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Site Name: Heart Bliss
Owner: Priya
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 7th May 2009
Site Name
No problems here! Cute name, easy to remember.
Coding and Validation
Your coding has 12 errors and 53 warnings.
You’re missing a </body> before your </html> tag.
Other errors are caused by your Twitter code. I have a tutorial on valid Twitter coding.
The marquees are also causing invalid coding as the marquee code is deprecated. This means that it is no longer considered correct. Similarly, you should not use <center> as that too is deprecated. Instead you should specify it with CSS with a div, or a header like h6.
There should be a <strong> at the beginning of your Cutenews entries titles, as there are random </strong>s lying around.
You have an error as a result of your marquee title (which is quite annoying). The error is because in the head section, there must be a <title> tag to specify the title of the document.
All the warnings are caused by Cutenews as you’re coding in HTML but Cutenews codes entries in XHTML.
I notice you are using <b> for bold and <i> for italics. Instead you should be using <strong> and <em>. This is to have better accessibility across all browsers.
Your CSS is valid with 2 warnings.
To fix those warnings you have to specify width for your Cutenews entries. Unfortunately Cutenews is an unsafe script which I don’t recommend using, and it also produces errors in validation.
Additionally, you have your CSS embedded, when it is a lot easier to use an external stylesheet.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
Browsershots.org tells me your site is fine in most browsers! I notice a little glitch when I view your site in Internet Explorer though; the divs need to be placed further down because they’re squished towards your header image.
One thing that is really distracting me about your site is the animation in your title bar. It is really distracting and annoying and when I’m reviewing I just see this moving thing across my title bar. Teamed with the affiliate marquee, it’s not a good look. Keep the title bar static. There is no point in having some animation when it would be a lot easier for someone to see the title and read it, rather than wait there for it to progress!
The aforementioned marquees – are not the best idea. Again, they are distracting. I understand the issue with sidebars and having them too long or cluttered. However, you can link your affiliates with their links in a two-column table like I do. With the “links out”, which appear to be like advertising, you can try a random rotator using PHP.
Other than that, the navigation is clear (and very nice, I should add!) and the font size is readable; totally fine.
Layout
Very cute! I have always enjoyed seeing this layout every time I visit. The peeping girl is very cute, the addition of very subtle brushes amongst your site name – very nice.
I guess the brushes in a way are random when I peer at your layout for a bit; ‘goodbye’ next to an umbrella not really fitting in with the theme – but nevertheless very, very cute.
A great colour scheme is chosen of blue, pink and the rarely used brown. I really like it.
The navigation has a nice touch. I also like how the links have a dotted underline on hover. I went against using this on my own site because it became a problem with images when it dodged the images around (I’m sure you will notice that on your affiliates page).
I also like the rounded edges of the layout – it’s all very neat and well put together. Great job!
Content
In your sidebar, a little property should be the property.
Site
This section is done fairly well so I obviously won’t make comments on things that are okay.
On the affiliates page it might be an idea to make all the buttons the same size or link everyone the same way so things look more organised.
On the application page, you might want to elaborate on “of that sort” when you refer to explicit content. (Porn, violence, animal cruelty…) And capitalise Piczo.
The plugboard isn’t working.
I notice that you place spaces after and before your opening and closing brackets. Like ( text here ). It doesn’t look very nice, not to mention it is bad punctuation. And you will get problems if the opening bracket is on the end of a line, and you get the remainder of the bracket’s content on the next line. Ugly.
It would be nice to see some more information on the past layouts, like the credits for the individual layout, and a summary of what would be on your ‘layout info’ page.
Resources
Wow, you have a lot of content! Time to delve in.
There are quite a lot of tutorials. You might consider putting them in their own section.
The polaroid tutorial is nice! I recommend using other images instead of celebrity images, because, if you’re not aware, they’re acutally illegal. Unless you took those photos of Audrey Kitching, of course.
A number of the functions should be shown as a screenshot as well, and it would be a lot neater and easier to go through the tutorial if the screenshots were on the actual page.
The tutorial on sparkles is quite interesting – but really, would you put a distracting sparkling image on your website? Again the same thing applies here with the screenshots.
Also, you can’t just credit “Photobucket”. Do you know how many users are on Photobucket? It would be equivalent of just saying “a site”. There are many sites out there.
Consider using an image from a defined source and make sure you credit the owner of the image properly.
Saving a brush set – fairly easy. The last screenshot doesn’t link correctly though; it links to the first screenshot again.
The tutorial on smoothing skin is alright, but the effect isn’t much different, it appears to me. Also, credit where you got the image from.
The color shading tutorial is quite nice. I did something similar on my current layout with the gradient!
The ‘before’ image on your photo retouch tutorial is a 404. I love the end result though. I wouldn’t say this is a ‘photo retouch’ but rather a photo editing tutorial.
The colorful photo style tutorial is great, but as usual place the screenshots on the page! It will be a lot easier to follow.
The glowing skin tutorial reads “Color shading”.
Brigtness should be Brightness on your tutorial. You also should not remove the copyright on the image. Sure you edited it, but the image doesn’t belong to you. You should use legal stock images that aren’t copyrighted.
I wouldn’t say ‘advanced’ image is terribly advanced, but it is a good tutorial.
In the centering layout tutorial, you should go into detail on where to put the container – that you put the content inside it. This would make it a lot clearer and more understandable. I know you know how it works, but you have to explain things to the reader. Don’t assume they know these things.
The bullets tutorial is good but consider showing the HTML as well for those who don’t know. Again you should be using <code> instead of textarea.
Favicon tutorial – I have seen a lot of these; this one’s alright.
I don’t see the point of the Cutenews tutorials. Cutenews is an unsafe script as it doesn’t store files in a secure MySQL database but rather uses a flat file system.
These tutorials are fairly useless because the Cutenews documentation roughly covers this information.
However the tutorial on chmoding is useful.
Nice brushes! Perhaps on the imagepacks (or stamps), you could spread them out a bit. Because really, how would someone cut them out?
The fonts are a nice addition, but if they were not made by you, you may be breaking copyright law if you are redistributing them and it isn’t allowed (which is very common). It’s very generic and unoriginal to offer fonts that aren’t yours; now people are making their own.
The stock photography is very nice. Some of the images are a bit blurry though, like the last four on the second page.
“Textures” would be better renamed to “Icon Textures” as they are resized and small and obviously only for icons.
The premade layouts are beautiful; I love the navigation on the first one; both have used good quality images and excellent colour schemes.
The coding links to CreateBlog – it might be better if you uploaded the code to your server or at least had a zip file available for download. That way the images come with it too; people can then save it to their own server.
The avatars are very nice. They all have very nice effects as well, and are of good quality.
Thank you! Finally someone who uses a proper abbreviation (Pen Tool Drawings). And it’s great that you noted what it actually meant. It’s not very useful when someone doesn’t note that. These are quite cute!
Website material – useful for those little things. Nothing to complain about here.
The scribbles are alright; they can be deemed useless – but not if someone finds a creative layout to make out of them or something! These have your old site name on them so should be updated.
Instead of using <textarea> to display code, use <code> instead. Textarea is simply for text and a form of inputting information, not to display code.
The backgrounds are nice but I can tell that they won’t tile nicely; it would be better if you edited these so that they would be able to tile neatly.
You should not be redistributing these dividers on your site if they do not belong to you. You wouldn’t like it if someone took your backgrounds that were made by you and stuck it on their site, would you? You should remove these.
I have seen a lot of the “fun stuff” (if not all) on other websites. They were not created bt you, meaning you must give credit to the scriptwriter. If I’m not wrong, a JavaScript site is not listed on your credits page.
I wouldn’t say these are very original. I guess they can keep people entertained, though. Personally I wasn’t hugely entertained.
On your article on site names, your apostrophes appear as question marks, so you might want to fix that.
On your Firefox addons article:
vety should be very.
I notice that a lot of these descriptions are copied directly from the Firefox site itself; you should try and rewrite them in your own words or rephrase them unless you are going to quote and link back.
The “life” thing is nice; I’ve seen the image before but never the writing about it. I can’t really make further comments because of the fact that you didn’t write this.
Layout Info
Just some errors:
half-an-hour should be half an hour
make for should be work for
Its called should be It’s called.
Portfolio
Nice stuff here! Must say, I like your current layout a lot more, still.
I understand this is just a portfolio to showcase your work, but some of the graphics could be improved more – they’re a bit blurry, and others use a bit too many brushes!
Credits
A nice, lengthy and clear list. Nothing to be complained about here.
Joined
No problems here.
Originality & Creativity
Your site is very creative and you have great content. A lot of your content was quite unique but others were simply generic. You had a lot of content displayed on your site that you didn’t create yourself. Your site would be a lot more unique if you just removed them.
You have great graphic skill and some very great designs. To make these stand out more you should definitely remove those celebrity images and all the random content that doesn’t belong to you.
Organisation & Errors
Well organised. The tutorials could be moved to their own section though.
I spotted a few typos and mistakes. Your English, grammar and spelling is pretty good.
I came across a few 404s, be sure to fix them.
Overall Comment
You’ve got a great site, Priya. Your graphic skill is definitely good, and you have rather solid coding skills.
The coding could be improved to be more valid though. I recommend moving over to FanUpdate rather than Cutenews; it isn’t hugely necessary if Cutenews isn’t giving you problems but it is an unsafe script that can easily be spammed.
Please remove the content that isn’t yours; the dividers for instance. There isn’t any point displaying the work of others on your site. It’s unoriginal and remember, it’s quality that matters, not quantity.
Just clean up those errors and remove the useless things that weren’t made by you. Continue writing tutorials, especially on graphics design – I believe that’s your strength.
Good luck with the site!
