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Site Name: RainysWorld
Owner: Rainy
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 20th February 2009
Site Name
It’s easy to remember and I like it.
Being an OCD English freak I feel the need to point out that ‘Rainys’ should have an apostrophe, but that doesn’t change my opinion.
Coding and Validation
Your coding is valid! Well done!
On your stylesheet9.css, you have 1 error. You’ve written n0-repeat instead of no-repeat.
You have 9 warnings. One of them is because you haven’t put times new roman in quotation marks. Font names with spaces should be quoted like so: “times new roman”.
The other warnings are from using the same colours in certain places.
Your lightbox stylesheet has a few errors and warnings but I won’t be going through those since it’s not actually affecting your actual styling.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
According to Browsershots.org your site looks the same in most browsers.
Your navigation is clear and stands out. The hover colours are good.
I like how your layout is centered. It looks very neat!
Layout
I love the colours. I don’t think olive goes great with blue, but you made it work. I like the small header image and the curve to add interest.
I lke the subtle flowery background, again using the blue.
I really like the blue and I think it could be incorporated into your CSS a bit more. Scrolling down, things get monotonously olive-brown (if you know what I mean) and it’d be nice to see a bit more blue.
Otherwise, your CSS is great and I like the variation of fonts.
I like the matching footer and how the background is fixed. Great job!
Content
I don’t see the need for ‘Welcome to RainysWorld’. We are already welcomed by your layout and everything; there’s no need. The colour of that font is nice, though.
Sidebar is very neat. Great job.
About Rainy
Good start, I’m enjoying my read! You don’t need the comma after to, in the brackets.
now.) should be now).
violin?) I should be violin?). I
A well written page, very interesting. People would get a clear idea of your personality from reading!
Website
This page has no problems, the policy page is good. I don’t think you need the link to your owner page here as it’s already part of the main navigation.
Great FAQ page! On this page though, the contact form leads to the URL on your old hosted site at 110mb.com. And it’s taking too long to load. Could just be downtime, but it’s better to have it link to the domain URL.
The lightbox is a professional look on your past layouts page, but personally I perfer the traditional screenshot-in-a-new-window option. I feel that Lightbox JS takes too long to load.
I like your version 7 derivations! They’re very interesting!
Your other past layouts are nice, but you dont’ need them as live previews. A screenshot would do.
Great credits page! Instead of writing (c), type © for the copyright sign.
The contact form is nice but the background to the form should just be the olive colour and not the black. Also, the red border doesn’t quite match. This part needs to be edited a bit!
Articles
On your first article you don’t need to capitalise WebDesign. With the coding, don’t forget that you have to close with a }.
This article doesn’t go into coding in detail, and maybe a coding template would be handy here.
The articles on External stylesheet and PHP includes are well written, and easy to understand.
The article on doctypes is good, and explained well. I’d include the doctypes here to make things easier though. You might need to go a little more into detail about the difference between HTML and XHTML.
I love your article on iframes. Totally good point, you got the message across and mentioned everything bad about them! I would totally remove the link to that tutorial though!
The article on colour schemes is great, but a lot of the websites you’ve referred to have changed their layouts and no longer apply.
Another Cutenews bashing! I love how you outline both pros and cons in your articles. 2008 should read 2009 now!
Hurk! Good point about the domains. I hate this sort of discrimination; it’s silly. I give Piczo and Freewebs a chance! Even though some are crap, you can’t judge by the URL!
I like reviews on hosts. You should add more hosts, and consider adding some paid ones as well if you know about a few.
On your book review on The Name of The Rose, Reveiw should be Review. All these book reviews are good, and I’d like to see more.
Your travel journal is interesting! I’m guessing that you wrote all this down because you didn’t have internet access to blog it?
Designs
These brushes look good. I don’t really like the first set though, the images look badly cut. Try a .abr file as well as an imagepack. And you might want to update your URL.
The geometric ones are very nice. The others are plain but alright.
The stock images would look better as thumbnails. I don’t like opening them up without knowing what they could look like.
These photos are great and most are of good quality. I like the bright flower ones. I absolutely love the sunflower one!
The forum sets are minimal and simple, but very nice. I’d like to see more!
The premade layouts are very neat. The nightlights one is very professional-looking. I like the navigation links there!
I know this section isn’t your main focus, but some of these resources and graphics are really good. I especially love the stock images.
Archives
Self explanatory.
Originality & Creativity
Very original – the articles were all very well written, and the designs were lovely. Your layout is very creative and I can see your past ones and your premade ones are as well.
Organisation & Errors
Very well organised. I didn’t spot any broken links or images, and articles were written with minimal mistakes.
Overall Comment
Rainy, your site is very impressive. It has a clean polished look, and I feel the same way about it as when I first visited.
Your writings really highlight your site and are very interesting to read. I particularly like the ones that address online/website issues.
I see you’re not keen on graphics but I would like to see more photos.
I actually don’t have many suggestions, except to add more graphics, and maybe layouts, because yours look very good.
You’ve got a great site and I’d definitely come back for a read.
