things to fix.
Other minor things – you should have an alt attribute for all images, even if they are blank, like alt="".
All <br> should be <br /> as that is what it changes to in XHTML.
It’s your job to have your site validated, because this allows it to be read better in browsers and so that browsers can process your site correctly. It is always more pleasing to have valid coding.
Your CSS is valid.
You have some warnings though. Most of them are because you’re using the same colour in two contexts, and also because you should place fonts like Trebuchet MS in quotes: “Trebuchet MS”. Fonts with spaces in them should be quoted.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
Your site looks different in Firefox and Internet Explorer according to Browsershots.org. I’ll go through this in detail later.
I don’t like the width of the header image, with your site name. It’s much too wide. Not just the image itself, but the font style. The writing is just really stretched out and in-your-face. It’s nice, but the font is just too big.
The font size is fine and the navigation is easy to see.
Layout
It’s neat and well organised, but there’s so much stuff.
The colour scheme is rather odd. Puple, blue, olive green and pink. It’s the pink that’s really clashing with the rest. The pink in the words “So-Lovely”.
The background is nice, a subtle addition.
You don’t need two sidebars; it looks like there’s just a lot to take in all at once. It may be organised, but it isn’t aesthetically pleasing.
There’s so much content in the sidebars it seems like you just put it there to fill up space. Having one would be a lot better. You don’t need the ‘owner’ information. There’s barely anything there.
I guess you need the ads, but to be honest, the animated ones are annoying. The non-animated ones are fine, though. Animation means distraction. Distraction isn’t good on a website.
Content
Ivy
Errors on this page:
is residing should be reside
I hae should be I have
the only child should be an only child.
So-Lovely
Nice and well organised page. Your credits for Adobe programs should link to Adobe.com at least!
awwhile should be a while
awhile should be a while.
Visitor
On the hosting page:
two week should be two weeks
server down should be server crash
Sorrys should be Sorry.
Nothing to complain about here; you have fair rules and all.
To be honest, the icons are very boring and monotonous. A lot of them are just cropped images, with no effects on them at all. The nature ones are okay.
Many of the others use celebrity images, which is illegal unless you’re paying for the use of the images. They’re also not very original.
Try using more effects on your icons and making them more interesting; not just cropping them.
You also don’t need to categorise the icons. There aren’t a huge amount, and you could fit more onto one page anyway.
Quotes – these are nicer than what I usually see. They’re also colourful and neat. However, they’re pretty useless, really. What can you use them for?
For the SOTM, I don’t see why people have to blog about the competition just to enter… that’s just a personal opinion though.
Links
Why do you have some link buttons for links and some just text links? Keep them consistent and just have text links.
Contact
Fairly superflous page; you already have this information on your ‘Ivy’ page anyway. I suppose the form is handy.
Originality & Creativity
I didn’t really see much of this. Your site was pretty empty; pretty much just like a blog site. Nothing was really too amazing, that’s all.
Organisation & Errors
Well organised. Not a problem at all. No broken images or links were found.
There were just a few spelling and grammar errors which can be easily fixed!
Overall Comment
You have a well organised but small site, Ivy. I think you did a great job in organising, but there isn’t much on your site to look at.
You should work on the icons that you have and make them more interesting. If you’re going to have visitor content at least make it worthwhile!
There’s nothing much to improve on; you have a fairly neat site but it wasn’t a big “wow”. Just try to get your site validated sometime, and if you’re making visitor content, keep it clean and impressive.
