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Site Name: Purely-Vintage
Owner: Renee
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 15th May 2009
Site Name
I’ve heard the word ‘vintage’ one too many times in a site name. I can’t say it’s too original but at least it makes sense. I don’t usually like hyphens though; as a side note.
Coding and Validation
Your coding has 7 errors and 4 warnings.
You need a doctype at the beginning of your coding to show it is an HTML document (this is the one for iframes):
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
You don’t even have <html> or </html> tags. <html> should go directly after your doctype and </html> should be at the very end of your document.
You don’t have <body> and </body> surrounding your content.
The favicon code should be in the <head> tags. Also, a character encoding should be in the head tags:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
You have numerous other errors. I recommend taking a look at my HTML validation tutorial so you know how to validate your coding. This will make sure your website doesn’t encounter errors in specific browsers.
Your CSS has 17 errors and 5 warnings.
These errors can be fixed by putting values after many of your heights – instead of writing just “0″, write “0px”.
Also, you should not be embedding CSS. Use an external stylesheet instead.
You are forgetting a } at the end of your body specifications.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
Browsershots.org tells me your site is fine in most browsers.
Your font size is too small. I can barely read it and I have to change my browser settings to make it big enough to read. It’s really a pain when I have to increase the font size because you have set it too small. You should really have 9pt as the bare minimum for font size. Any less than that and it becomes a pain to read.
While your links do have this nice hover effect, they are not very good. I don’t like the way all your text moves when I hover over a link, because the style of the text changes a lot. You should change something simple like the font colour and an underline.
Your header image is too big. All I see in my screen when I visit your site is some of your sidebar and your huge header image. You might have a wide or big screen resolution, but it doesn’t mean that other people do. Your site may look fantastic when it is big, but not to everyone else. Also, big images mean bigger file size, therefore meaning that there is more to load. If people are on a dial-up connection or a slow connection, they will be sitting there for a while just to see your layout!
I know the iframes and imagemap combination really works – but it isn’t very user friendly. What if your image didn’t load because someone had a slow connection? What if someone had images turned off? Perhaps you don’t think about these things. But as a matter of fact, I turn off images sometimes when I am browsing the web, because everything does load faster.
Keep in mind that if this happens, people would be lost on your site, which is why it’s always a good idea to have links in your sidebar as alterate navigation, or even a link in the sidebar reading ‘site map’. That way no one will get lost.
Now I can’t stress this enough. I know iframes may seem like a great option for you at this time, but they’re not. There are many disadvantages with iframes, both for you and your visitors. For your visitors, they might want to bookmark a page of your site, and they won’t be able to because the page is trapped in an iframe. I don’t know if you have heard of divs, but they are a better option. If you’re thinking about layout changes and how long they will take – use server side includes (SSI).
Iframes are not good for you either; search engines will not look at your pages in an iframe. This means that whatever you have in an iframe will not be looked at, meaning there will be less search results for your site – therefore meaning less visitors.
Layout
The layout is really a mess. The corner of the header image is quite nice, but then you have this bold horrid navigation slapped across it diagonally. It doesn’t look great. You haven’t even filled up the bottom right corner of the image.
The image does have some complexity to it. I like the bulk of the image, but I’d like to point out the things that don’t look that great.
You seem to have just scrawled ‘purely-vintage’ on your image quite messily. It is drawn over the navigation parts of the image. What is the effect of this? It looks very messy. At least you could have reduced the opacity of the text.
The “Run away” text seems pretty random. It is quite dark and too bold for this style of layout. It could have been a lot lighter. The film strip brush also doesn’t fit with the layout.
The layout also just cuts off to the right – here’s a screenshot. It would look better if the layout faded into black on the side as well.
The text size could be increased, as I mentioned. The other parts of the CSS do have nice colours that match roughly with the layout image. The links should be kept as bold on hover, to avoid the text around it shifting around.
Overall, the layout would really just look better without the tacky navigation parts and without such a big gap of grey in the middle of it.
I already mentioned how big your layout image was. I constantly have to scroll up and down to navigate through your site.
Content
Owner
Nothing terribly wrong here.
I have a retainer too, haha. It is quite annoying.
Capitalise Piczo and Freewebs.
Content
Errors:
a s you should be as you
use you can should be use; you can
msn should be MSN.
Try not to have things ‘under construction’ on your site. It makes things look messy, and worse, unfinished.
Hm. The blends contain images of celebrities which are actually illegal. I’m sure you didn’t take those photos of Alexis Bledel, Ashley Tisdale or other celebrities you have included. You should at least give credit. I don’t see a credits page on your site. You have to credit everything – Freewebs for hosting you, Photobucket, where you got all these images from. You can’t just ask someone to credit you for your “blends” when: 1) you don’t credit your resources, and 2) the images aren’t even yours.
That aside, the blends are alright. do have some skill and flair in designing these, but some of the images need to be improved in quality as they are blurry. Your third one, of Alexis Bledel, has a rather pixelated image of her face.
This one of Ashley Greene – her image hasn’t been cut well, and I can barely see her name on the layout.
For the most part, these blends are alright and to be honest, they’re better made and seem to have more time spent on them than your current layout.
I don’t see the point of ‘mini blends’. If they’re smaller, how can they be used as a layout? For subpages? It’s horridly annoying to have the layout change on every page. Very Piczo-ish, not very professional. Neither are enter pages!
The icons aren’t as great as the other graphics or ‘blends’ I have seen. They look rather pixelated, like the Twilight one and the Zac Efron one. All of these look pixelated and don’t have very good effects on them. Not all of these are the same size either.
I don’t know why the banners open in a new window. These do not look good; they look rushed and messy and of bad quality.
The bullets and pixels are actually quite nice. Great job! Love the shading on the hearts.
The HTML codes are pretty pointless. They’re just for copying and pasting. No one can really learn from these. If you’re going to tell people HTML, it would be better if you explained it thoroughly and not just provided a bunch of codes to copy and paste.
Competitions
I can’t really review these… on the blend competition page:
Hello Welcome should be Hello. Welcome
10 Then should be 10. Then
its not should be it’s not.
On your icon competition page:
10 Then should be 10. Then
its not should be it’s not.
I think it’s pretty immature if you’re going to tell all your friends that “so-and-so has stolen” just because the blend isn’t by them. How will you find out if it’s not made by them? Is it really necessary to bother telling 80 other people that someone stole? Why can’t you just ban them from competitions and that’s it?
Guestbook
Nothing much to say here.
Originality & Creativity
I did not see much originality because the bulk of your graphics were celebrity-bound. You did show creativity but I think overall you could optimise your graphics a bit more. You tend to use quite a lot of effects on your graphics that aren’t necessary.
You also had quite a lot of generic content – “blends”, icons, banners – you could spice up your site with something a bit different.
Organisation & Errors
Organisation was alright – things went in their respective sections. I didn’t spot any major errors with any images or links.
There were a few typos but they can be fixed quite easily.
Overall Comment
It’s obvious that you put a lot of work into your site and content but overall, you need to spice things up a bit. You should optimise your graphics so they are of better quality. Do not edit photos too much. Chances are if you’re getting them from the web, they should be of generally good quality. There would be no need to add too many effects to the face or people or to the image itself. Just dress it up with brushes and so on.
You definitely need to make your text bigger. Throughout the review I had to constantly increase the font size using my browser.
Work more on usability. For visitors to keep returning to your site and be able to use your resources, you have to make your site usable. Popping out of the iframes and using divs instead would be a good start.
Additionally, don’t make such a large header image or a large layout. It might look good to you, but not to others.
Also: work on creating less generic but more original content.
