back to Completed Reviews
Site Name: Essence of Complexion
Owner: Juniper and Virginia
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 13th February 2009
Site Name
Interesting. Long name but an acronym used in the URL – that’s wise! The name’s quite unique.
Coding and Validation
Your coding has 15 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. And seeing as you don’t have one, this is what should go before <head>:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
You need the proper structure for the rest of your document. Where’s <body>? And where’s the ending tags for that? If you don’t know the essential structure of a HTML document, you’re not going to get anywhere.
And I was talking about the character encoding? Here it is, and it should go in your head section:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" >
Of course your coding is very organised but you’re forgetting things and putting them in the wrong places. Also, where you have your favicon code, remove that / just before the ending bracket. You only put slashes like that in XHTML coding – and you’re in HTML.
Oh, there’s also some trailing backslash where your tracking counter code is.
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 an otter!">
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.
Also, I’m not sure why you have a Freewebs script on your site..
<script src="http://www.freewebs.com/p.js"></script>
..when you’re not on Freewebs! You really don’t need it. 
And you need to specify rows and columns for textareas, like so:
<textarea rows="5" cols="5">
Having said all that about your coding, don’t forget to have </body></html> at the end of your document!
And your CSS? That’s not meant to be where it is. It should go in your head section. And you know what would make things easier? If you had an external stylesheet. That means you don’t have to edit the CSS on every page – only one document!
I do highly recommend an external stylesheet. Speaking of CSS, yours has 8 errors and 9 warnings.
Yuck. A lot of them are to do with your coloured scrollbar, which I suggest you remove. It only works in Internet Explorer (so I can’t see them since I’m a Firefox user) and it’s causing errors. Horribly 
And to be honest I don’t like it at all because I can’t even see your scrollbar; only the arrows. If I wanted to drag the bar to scroll I couldn’t see it!
You have a comma after a:link which is causing a parsing error.
With the warnings, what you should do (and what is correct) is to place any fonts in quotes. Eg. “times new roman”. Particularly those fonts with names more than one word long.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
According to Browsershots.org your site looks the same in most browsers.
While that’s a good thing, and everything looks nice in my resolution (my odd resolution, I should add) of 1152 by 854 pixels.. and it’s looking nice on my other computer of 1024 by 768 pixels.. it doesn’t look too great on a laptop of 800 by 600 pixels. I haven’t gone into detail about the layout yet, but things don’t have to fit in the whole screen. In fact, I think you could narrow your content div a bit. It’s annoying to read long lines especially when your paragraphs are short.
Your navigation is clear but it should be a bit bigger; it’s the navigation!
Your default font is of a good size. I suggest changing ‘Content’ to ‘Visitor’ though.
Layout
It’s cute! It’s so rare that people use animals, especially endangered ones, in their layouts. It reminds me of the site my friend and I opened on endangered species!
It’s a simple layout. I think more effects could be used though; the otters look a little dark. Also, I don’t like the part with your site name. The black doesn’t go well – black text with a white background would be better. Maybe putting the text on its side down the image? That would look rather cool.
In future don’t make headers too high. This one’s high enough. It’s not nice to scroll with a huge header, I’m sure you know.
Your sidebar would look nice starting at the top of the page, next to your image. This image shows you what I mean.
Your CSS is nice but a little more variation would be good. Use some more brown for something like your dotted underlines on the headers.
Content
I don’t think your elite affiliates should be so far down the sidebar! Pop them before your link back button. And I don’t think the linkback button is necessary. If people want to link you they will find it in your navigation.
Sitely
I don’t think requests should be here but let’s take a look. I don’t like the textarea borders – too thick! And the text inside – too small!
It’s a nice idea to have these all in textareas but it doesn’t look too organised. Maybe you should just list what you offer, and let people describe to you how they want things.
I’m not a fan of ‘pickups’. It’s more sensible to email the graphic to the person, don’t you think?
The linkback page is self explanatory. It’s nice to offer the code, even for those on Neopets. But I think you bold font shouldn’t be that big!
Awards are self explanatory too. These seem more like gifts though. You could link to the original sized image!
Reviews.. ditto!
Cool past layouts! I love the one with the zebras. You should have more effects like this in your current layout! Also, save the space and just have screenshots for these.
Now you guys are even cooler when I read your ‘About the Staff’ page. Some great webdesigners out there who care about animals and grammar! Thankfully. I hate chatspeak!
It would be better to write ‘Affiliates’ instead of ‘Affies’. No chatspeak, right? Even though ‘Affie’ is kind of renowned as a word now. 
On your affiliate application page:
/must/ should be must (in bold or italics!).
Nice credits; though would be better in a list. Type © instead of (c). That way you get an actual copyright symbol.
Credit Cutenews! I know you’ve just started using it but don’t forget.
Content
I’m not really liking the icons or the banners of Virginia’s. They’re all made with great ideas, but use light stocks and textures to make them more interesting. Use more interesting fonts. More brushes – and work on optimising graphics. Save them in a higher quality JPEG or try a PNG file.
The guild layouts could be improved. The colours mainly, and the setup. The green and yellow doesn’t go with the deer, for instance. Green doesn’t go with the polar bears! These need to be a lot neater.
Onto Juniper’s graphics. I’d have to say these are a lot better than Virginia’s. More effects are used and more textures. I love the one with the robin.. I’m not sure what type of bird it is though.
The banners of Juniper’s are nice, but why are they resized? Get rid of the width and height values in your image codes and show the actual size. The dragging to sidebar thing is quirky, haha. Now that’s retro. I prefer thumbnails though!
And update the links on them, which have your old URL.
With the site layouts, I don’t see a need for the ‘welcome’. I don’t like the images on most of these. They’re not of good quality – too much contrast and not clear. The fox one’s quite distorted. The kestrel one is okay.
The headers should be a lot smaller. It’s not nice when images take up my whole screen. Also, add some variation to the CSS. Not the same fonts and colours over and over. These all need a lot of tweaking.
The guild layouts are pretty much the same as the site layouts. Some of them, anyway. So ditto. CSS needs to be improved and the same comments apply. Have live previews instead of just screenshots here. Like your other layouts!
The lookups.. well, since Neopets went nuts with the ads.. or since I became a teenager, I gave up on their crud so I don’t know what lookups are supposed to look like. The images are of better quality than the layouts though.
Also, please make thumbnails instead because I don’t like dragging to my address bar, even if it’s ever so slightly cool. It’s not user friendly.
Again Juniper’s button bases are nicer here. Very nice, but if I were to put text on them, it’d be a shame that it’d ruin the lovely pictures.
The PSDs are nice but I hate them being called PSDs when a lot of people don’t know it’s short for ‘PhotoShop Document’.
The icon and banner effects are quite nice. Better than what I could spice up, in the least.
Ah! Now we have thumbnails for the cutting of a.. don’t call it a PSD or a PNG, those are file types. Just say ‘cut a graphic in PhotoShop’ or something similar.
This is interesting. A video on a tutorial. The fullscreen is a bit dodgy. I wouldn’t count on it. I’d stick with screenshots, personally.
Animals
These are all great and a unique idea, but you can’t just display copyrighted information on your website that’s copied from another site. Reproducing isn’t allowed when something’s copyrighted! You wouldn’t like it if I took your layout and just showed it on my site, even if I credited – would you?
It’s a much better idea to do a little research and write your own things. Copying like that is illegal. Like they say, copying from one source is plagiarism, copying from many is research. Yes, funny, but true.
Plugboard
Gotta love these, no matter how many times I see them. Self explanatory.
Originality & Creativity
You’ve got an original themed site. I can see the hard work you’ve put in and I really like the original idea of animals.
There’s definitely lots of creativity, but quality of images could really be improved. And also keeping in mind user friendliness.
Organisation & Errors
Fairly well organised and no broken links or images that I could see. There weren’t many grammar, spelling or punctuation errors since there wasn’t much writing.
I didn’t really read through your animal profiles; they should be written by yourself!
Overall Comment
Juniper and Virginia, you have quite a nice site that was nice to go through. I rarely, if ever, see sites with animals, after all these site’s I’ve reviewed. It’s definitely original and I give you credit for that.
I’m going to have to be selective and say that Juniper’s graphics are a lot better. Maybe you should give Virginia some tips!
Despite that, while you have all this creativity, you need to work a little on image quality. Some of the effects you’re using are too harsh. A tip is to keep the original image aside and compare it to your edited result (say, a header for a layout). That way you can see the difference in image quality and reduce those effects that contrast or saturate too much.
Work on making your headers smaller. It’s not good to scroll all the time with a huge header image. Also, tweak your CSS, because your bold font is too big.
As for your layouts as a whole, make them smaller too. Things don’t have to fit your entire screen. And don’t make your divs so wide. It’s annoying to read text in a long line.
And skeletally, your coding – only needs a few tweaks. I suggest fixing those up quickly first! Good luck girls. I love the animals.
