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Site Name: Meltedcake
Owner: Lauren
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 25th May 2009
Site Name
Easy to remember! I have seen the word ‘cake’ a lot, but only recently. No biggie.
Coding and Validation
Your coding has 5 errors and 3 warnings.
You have the following character encoding:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
The part I have bolded should be in lowercase.
Your affiliates’ link for Janet&Miranda needs to be edited. You must write & for the ampersand (&) to prevent an error.
The final error is in your code <div class="navigation">. I don’t know if you have noticed, but those quotation marks you’re using there are curly quotation marks. Look over your coding. They should be straight quotation marks.
Your CSS is valid – good stuff.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
I’ve had quite a few issues getting to your website so far. I have been experiencing a lot of downtime and at times I have just not been able to view your site at all. Therefore I couldn’t complete this review as fast as I wish I could have. I don’t know if you’re also experiencing this problem, perhaps with your host – but I definitely am.
Browsershots.org tells me your site is fine in most browsers.
The layout is centered which is good. The font size is comfortable.
I like the navigation, but on hover, a brown background rather than a transparent one would be nicer and make the link text stand out more. “Journal” would also be better expressed as “Home”.
Layout
Thanks for using my photo! I actually thought that photo was pretty retarded, but you’ve made it look interesting.
I love the background. Not sure that it’s a great choice to match with the image though. Perhaps if you edited the image to incorporate colours from the background, it would fit better. For example, a gradient with a bit of pink and orange would fit with the background. Alternatively, you can edit the background so there are colours that fit better with the image – like blue and orange.
For instance, editing the stars in the background so there would be a better combination. DeGraeve has a colour palette generator that you can use to obtain colours from an image. You could use these colours to fix your background.
A more interesting font could have been used for the header! “Lazy days” needs more expression, like a lazy slagging font.
Overall, I like the simplicity of the layout; you simply need to work on colouring a bit.
Content
Extras
Normally I would prefer this somewhere towards the end of the navigation links – but that’s more of a personal comment.
You have quite a lot in the tutorials section – there’s a lot of navigating going on and I have to click and choose where I want to go quite a lot. Perhaps these would be better in another section, or spread out on the extras page under different subheadings?
I’ll take a look at the Core FTP tutorials first.
All the tutorials are very, very short and you could condense it all into one tutorial on ‘how to use Core FTP’.
On the ‘edit files with Core FTP’ tutorial:
dialouge should be dialogue.
‘This tutorial’ doesn’t link to a tutorial; it links to what appears to be your old site (a 404).
It would actually be better if the screenshots were on the tutorial page itself; saves the viewer having to click just to see a screenshot.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but in your tutorial on Notepad with Core FTP, is there not a “browse” function to look for the Notepad program? Would it not work better that way?
The cPanel tutorials are fairly easy; they’re not the greatest because cPanel has video tutorials for most of the functions.
On your cursor tutorial:
transparant should be transparent
viola should be voila.
The Bellabuzz tutorial is good and easy to follow. More detail into how to integrate it into pages and such would be better though.
On your tutorials, you should use <code> to display the code, not <textarea>. Textarea is intended for forms and user input, not for displaying code.
On your WordPress as homepage tutorial:
directory then should be directory than.
Oooh, I found a soda pop on the permalinks page… Oh, looks like you just added the games as I was browsing.
The icon bases are alright. The first four look a little bit blurry to me. I don’t know if you used effects on all of these or not at all – but some of them, such as the last three in the second last row (the same girl with the pink hippopotamus), look a bit too light.
The adoptables are very nice. The soda pops look very familiar though; I remember erin.polkadotted.net had some similar ones but they were animated. I may be wrong – I am not accusing you of stealing – they just look similar. If you used them as a base, do credit.
The article about hits – good stuff. Pretty short but otherwise well done.
ridiculous then should be ridiculous than
Hits isn’t should be Hits aren’t
re-consider that their should be re-consider whether their.
I quite like your little rant on texting; it’s very unique. An introductory paragraph would be a good idea, to introduce what texting actually is. In Australia sometimes we refer to “texting” as “sending SMS”.
I’ve only ever seen something similar to your ‘rude comments’ article once – and that article didn’t really help at all. I really enjoyed reading this, as short as it was. I think you could think of plenty of other things to do. I absolutely love the idea of thanking them for their opinion. I have received quite a few rude comments before, and some I have simply ignored, or responded back (I had to edit the comment; the person didn’t even have the nerve to leave their details, haha).
I like the tips on writing a book! You make it seem so simple. Last time I tried writing a book, I introduced too many characters and too many conversations (not sure if too many conversations is a bad thing…). You might want to help me on that one. 
You only have one scribble, but it’s cute! Do add more.
The games are fun! I think you have an error on your treasure hunt form – you only show two items, not four, to type the codes in.
You should organise this section a bit more. I’m a bit annoyed at having to click ‘here’ all the time – you should have links to these pages on the main ‘extras’ page. Eventually I have to keep pressing “back”, which can be very tedious.
Site
On your owner page:
Lets move should be Let’s move
spirt should be spurt.
On your 10 weird things page:
habbit should be habit
more often then should be more often than.
The ‘link me’ page is pretty self explanatory. However, use <code> to display the code, not <textarea>. Textarea is intended for forms and user input, not for displaying code.
Your hosting rules are great – they cover what you need to cover, no problems there.
cutenews should be Cutenews
Database should be database (after this setence you need to start the next point on a new line, as it just runs on)
to public should be the public
fix it should be fix the problem
that the email is sent should be of the email being sent.
Author
This is the same link as the one you have under your site section – there isn’t a need for the double-up.
Writing
Same with this section. You don’t need to have a link to the same place when it’s already somewhere else. I would suggest keeping the articles out of the visitor section and placing them only in the writing section.
Playlist
Pretty self explanatory.
Originality & Creativity
Pretty original and creative; quite a number of things I found interesting and unique.
Organisation & Errors
Pretty well organised. There also weren’t many errors.
The only issue I had was with some of your sections. I didn’t like navigating through so many subpages with so many categories and things. Consider having all the links on a page under different subheadings.
Overall Comment
You’ve got a good site, Lauren. I enjoyed my visit, even though the downtime was a bit annoying.
Your site is fairly organised and you’ve got quite unique content.
I have some suggestions:
- Cut down on the unnecessary subpages (particularly the tutorials section).
- Cut down on the unnecessary navigation (like linking things twice).
- Add things to your navigation appropriately (credits, contact – instead of being in the footer)
- Keep working on making your own themes and look more into colouring.
- Try and use your own images and customise premades more.
