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Site Name: Karla Kay
Owner: Karla
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 22nd April 2009
Site Name
Not bad. Easy to remember, nice alliteration. I’m not a big fan of using names in site names, though.
Coding and Validation
Your coding has 166 errors and 10 warnings.
Your coding is a mess. You are still styling a lot of elements, such as divs, in the tags themselves. You should be customising them using your CSS. This, for instance:
<div style="width:750px; margin-bottom:30px;">
You can set a div id to this (read a tutorial on classes and ids) and customise it with CSS like so:
#id {
width:750px;
margin-bottom:30px;
}
You’re using <font> to customise your fonts in your Cutenews entries. You should not be using <font> as it is deprecated coding – no longer considered correct – and you can be modifying this with CSS through headers, or even classes and ids.
All images need an alt attribute. Even if the attribute is blank you must still use alt="".
I suggest using Transitional rather than Strict for your doctype; it’s easier to validate to. Validation is important to make sure that your site works smoothly in all browsers and can be processed easily. I suggest you read this tutorial on XHTML validation to fix your errors.
You’re not even typing in proper XHTML. You are not ending your image tags or line breaks with <br />. It might be best for you to validate to HTML first.
Your CSS has 1 error and 21 warnings.
In your external CSS file, background-attachment has no value. You should fix these other errors embedded in your document, and as much as possible, use CSS for styling, rather than embedding it in the tag itself.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
Your site looks the same in most browsers according to Browsershots.org. Good stuff.
The header image is quite wide. The height is fine, but on a smaller resolution, the width would be a bother, resulting in a horizontal scrollbar. One of the smallest resolutions is 800 by 600 pixels, so keep that in mind with your next layout.
The text size is easy to read; it’s not too small.
The navigation is clear and obvious. However the hover links on both the navigation and the regular links are a distraction. Because the font style changes as well, a lot of text becomes easily dodged by the movements, and it’s also distracting. I recommend to keep this effect to a minimum and simply change something like the colour.
Layout
Good choice of colours. The pink spotty background matches with the more subtle pink spotty background of the header image.
The colours are quite nice on the eyes – very pinky-purpley. I think the grey could be used a bit more in the CSS though.
The variety of fonts is nice. The sidebar could actually use some padding, because it’s quite squished with the content. Also, the dotted line down the left side of the sidebar isn’t very appealing; it mismatches and appears random. I see how it compliments the dotted brushes in the header image but if anything, it should be used for text and header borders, not just that random border.
The sidebar could be a bit wider; it’s a bit funny being so narrow because of the wide layout. It looks unique though; I think it’s just the Twitter updates that look really squished.
It’s a fairly neat layout overall, very user friendly – just needs a few tweaks.
Content
Karla
Your autobiography page has a very large photo on it, which I recommend resizing. You don’t need such a big photo. Also, consider using less text effects as this makes things very hard to read.
This isn’t quite an autobiography. It’s just a short page of facts and things. Please just get rid of the text effects. They’re annoying and tacky.
The novel you’re writing… well, this section is pretty much empty and all you have is an introduction. I don’t know if it was intended, but the category name is Writtings which should be Writings.
Dark Corner? Well, if these are secret blog entries, or ‘private’, then I don’t really understand why you are putting them here anyway.
Site
You say “our” affiliates. I’m sure you’re running the site by yourself. There isn’t really any need to use “our”.
Affiliates page – nothing much to say. I think you could link them all the same way though. If you’re linking with buttons, link with buttons. If you’re linking with text links, link with text links. This is just so everything looks more organised and neat.
Credits are good. You credit just about everything and what you’ve used. You need to credit Cutenews and your host – things like that.
I don’t see why you need to use a button just to credit the website you got the blog smilies from, when you link everyone with a text link.
Contact – self explanatory.
Hosting – you should link all your hostees the same way; just to be more organised and neat.
HTML and CSS should be capitalised.
There is not a lot of site information. Most of the links are just to other pages on your site.
Nothing much on the link back page either. I think a lot of these pages could just be merged onto one page, just under different headings.
The reviews page shouldn’t really be under the site section. It should be in a visitor section. Rather ironic that you would like HTML and CSS valid when yours isn’t.
Pictures
Nothing much to comment on here.
The artwork is nice. Looks like the beginnings of a portfolio.
Photography is “coming soon”. “Coming soon” pages give the visitor the impression that your site is unfinished. Not a good look.
Playlist
Some video clips. Nothing hugely interesting here.
Visitor
The brushes are okay. They aren’t the best, but they’re okay.
The icons aren’t too bad. I don’t really like the animated ones but most of these are well made. Make sure you credit where you got the images from.
The pixels are quite cute. A few could be improved a bit, like the splots. They could use a bit more shading, a few of them.
I don’t know what program the screen fills are for. More detail on these would be better. I don’t really ike these and some of them aren’t that great. Animated graphics are also quite distracting.
Tubes – nothing interesting here. These could make a nice base, but nothing great.
The vector images are quite nice. They’re quite superfluous though.
A preview for the wallpapers would be nice. They’re only one file so I don’t see the need to put them in a zip file. None of these are hugely appealing and they don’t come in different sizes.
Originality & Creativity
You had some original things, but there was barely any creativity. A lot of the graphics lacked focus and interest.
There was nothing much on your site and all the graphics were quite basic or just superfluous.
Organisation & Errors
Things were organised in terms of sections, but pages could be organised in a more orderly and neat fashion.
I didn’t spot any broken links or images.
Overall Comment
There wasn’t anything worth using on your site, Kayla. It doesn’t seem like you put much effort into the visitor section.
A lot of the visitor resources weren’t useful or were rather plain and boring. You should make more useful resources like layouts, tutorials perhaps – more interesting content. Though a lot of it was unique and things I’ve never seen before, they were quite tacky – such as the glitter fills.
You really need to improve on your coding. You have the structures fine, but you need to know that things are better styled with CSS.
Work on more quality, useful content and coding validation and your site will be better.
