back to Completed Reviews
Site Name: Pretty In Pink
Owner: Jen
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 27th December 2008
Site Name
Pretty in Pink is a phrase I’ve heard often but I haven’t heard of it as a site name. It’s quite cute and simple. Your URL is a little long though.
Coding and Validation
Your coding doesn’t look awful at a glance.. When I check your coding in the W3C Markup Validation service, you have just 14 errors. Most of them aren’t your fault but you are missing some important things.
You don’t have:
- an opening
<html>tag. - an opening
<head>tag. - closing
</head>tag. - an opening
<body>tag.
Your character encoding is correct but get rid of that backslash here:
...charset=utf-8" />
Because you’re in HTML, you don’t use those backslahes. Unfortunately since you use Cutenews, it makes your coding have a lot of errors as it writes your entries into XHTML, not HTML. This means it’s hard to get your site validated without converting. Try this Tutorialtastic tutorial if you’re interested.
Looking quickly through the errors there seem to be some places you’ve gone wrong with divs – be careful and make sure you’re ending each one.
Your CSS has 16 errors… but you have over 100 warnings.
Firstly, why do you have an external CSS file, and you still have CSS embedded into your page? It’s very messy. You need only to change your CSS file, and you should really remove all those embedded pieces of styling that are on the page itself. You should really take a look at the errors for yourself and get them fixed. A lot of them are caused by using the same colour for some links.
Other errors are caused by not quoting font names with spaces, like Century Gothic, which should be “Century Gothic”.
In other places you’re forgetting the hash (#) for colours.
Also, text-transform: normal should be text-transform: none.
If you used CSS from Divergente, you should link to the site itself, not just say ‘Divergente’. And if you used it, does that mean you didn’t make it yourself? So am I reviewing someone else’s work?
Nevertheless, you still need to work on your own coding errors and CSS.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
According to Browsershots.org your site looks good in all the common browsers.
The navigation is nice, but it’s not in a good spot. It should be first thing on the sidebar, or placed horizontally.
The default text is legible but I’d suggest making it a tad bigger.
Layout
Firstly, remove the animated title bar. It’s really distracting and annoying, because anything that moves will attract attention.
Secondly, you didn’t make your layout yourself, so there’s no reason for me to review someone else’s work. It’s really unfortunate and while I like the layout, I can’t really make any further comment as it’s not your work.
Generally, make your own. The layout would be better centered because the right side looks cut off. The CSS looks okay.
Content
Your sidebar doesn’t need the welcome message. It is hardly read, and generally people want to get into browsing the site right away. Your webmiss section needs to be shortened a little bit as it’s only supposed to be a summary of your webmiss page.
Your navigation should be first up on your sidebar so visitors don’t have to scroll to navigate. Also, if you don’t need a co webmiss, don’t say it! Your tagboard also needs to be adjusted because the links at the bottom are cut off.
Keep the disclaimer short please, no need to ramble on. Don’t say ‘we’, you are the only owner.
Visitor
Well, it seems pretty organised – your stuck should be you’re stuck.
I love the brushes, they’re really quite cute. The only problem I have is that they’re saved in .bmp format, which, unfortunately, sucks. Save them as .png instead, or .jpg. Bitmap files load very slowly.
Don’t say ‘credit us’. You’re the only owner, so it should be credit me.
I haven’t seen blinkies in a while. I expected them to be small and cute, but these are large and I don’t really see what people would use them for, so they aren’t really useful. The colours also aren’t that great. However, since you’ve made them yourself, a tutorial on how to make these would be handy since some people might not know how to make one.
Celebrity graphcs – no, no, no. I am not sure if you know, but they are actually illegal. Read my article for more information.
The blends aren’t bad, but don’t save them in bitmap format. They simply take way too long to load. Some of these aren’t too great. The Miley Cyrus one needs to be cut better – you can still see while outlines around her.
Your Twilight blend doesn’t fully load; it must have timed out when you were uploading.
The animation on your icons isn’t nice. It’s too flashy and fast and not too good on the eyes. If they weren’t animated they could still look great. These graphics are also of celebrities. I know you can do a lot better by using legal images. Try Stock Xchng or Freefoto.
Askin should be Asking.
Coded layouts.. the Selena Gomez one isn’t bad, but it’s falsely centered. Try Tutorialtastic for tutorials on that. The CSS for the layout isn’t bad. The graphic though, is not so well outlined. There are still white bits around the images. Also, the code doesn’t appear in the box, if that was your intention.
The Taylor Swift layout follows the same sort of styling but I have to say, the colours look a lot better.
Ah, tutorials. You need to organise this page more. There are a lot of dodgy gaps – there isn’t a gap before your ‘Photofiltre’ heading, for example.
Miscannelous should be Miscellaneous.
On your first tutorial on imagemapping, it’s written fairly well. When you say ‘select this tool’, circle it with a colour like red, and bold, to make it obvious and not confusing.
I can’t say your blending on MS Paint tutorial is the greatest because the example you’ve given isn’t good. The backgrounds of the images are different colours so it simply looks like you’ve stuck the images together. Also, no celebrity images should be used!
The grayscale tutorial isn’t useful; you’re essentially telling someone how to click a menu function.
On your reflecting text tutorial, ok should be OK and Viola should be Voila.
This tutorial is quite good.
The basic HTML is boring. I have seen these everywhere and the thing is, they don’t help at all. People who know webdesign know these already, and people who know nothing can’t learn solely from these. Think about it; they’re not really useful.
The installing fonts tutorial is good but screenshots included would make it excellent! Also, capitalise WordPad.
Your quotes page is empty!
A note on your pages I’ve seen so far. On your tutorials page, there are more links to each tutorial. Consider putting them all on the ‘visitor’ page to get rid of this subpage, or add ‘tutorials’ to the main navigation. Visitors don’t usually like to click so many links to get to one page.
Webmiss
Now, I notice that you have a few facts up first. They don’t really flow. ‘Either is fine’ doesn’t flow on to ‘I love saying..’
You should make these facts into a little list, or more paragraphs to make it easier to read. The whole page would look better and easier to read with more paragraphs.
These are the few spelling errors:
ALOT should be A LOT
girlygirl should be girly girl
genious should be genius [ironic, Jen! Quick, fix it!]
theres alot should be there’s a lot.
Site
One error on the page: alot your should be a lot, you’re.
Your affiliates page is nice but if you’re putting the owner as well as the site name, it’s best to put them nicely in a table. Otherwise, pick just the owner name, or just the site name – makes things look neater.
Your affiliates rules need to be edited. Having to love Twilight is a silly rule. We’re affiliates, what if I said I don’t like Twilight? It’s not really fair; friends don’t have to like the same things, you know?
Please capitalise Freewebs and Piczo.
appreciatte should be appreciate.
Your email should be displayed at the bottom of this page. I didn’t realise it wasn’t linked to a page, so I was confused. Put it on it’s own page with any other ways to contact you, or in your sidebar.
Credits.. no, no, no. ALOT should be A LOT!
And also, credit what you’ve used, not just the site. For example – brushes from Swimchick.
Ah, FAQ, I really like reading through these.
well that’s should be Well that’s.
Please capitalise Freewebs, Notepad and Cutenews.
What is this about hosting Cutenews? You can not host Cutenews. You can only get it installed on your server.. what the hell, seriously? Hosting is when you use someone’s space for it, and usually, you can use your own subdomain for it because it’s a flat file system.
Essentially.. I think you mean ‘install’.
Specify the size of the link buttons so people don’t have to check! And some of these don’t look too good so make some more that are better quality.
Right, your site history page is too long. You need to shorten it and keep it to the point. You go off on tangents a lot. Keep it to the site’s history and only briefly outline how you got into webdesign. I know things like this can be hard to keep short, but if it’s too long, no one’s going to read it.
In fact, I skimmed through it. Make sure you check this page for spelling errors because I spotted a few.
Originality & Creativity
To be honest, I would have judged this on your layout.. but you didn’t make it yourself. A lot of your content was generic and boring, and I can’t say I saw much originality. I would say the layout is a creative idea that suits the site, but it’s unfortunate that you didn’t make it yourself.
Organisation & Errors
Generally well organised, but a couple of glitches here and there with things like paragraphing and the way things are put on pages. I didn’t find any broken links or images.
Minimal spelling and grammar errors, although you need to look through the site history page and clean that up; it’s all too much.
Overall Comment
Jen, your site is really simple. I like the layout but I really think that with your content, you could make a layout of your own.
I suggest making more unique content. Your tutorials at the moment are the best visitor content you have.
Your site needs a little more ‘oomph’, so to speak. I think that your graphic design skills are good enough for you to make layouts on your own.
You know how to code well, as most of your coding is correct and errors are mostly created by Cutenews. However it does need tweaking along with your CSS. You don’t need further CSS in your files if it’s already in a .css file.
To improve your site I suggest making your own layout to start off with, and making graphics with something less generic (no celebrity photos). Good luck with your site.
1 Comment so far — leave one?
Lee says:
Hehe, Jen HAS improved a lot! I like how you’re not too harsh on the rough content, Georgina.
Reply to this comment »