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Site Name: Skychase.net
Owner: Ryan
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 1st October 2009
Site Name
It’s fairly unique and easy to remember.
Coding and Validation
Your coding has 15 errors and 5 warnings.
You’re completely missing a doctype. This is necessary so that the browser can register your page as a web page in HTML. This is the XHTML 1.0 Transitional doctype, which best suits your coding with WordPress.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
To ensure there are no errors through validation, it is also necessary to put the xmlns attribute in place of <html>:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
You also need character encoding to define the character set of your webpage. It should be placed in the <head> section:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
Your CSS has 1 error. -moz-selection is not a valid property by the W3C; it only works in certain browsers like Firefox. You have a number of warnings but they are not huge issues. It’s also good to see the CSS shortened.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
Your site looks the same in most browsers except Internet Explorer. In IE, it is off to the left, and the layout image isn’t complete. It looks like this. To fix this you might need to allow #header to span across the full width of the container, and use a class to arrange the text onto the image within that header div. Alternatively you could edit the image to place the text on.
As for centering the layout, you might want to see this tutorial. margin: 0 auto 0 auto should be part of the CSS properties for the container so it is centered, and text-align: center; may need to be added to the body to center the layout in IE.
Aside from that problem, the website is navigable and functions in Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari.
The navigation is fine, although putting the links in alphabetical order would look neater.
The text is easy to read.
Layout
It’s a simple layout and I like the focus on the image in the header. The blue colours work well together. A bit of brown or other colours in the CSS would have made it more interesting.
Overall the layout is simple but well put together, with the exception of the browser compatibility issues.
Content
In the sidebar, british should be British.
Resources
The brushes are of good quality and there’s a good variety.
The web templates are simple but very good; they also look the same in most browsers, which is strange as your current layout doesn’t.
The textures look great, although the scratch ones are quite common.
Information on how to use the scripts on the page would be handy.
Tutorials
On the manual WordPress installation tutorial, you should indicate what exactly needs to be changed in the data.
On the displaying WordPress tutorial, I think you also need to outline that the blog URL needs to be changed in the settings.
The permalink tutorial is fairly straightforward and simple. I think you could outline the other permalink types and how they are useful; this would make the tutorial more useful.
The WordPress theme tutorial should be refined a bit in terms of the introduction. This isn’t really creating a theme “from scratch” as it assumes that the user knows some elements of HTML and CSS. More subheadings and splitting this tutorial into parts would make it easier to follow. It seems like a rather bland tutorial, and you mention the lines, but it’s hard to pick out from the documents.
Articles
In the “6 Website Tips” article you should capitalise HTML and CSS.
In the site name article:
choice of words need should be choice of words needs
resemblance to any current sites are should be resemblance to any current sites is.
In the “Getting more hits” article:
finding yourself should be finding you.
In the “Movies and Books” article you need not capitalise “movies” and “books”.
fun to watch, therefore should be fun to watch – therefore.
On the article about sidebars, bookmarked, the should be bookmarked; the.
On the photography article:
There’s so should be There are so
quickly, find should be quickly; find
plently should be plenty.
On the reviews article mean, it should be mean; it.
About
The credits page would be better if you added what you are crediting the websites for. It is however, a great credits list.
On the owner page its the should be it’s the.
Originality & Creativity
You have original articles and resources, even if I have seen some of the article topics on other sites. I think you could make a more creative layout though. I have seen your layouts in the past and they have been a bit more impressive with more use of brushes and more creative elements.
Organisation & Errors
Well organised; barely any errors apart from the layout looking a bit funny in IE.
Overall Comment
I didn’t see anything majorly wrong with your website but I didn’t find it that interesting. I think your layout could have been a bit more impressive. It was simple in a good way, but I think you could have made the CSS more interesting or used a few more colours.
You had some interesting content, even though it was minimal. I enjoyed reading your articles and I think this is your strong point.
I believe you can work towards a more striking layout and continue building up on your current content.
