back to Completed Reviews
Site Name: Warriors Spirit
Owner: Raven
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 4th August 2009
Site Name
Apart from the fact that there should really be an apostrophe in the word “warriors”, the website name is fairly easy to remember. I have a bit of difficulty remembering the URL.
Coding and Validation
In your footer, it is stated that the coding is not by you, but by someone else. Therefore I don’t know if it will help you at all if I go through your errors.
You have 10 errors and 11 warnings in your coding.
Firstly, you need a doctype to declare your document as an HTML document. You have good basic structure but are missing these fundamentals. The doctype below, HTML 4.01 Transitional, best matches your coding. You need to place this at the very beginning of every page, before <html>.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
Directly after that, you need <html> and <head>.
You also need a character encoding to define the character set of your webpage. The most common one is UTF-8. You should place this in between the head tags.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<div align=center> should be quoted as <div align="center">, and you should also place it within the body tags.
Another key rule with validating coding – specify an alt attribute (alternative text) for all images. Screen readers such as those for the blind will be able to read these more effectively and give a better description if you put some alternative text on your images.
Your CSS has 5 errors and 3 warnings.
Firstly, you should be using an external stylesheet for your CSS, because it loads a lot faster and is easier to change.
You’re using word values for colours. It is recommended that you use hexadecimals for the colours as they are more accurate, and not all browsers and operating systems will recognise the colours in words.
#nav li should have width specified. As you have no width specified, your navigation is out of alignment in browsers other than Internet Explorer. You must specify a width to overcome this issue.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
According to Browsershots.org your site looks different in all the browsers, as a result of your navigation. As I mentioned in the coding section, nav li should have width specified so that the navigation blocks are the size you want, and will allow things to settle into alignment in other browsers.
The main font size should be increased. It’s fairly small and hard to read.
Layout
After a brief look at your website (using Internet Explorer, as it doesn’t look that fantastic in my preferred browser Mozilla Firefox), I quite like the footer with the designed oblongs. The brushes used on them look neat and they have a nice effect to them, particularly with the colours.
While I like the footer image, I don’t like the header image. The brushes on the right match the footer image, but looks very pixelated. The quality of this part of the layout isn’t as good. It appears that you’ve cropped this brush messily from part of a picture as the edges seem a bit sharp.
The cat on the left of the header image is a nice addition. The position of the cat such that its deep blue eye is in view is great. However, the eye colour should be manipulated to a colour that will suit the layout better, such as a yellow or pink shade.
The header image isn’t done so well. Now I get to the text – which looks a bit tacky. The blue and purple don’t match with the layout terribly well, and because the text is so large, the colours stand out like a sore thumb. The colours should have some shading to them, like the brushes in the footer do. Otherwise they should be kept a subtle colour like grey. The text nees some effects. The “MS Paint” look isn’t very favourable, and a dropshadow effect would be more appropriate, using a more subtle font as well. The decorative font clashes with the decorative brushes – it should be kept subtle so they don’t clash.
As I look at the colouring in the stylesheet, it appears that you have two colour schemes going on – the pink/yellow/purple, and a blue/green. The colours clash a lot – you should stick with a minimal amount of colours, because the more colours you have, the less they “work” together.
If you have an image and want to generate a colour palette, Degraeve is a good website to visit.
Content
You have errors in the sidebar.
Affilates should be Affiliates
Status should really be Statistics
advirtising should be advertising
Alligiances should be Allegiances
Top Affilates should be Top Affiliates
You should also be using colons instead of semicolons – Opened: March 2009.
Sitely
“Sitely” is not a word. This section would be better named as “Website” or “Site”.
Afflates should be Affiliates.
On the “Affiliates” page:
Affilates should be Affiliates
Affies is not a word – use Affiliates
a great plessure should be great pleasure.
The staff requests are closed, so take the page down.
Awards are pretty self explanatory.
On the contact form page, the text should be aligned to the left, not centered. By convention, people read from the left to the right when reading large amounts of text.
Affilation should be Affiliation.
On the introduction page, the text should be aligned to the left and not centered.
On the linkback buttons page, you should not be displaying code with textarea. You should be displaying it with code like so, and using a converter to convert the HTML code into its entities. Textarea is designed for user input and not for storing code.
The past layouts page is under construction. When you have pages like this, avoid putting them up until the page is ready – it makes your website look disorganised and incomplete.
The staff pages all have different layouts, which is very confusing. It’s hard to actually notice that the navigation leads to the same places on “Warriors Spirit”.
On the webmistress page, there are a few errors:
Famale should be Female.
Half of this page’s text is centered; you should align it to the left like the text at the beginning of the page. Also, instead of using semicolons incorrectly, you should be using colons.
Designs
“Artwork cats” is under revamp…
The avatars aren’t that interesting. I see why they’re all of cats because your website focuses on them, but some of these avatars could really be improved in quality. The quality of many of these is very low, particularly the ones with text under “Ravenflight’s Avatars”. Avatars such as this one and this one are extremely pixelated.
The avatars need to be improved. The ones without text aren’t bad, but they’re boring. They appear to just be cropped images. Effects and subtle pieces of text should be added.
You should not be making the visitor do all the work and have to drag every single one of your banners to the address bar, viewing it, pressing back, and having to repeat the entire process. These should be linked to the full image, like a thumbnail, and open in a new window for ease of navigation. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to drag all your images to the address bar to view them when you could just click them.
The banners aren’t of good quality either, and they are not interesting. Banners such as this one need to be improved. It appears that you have simply “slapped on” text, for want of a better description. Effects should be used appropriately, on both text and image. You should read tutorials on how to do so.
The “blogs” are not bad. I am against them being called “blogs” really; a “blog” [weblog] is like an online diary; a graphic in which text can be fancily displayed isn’t really a blog. As I mentioned, these aren’t bad. They are simple and there is sufficient space for the text.
The character series graphics – I’m not sure what exactly they are or what they are for – but they are a heck of a lot better than the avatars I have just seen. Though they aren’t the best graphics, these graphics have nicer effects and the quality is a lot better. On quality, though, BMP is not a suitable file type for this sort of image. Bitmaps take an extremely long time to load, so saving in an optimised JPEG is a good idea. PNG is also a desirable format, but don’t save too many graphics in this format because file size tends to be large as well.
I’m not aware of what program you are using to create the graphics but in more sophisticated programs other than Paint, you can select the quality (minimum or maximum) of a JPEG.
On that note, it would be wise to include a credits page on your website too. And it would be a good idea to create these banners as thumbnails so people don’t have to go through all the trouble to drag these images to their address bar. You might like to size the image down to a smaller size and saving it as a thumbnail so that the thumbnails themselves don’t take a while to load.
On the “guild layouts” page, Preveiw should be Preview.
The first layout isn’t good at all. Firstly, the grammatical error of “which side will you chose?” – chose should be choose. The fonts are also really tacky and not everyone as the fonts you have chosen for the layout. The graphic quality is also terrible.
The last two layouts are better in terms of CSS and graphic choice, but they’re still extremely large and the placement of the image elements are a mess.
The signs are useless. No one uses premade “enter” signs or “hiatus” signs – they’re outdated, and people usually make their own or use text.
The “stock linkbacks” would be better named “button bases” – also useless; people make their own.
On the website layouts page:
I’s real should be It’s really
mite be ok should be might be okay
Preveiw should be Preview
Cose should be Code.
This sentence makes no sense:
It is an image based layout so it is not Css with the boxs and other stuff that confued me but a image based layout!
The layouts themselves are okay. The image placement and general elements are okay, but compatibility and accessibility need to be looked into.
The user lookups open documents of HTML.
Warriors
I don’t understand anything in this section. There is no introduction or explanation and half of it appears to be copied from websites or numerous other sources, which is stealing, as you are showcasing someone else’s work.
Extras
Nothing much to say here.
Originality & Creativity
I’ve seen a lot of websites like yours with similar themed graphics, so I didn’t really spot anything hugely special. Your graphic skill needs some work. Considering you have “staff” as well, you probably all need to step up your game and work on the website a bit more. It seems like it could do with a bit of attention. Graphic skills and coding need to be improved.
Organisation & Errors
Organisation was okay. There were errors in some of the writing and with browser compatibility issues so be sure to address those as soon as possible.
Overall Comment
It’s fairly obvious what you can improve on here. Graphics need to be sorted out, as do the empty and “revamped” or “coming soon” pages.
Thumbnails for the images would be appropriate and more user-centered.
Coding needs to be looked into, as does the design of the interface and the layout in general, particularly colour schemes.
Best of luck with your website.
1 Comment so far — leave one?
Raven says:
Wow. Not so good here. But I do see your point. So I’ll get right to work on it!
Reply to this comment »