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Site Name: Over My Head
Owner: Morgan
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 28th December 2008
Site Name
Okay, I’m confused. You say your site name is Over My Head but your URL is totally different – justthewayweroll! I mean, what’s wrong with ‘Just The Way We Roll’?
It would be less confusing to just follow the URL.
Coding and Validation
So, you didn’t code your layout:
lyt coded by psychopsychic; do not remove credit or steal coding!
Interesting. So you can’t even code, it tells me. I mean, why did you apply for a review expecting me to review something that isn’t yours? Ironic, don’t you think?
Nevertheless, I am going through your coding errors briefly.
When I check your coding in the W3C Markup Validation service, you have 28 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 also missing:
- an opening
<html>tag. - closing
</head>tag. - an opening
<body>tag. - a closing
</body>tag. - a closing
</html>tag.
So really, even the person who coded your layout can’t code for crap if they don’t know basic HTML tags. It’s up to you to learn it yourself if you can’t. Maybe you can, but with all this you’re giving me a pretty bad impression.
Other errors, would you believe it, are caused by the music code on your site. Not good, huh?
Another few errors are caused by use of the & symbol. You should be writing & for that symbol.
Your CSS has 16 errors and 31 warnings.
Firstly, why do you have CSS embedded into your page? It’s very messy, and you should be using an external css file to make things easier.
You should put your CSS in a separate file called css.css or something similar. 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”>
Furthermore, your embedded CSS has many errors. You should really take a look at them for yourself and get them fixed. A lot of them are caused by not quoting font names with spaces, like Century Gothic, which should be “Century Gothic”.
In other places you’re not using the hash (#) for colours.
Also, font-weight: none should be font-weight: normal.
So even though this isn’t your own coding and there’s a line of text stated not to remove credit by “psychopsychic”; that very line of credit is causing the errors in your CSS. Hilarious, isn’t it?
Nevertheless, even though the coding isn’t yours, you still need to work on coding yourself, really.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
According to Browsershots.org your site looks the same in all the common browsers. Anything looking off would be in the older less common browsers. Fairly good job, then.
The default text is way too small and very hard to read, so I suggest making that bigger. Your navigation links are also much too small. Content should be Visitor Content – ‘content’ would be referring to any content – any parts – of your site.
You have music on your site – NO. No, no, no. This music is very annoying. Music is not a way to welcome visitors. Might I add that I hate rap and RnB music and your music just totally ruined my Atreyu music from my media player?
Should other visitors encounter your music in such a way, they would probably leave. Since I am reviewing I must continue. So please, remove the auto-starting music.
Layout
Firstly, you didn’t make your layout yourself, so there’s no reason for me to review someone else’s work. I can’t really make any further comment as it’s not your work; you state that the layout is by Psycho Psychic and it is also stated in your header image.
While it is not a bad layout.. make your own. The CSS looks pretty good except for the tiny font.
Content
Consider putting the navigation as first thing on the sidebar. Obviously, make it bigger.
All these little words in your brief owner section don’t make sense. Why is your name spelt ‘morgann’ – no capital letter and an extra ‘n’? Why are there no capitals at all? Stalkerr should be Stalker, obviously.
So.. I click on stalker. To a lot of unbeknownst people, they wouldn’t know what ‘stalker’ means. They might think that it’s addition to your description. Being more user friendly is key here. You would be better off writing ‘more’, or something of the sort.
Utterly confusing. Is your name Morgan or Morgann? And do you know how hard your text is to read here? Very hard. You didn’t even paragraph properly, let alone capitalise your damn letter Is. It makes everything look messy and awful and even harder to read.
With the little profiles you have, put the questions in bold, for example:
Age: 13.
That too, makes things easier to read, in case you don’t want to change your insanely small font.
Furthermore, I am bombarded with music that is yrrching out my wonderful Anberlin music. Care to apologise for the auto-starting music? Morgan (or Morgann..), please. Get rid of the music.
Content
So really, like I mentioned, it would be better if you named this section ‘visitor’, because ‘content’ simply refers to the content of your whole site, whatever that may be.
Hmm, advertising. If you’re only advertising on one page, it’s not really ‘advertising’. It’s like a plugging service.
any order should be in any order
your ever should be you’re ever.
1000 hits. By that are you saying unique hits, or just hits? If I refresh your page, essentially, that’s another hit. Unique hits are better.
I know you feel compelled to make sure visitors read rules, but is the secret word and the “..” really necessary? Just one would be fine. Too many annoying rules is tedious, not to mention old and annoying. And also not fair since you only seem to advertise on one page.
Nice backgrounds but.. credit for them? Did you make them ALL by yourself? Also, they don’t really tile.. they seem pretty random. More like icon backgrounds or something of the sort.
You have a dead link on this page where it says ‘more’. It seems to lead to an old URL.
‘Contact Me’ shouldn’t really be under this section. I really wish you would capitalise and write with proper English. You don’t even capitalise the first letter of every sentence. Hurgh.
Err.. a Freerice competition? Where.. the links to Freerice actually lead to your ‘about me’ page? Ahoooo..
At least you have better capitalisation on this page. Wht should be What.
Get reviewed.. huh. With rules incorporating The Jonas Brothers. So, I’d probably apply, but there’s no way I’m saying any of them are hot. Gherkins.
I think you should cut down on the rules. What does typing some statement about the Jonas Brothers help? When furthermore, they won’t get a review is they rush you. Hmm.
I don’t think you should be offering reviews with your site currently in this state. Are you just giving opinion on someone’s site? Do you follow a rubric?
The title at the top of this page says ‘Content!’ – hasn’t been changed accordingly.
These gifts don’t really belong here. You should have these on your ‘about me’ page or somewhere similar. Most of them are your own.
‘Guess the song’ is pretty good but I have seen this sort of thing on a lot of sites. Specifying prizes would be a nice idea too, who knows what they could be?
‘Other links’ would be better named as ‘Resources’.
Your pets would be better off on your own page as they aren’t visitor content.
Well, finally. Something original. Nice photography! Your sidebar gets dodgy here, and I have to scroll to see it. The first and last photos are nice. I suggest adding more, because often people do like using photographs.
Quotes – boring. I’m sure you didn’t make them all up yourself.. generally they can be found on the internet in other places as well.
Okay. So.. you can’t code? You only make graphics as requests. Yet you didn’t even make your own layout. Come on, Morgan. Really.
Nice tips on your page. Rather ironic that you write irrelevant unrelated things in the same paragraph, though.
The tutorials are boring. I have seen these everywhere and the thing is, they don’t help at all. People who know webdesign know these already, and people who know nothing can’t learn solely from these. Think about it; they’re not really useful.
And ‘adding soon’ gives visitors the impression that things are incomplete. You should never give that impression.
Yes, you’re right, it is truthfully sad to have a Wall of Shame. There is no need. There are hackers and stealers in many places. A Wall of Shame isn’t really going to do anything or help anything.
C-box
It’s a simple comment box. Self explanatory.
My Iconator
External link; won’t be reviewed.
Originality & Creativity
To be honest, I would have judged this on your layout.. but you didn’t make it yourself. Your coding, even your CSS wasn’t done by yourself so I can’t make further comments.
A lot of your content was generic and boring, and I can’t say I saw much originality apart from the photos.
I hardly saw visitor content that showed originality or creativity. I expected to see some graphics but I really didn’t see much, so I can’t say much about creativity.
Organisation & Errors
There were some errors and one broken link from memory. A lot of pages seemed rushed and weren’t written well – with improper punctuation.
Not so well organised. A lot of the links in the content section could be moved to a different section.
You’re lacking a credits page. This is necessary to credit every source of yours – your host, Photobucket, layout credits.. and so on.
Overall Comment
Morgan, your site seems unfinished and disorganised and needs a lot of work. To start off, I recommend learning some coding and designing your own layouts. Because your current layout isn’t by you, I had no reason to review it and have no idea of your webdesigning ability.
Your content needs sprucing up. A lot of the content is boring and generic. More photography would be good.
I don’t have many suggestions – really, just make a new layout, organise the site more, and work on the content you have. Some graphics would make things a little more interesting, and anything without celebrities because using their images is illegal.
Also, please remove the music. It makes your site take a long time to load, and isn’t very welcoming.
Good luck with your site. 
