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Site Name: Blissful Innocence
Owner: Kimberly
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 26th March 2009
Site Name
Blissful Innocence is a nice name. Long, but nice. Your URL is fairly simple.
Coding and Validation
Your coding has 4 errors and 3 warnings.
That isn’t too bad, but when I actually look at your coding, it’s not very good at all. You don’t have a doctype, or character encoding, or even the right structure. Where are your <html> and </html> tags? And your <head> tags? What about <body> tags? It seems to me that you need to correct your coding altogether.
You need a doctype at the beginning of every page so the browser can process your site as an HTML document. Since you’re using frames, this is the one you need:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
You need to have the correct structure of an HTML document. You can’t just slap stuff on it in the hope that everything will be good. Some browsers don’t even cope with reading a page when it’s not validated properly.
You don’t have a character encoding. You have to place this in the <head> section:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
You need alt tags on all your images. I suggest you read my tutorial on validating HTML.
Things like your scripts need to have a type – type="text/javascript" as an attribute, not just <script>. Things like ampersands need to be written as & and not just &.
Your tracker is coded in XHTML; therefore you have to remove the trailing backslash before the end bracket.
Your background image should be modified using CSS, not as HTML:
body {
background-image:url('http://s295.photobucket.com/albums/mm126/instantstardesigns/bg-4.png');
}
For your layout image, remove the backslash before the ending bracket. Backslashes like that are only used in XHTML coding – and you’re in simple HTML.
Also, in your iframes, “allowtransparency” is not a valid attribute – you should remove it. Same for borders. Iframes are really a hassle and I suggest removing them; using divs or PHP instead.
Your CSS is valid. Great job!
Browser Compatibility & Usability
Looking at your site at Browsershots.org, your layout is looking consistent in most browsers.
You’re using iframes, which isn’t recommended. Your iframe has a ridiculous height. I know you’re just doing that to prevent auto-scrolling. Having extremely large iframes can cause a browser to actually lock up and freeze.
Iframes have so many disadvantages. What if I wanted to bookmark, say, your content page? I couldn’t very well do that because the page is trapped in an iframe.
Search engines don’t even look at your webpages if they’re in iframes. It’s just not a great idea at all. If I have still to convince you that iframes are bad, read this article.
You could achieve the same look with divs. I know you want to make layout changes easier and not go for the divs, so why not try PHP? Try this TutorialTastic tutorial. It will help you convert from the iframes.
I did go through your coding and correct it for your iframes, but I’d highly recommend converting.
The navigation text would be better if it was bigger. I like the style, but the text is much too small. ‘Clear’ should be ‘Home’. A lot of people don’t understand ‘Clear’.
Your default text is easy to read.
Layout
I like the choice of image and the effects behind your site name, making it stand out more. I like how things are fairly simple.
I don’t think yellow was a very good choice for the sides at all. It’s too bright and contrasts too much. Also, I wouldn’t say that white was a good choice for the content background – it doesn’t match too well with the image.
Using an imagemap for your navigation isn’t exactly a great idea – some people browse the internet with images turned off. It’s true; I do it sometimes when I want to check out things faster. Try horizontal CSS block navigation.
The layout would look a lot better centered, because it’s so uniform. Try using containers to center your layout.
Your background repeats horizontally because of my large screen rseolution. It looks like that on any large resolution, actually. Centering this and doing things in a more user-accessible manner would remove such flaws.
Other than technicalities, you have a nice simple layout.
Content
Kimberly
You have three pages here, all which have such minimal content. Avoid the subnavigation and pestering visitors – put all this information on a single page.
On your facts page:
to children should be on children.
So far, so good. This whole section is very neat.
Content
The brushes are quite nice – but only available as an imagepack. I find them a bit pointless as such. It would be a lot easier if they were as an .abr file. Consider putting them in this format.
I don’t see the point of the “mask” – unless it’s some sort of texture. There’s only one, and it’s not bad.
I come across icon masks. Again not many, and I’m assuming these are like textures. They’re nice but fairly simple.
People can usually pick their own colour schemes. The ones you have are okay, but the colours are really quite bright on many of them. I do like the second one and seventh one – those colours aren’t so bright. Imagine putting one of those bright greens or yellows as a background. Not too great.
You don’t have a huge amount of icons. I don’t see the point in making separate pages. They’re a waste of space, and it’s tedious having to click on each one, go back and click on another category. Essentially, I’m just opening all your pages in new tabs because I’m annoyed at them being stuck in the iframe.
But, that out of the way – these icons are really quite nice. The effects are minimalist and the icons look nice overall. There’s nothing too bright or overdone. The thing that buggers me is that you’re using celebrity images. They’re illegal unless you’re paying for their use – essentially you’re just editing someone else’s photos and redistributing them. It’s a lot like taking someone’s work, editing it, and giving it away. While it may seem dodgy, it’s quite true.
Blah. Icon bases. Essentially the same thing. Useless. They look like cropped images, and that’s it. Icons would have been better made. Also, I don’t see the point of categorising.
People can make their own button bases. These are boring and again just look like cropped images.
Blends are coming soon. Urrgh. Kimberly! This isn’t a good look. I just feel like I’ve walked in on an unfinished site. Never have ‘coming soon’ on your website!
Signs. Again something most people would make themselves, not go looking around the web for. A coming soon sign, too, at that. You’ve only got one. I really don’t see much use in it. I have not seen someone use a sign in a while.. much less a coming soon one. Usually they just type it. Like you obviously did on your ‘blends’ page.
Signatures. I see a lot of these on other sites. The one you’ve made is nice, but often I don’t see many people using these.
Nice wallpaper. Only one here, but quite nice. Offered in two different sizes as well!
Pixel text – kind of boring. Not many. And I don’t really like how they’re animated. Well made, though.
Tutorials
Your basic HTML tutorials are useless. People generally already know this stuff. Those who already know HTML won’t be looking at this at all – they will most likely know it. And if they don’t know a thing about HTML, they aren’t even going to understand it too well.
This isn’t really a tutorial either – it’s just a bunch of copy-and-paste codes.
The advanced colouring tutorials are fairly good. Some of the effects I don’t really like, though. A bit too dark and contrasting. The first one is good though.
Image mapping. That’s a fairly good tutorial. It would be good if you knew how to do it outside of PSP though – a lot of people are unfamiliar with that.
Miscellaneous tutorials are coming soon.. not again!
Get Reviewed
I obviously won’t review this section.
Site
On your forms, you should say “high quality” rather than “HQ”. Many people will mistake this for “headquarters”.
Your current layout under past layouts says version 3, instead of version 4.
Don’t forget to credit Cutenews. This credits page is okay – “Flickr” doesn’t seem to great though, because there are different users on Flickr. And I’m not sure if you have those sites credited from which you took your celebrity images.
Originality & Creativity
You obviously show creativity. You have good graphic design skills. However I couldn’t see anything that stood out from your site. It’s a lot like other sites out there, with similar resources. That’s fine, but it can get a bit boring if things are pretty much the same.
Organisation & Errors
Well organised. Not many errors at all. Just a lot of annoying ‘coming soon’ pages.
Overall Comment
Kimberly, you’ve got a fairly good organised site. However you have a lot of generic content, and not much of it.
You really should make the switch from iframes. I don’t really have many suggestions – but try coming up with more original ideas and more content.
Good luck with your site!
