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Site Name: Mmhm. Sure Thing, Ralf!
Owner: Katelyn
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 5th January 2009
Site Name
This is what I call a crazy name. It’s funny, but much too long and not like the name of a website. “MSTR” would be appropriate on its own and I’m guessing a lot of people type it as such, because your site name is too long.
Coding and Validation
Your coding has 4 errors.
You don’t have a doctype or a character encoding. These are really important to ensure your site is processed properly and can assist it in loading faster, preventing all those errors that can occur in different browsers. This is what you need at the beginning of every page. I see that HTML 4.01 Transitional is the best doctype for your site:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
You’re not putting an alt tag on your images. You need one on every image, even if it’s blank. This snippet for example. It doesn’t need that backslash either, so:
...apozitiv8-1.jpg' border="1"/>
should be:
...apozitiv8-1.jpg' alt="" border="1">
You’re also missing your opening <body> tag.
I don’t like the idea of your CSS being embedded, when it’s a lot easier to have the CSS in a separate file called css.css. You can do this by saving the document in Notepad as “css.css” (with the quotation marks). In your website pages, you use this to call on the file:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css.css" type="text/css">
Despite that, your CSS is valid CSS 2.1. Good job.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
The site looks the same in most browsers according to Browsershots.org.
The navigation is nice but it should stand out. A background colour other than white, perhaps.
Your default text is of a good size.
Layout
It’s a nice layout but I’m a little bored of seeing winter-style layouts. Yours is quite nice and I like the simplicity. What’s with the “KS” and “SL” in the corners of your layout though?
This layout would look a lot nicer if it was centered. I don’t really like the double-sidebar thing going on. One sidebar is enough; two is kind of overload.
The CSS looks pretty good and you’ve got a nice colour scheme going on. I think you should change the bright blue background on the links to a softer blue that complements your background.
Everything looks pretty organised, but your regular links on hover don’t change that much. The colour change is barely noticeable. You should try a blue like the colour of your background.
Content
Site Info
Capitalise Piczo and MySpace here.
Now this page confuses me because I don’t know if you’re the owner and manager of the site, because you mention “credit for what we use”. Who is “we”? Are you the only owner, or does this Tyler help you – because he contributed to the site name?
On this page your sidebars are different and don’t have your link button or reviewers. The further links to credits and such would be better at the top of the page.
The further links look okay. Why is your guestbook/comment board buried in this section? You already have a link to it on the main navigation. Also, having a blog that allows comments is enough, so a guestbook isn’t really necessary.
Credits are good. Good on you for noting what you’ve used. Photobucket and Cutenews should be here as well.
Resources
I expected better for these edited stock images. Have you used your own photos? If not, credit! These images are really nice but the quality isn’t good. I thought these were meant to be thumbnails but they aren’t. They look like they’ve been resized and it’s caused them to lose quality. These would look better if they were bigger.
The ‘graphics’ are okay. Creative but the colour combinations you’ve used aren’t the greatest. Again, these could be bigger as they would be better quality. These again look like they’ve been reduced in size which has reduced quality.
The profile headers are boring. They are neat, but anyone with a classy font could cook up something in Paint and save it as a .png file. They’re ordinary and not very useful. You’ve only got one style too. Boring.
Your stock photos are nice, but for people to use them effectively, they need to be rather large. These are very small. Have the original photo and link to it using a thumbnail.
Your coded layout looks dodgy. The image is pixelated and the CSS doesn’t match at all. This also looks old as it has your old URL on it. It looks really amateur.
You didn’t write a description for ‘other sites’.. what sites are these? Are they just links for visitors to ‘check out’, so to speak? Put a little introduction on this page or something!
I’m only briefly skimming through your tutorial on ‘great reviews and more hits’. This isn’t really a tutorial. It should just be a page of website tips. I will admit that it’s pretty good. At a glance your grammar and spelling look good. This page is hosted by Webs and you should have it on your subdomain at Voltagebox.org. It shouldn’t be under tutorials either.
Services
‘Domain’ layout? I think you just mean ‘layout’. Also, no need to say ‘etc’ twice.
On your layout ordering service page, tha should be the.
On your image ordering service page, Haitus should be Hiatus.
So.. why does ‘reviews’ lead me somewhere with a different layout Twilight-related? If it’s a separate site, state so. It should open in a new window too.
Your only review is a mess. With a disorganised site like yours, I’m surprised you offer reviews. Hmm..
Guestbook
Self explanatory.
Originality & Creativity
You had some original stuff here like your graphics and I can really tell you’re trying to be unique. Some of your graphics could be optimised though, and of better quality.
Organisation & Errors
Things looked organised at first but a lot of the pages don’t match and the sidebars change over different pages. Things aren’t really that organised.
I didn’t find any broken links. There weren’t many spelling or grammar errors.
Overall Comment
Your site was pretty well done, Katelyn. I think your coding was done fairly well. Your layout was simple but quite nice.
Your content could do with some improvement. Optimising graphics in particular. Services are a good idea but not everyone will use them.
Work on optimising your graphics. Big is good. You can always make large graphics like for layouts. Also, work on organising the site more. Good luck!
