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Site Name: Bloody Shirt
Owner: Sindara
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 8th August 2009
Site Name
I must say that the name of your website was a bit intimidating. I have visited your website before but I’m not a fan of the name. It’s a bit of a creepy name, to be completely honest, and from a more personal point of view. It’s not affecting the rest of your review, though.
Coding and Validation
Your coding has 31 errors and 3 warnings.
You have a doctype, which is a good start. However, you 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" />
Your CSS should be within the head tags. You should also be using an external stylesheet, not have the CSS embedded in your coding. It helps your website load faster and is a lot easier to manage.
Your divs are completely wrong. Why are you using an unnecessary slash within them? A div is closed with </div>, not with the closing slash.
Divs like the following should be assigned an id and specified with CSS:
<div style="position:absolute; left:-2px; top: 0px; border:none;">Should be written as:
<div id="divname">Specified with CSS:
#divname { position: absolute; left: -2px; top: 0px; border: none; }
Visit my tutorial for more information on classes and ids.
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.
Additionally, all images should be in the following format if you are using XHTML:
<img src="image URL" alt="photograph" />
You are missing </body> before </html>.
Your CSS has 1 error and 1 warning.
As I mentioned, your CSS should not be embedded. Also, width cannot be used for blockquote.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
According to Browsershots.org your layout looks similar in most browsers.
On closer inspection your text is centered in Internet Explorer but aligned to the left in Firefox, Safari, and Opera. You don’t have any attributes set in your CSS, not even specifications for font. I’m seeing the ugly default text in all my browsers, which is Times New Roman. You should edit your CSS and include something like the following:
p, body {
font: normal 10pt Arial;
text-align: left;
}
The links changing their case on hover is not very attractive and often this dodges the text around the links. You should make it so that nothing more than the colour changes – having such a drastic changing effect looks messy and unprofessional.
“Domain” should really be written as “Website” – not everyone is familiar with the term “domain”.
Layout
It reminds me of an old styled iframe layout, which isn’t a good impression. The layout is aligned completely to the left, and is extremely large in size. This sort of style isn’t suitable for websites because it will not fit in all screen resolutions and won’t look the way you want it.
The edges of the layout are really strange. They look fuzzy and I’m not sure what effect you were trying to achieve. It seems like there is a bunch of squished text at the sides that you have just resized.
The layout components look fuzzy and pixelated. The brushes you’re using are not of good quality and they look like they have been sized too far beyond their width, resulting in a pixelated look. They are placed in good positions, though.
This layout has obviously had some thought put into it but the graphic skill is not up to scratch. The quality is low and in my opinion, a box-type layout isn’t very efficient; it’s a lot easier to stick with a header image and content below, or something along those lines. Content being in a box works for a small website, but I believe your website could benefit without that.
The cat on the layout seems very random, and the affiliates in the circle is a creative idea but they don’t really fit there neatly.
There are random colours of yellow and blue in the CSS; it should be customised further as it is simply too plain and uses the default text.
Content
Visitor
Putting the content links into a table is a creative and unique idea but you should be evening things out with a few line breaks, so that the columns of the table aren’t jagged up.
This section is where the links are particularly to a visitor’s disadvantage; it looks awful and dodges a lot of the text.
The images for the “blends” should be as thumbnails so that they open in a new window for full size. Celebrity images are used here, which isn’t recommended. Using these images without permission from the photographers is in breach of copyright and is considered illegal.
Additionally, textarea should not be used to display code, as it is intended for user input only. code should be used instead, after converting the code into its entities.
This tutorial can assist you in correctly displaying code on web pages.
The blends and icons are not very good at all. They’re of bad quality and barely any nice effects are used on the images. The colours need to be brightened up, and subtle but nice effects should be used.
The wallpapers are a better job, but they aren’t the best. The Johnny Depp and Alex Evans wallpapers are the best ones. They are of better quality, and the Johnny Depp one is blended very well, even if there are minimal effects.
The wallpapers would be better if they were offered in a variety of sizes. Some of these aren’t even in wallpaper sizes.
The textures should be renamed “icon textures”. The first few are very good, but the others are boring and lack variety, or are extremely pixelated. They all have the same basic pattern. Some less crowded ones and subtle ones would be good.
All the stamp images are 404s.
Nothing much to comment on about the site names. “Memory” is much too common though.
On the random rambles page you have some errors:
just cause your should be just because you’re
Carriage are cuerl should be carriages are cruel
feilds should be fields
they are place should be they are places
newpaper should be newspaper
pregancy should be pregnancy
is already should be are already
pregant should be pregnant
opinon should be opinion
responsiblity should be responsibility
postive should be positive
grocieres should be groceries
responisable should be responsible
responsable should be responsible
responible should be responsible
everytime should be every time
lifes should be lives
Disease that have should be diseases that have
mediciane should be medicine
religons’ high preist should be religions’ high priest
mediciane should be mediciane.
All these need looking over and proofreading. They’re very short and should be paragraphed out so they are easier to read. “Prego” isn’t an appropriate substitute for the word pregnant.
The “installing FanUpdate” tutorial doesn’t even appear to be finished, and the images can’t even be viewed because they are not thumbnails.
All that is on the icon tutorial is “First find an image”. You should have more instructions on the page, really. Relying on an image to show the user how to do something isn’t always a good idea because the image might not load for them, and you also don’t even have the full view of the image.
I can’t even see any text for the blend tutorial. It’s just an image.
Domain
You need FanUpdate on your credits page. Also, crediting “Google” is ambiguous. Google is a search engine. You must credit the exact website that you got your images from. How would you like it if I credited “a website” after using your images?
Originality & Creativity
Most of the content on your website was generic, and can be found on many other websites. The book nook is a unique idea; I haven’t seen it much, even if you did have the idea from someone else.
You didn’t have such great graphic skill. I can see that you attempt to be original and try new things but your graphic skill needs a lot of work.
Organisation & Errors
The pages were generally in the right places, but the pages themselves need some editing. A lot of them didn’t have titles. You also had a lot of mistakes in your writing.
You had a few pages with images that didn’t work. I also think you should avoid relying solely on images for the tutorials. You haven’t even provided a user-friendly way of viewing them full size.
Overall Comment
Your website is obviously well maintained but you need to work on quite a few things.
Your graphic skill needs some work. I noticed a lot of your graphics have dull colours; experiment with brighter colours too. I’m not sure what graphics program you use (it isn’t listed in your credits), but if you’re using something like Paint, try something like Gimp. It’s free and it’s the equivalent of Photoshop. There are a lot more tools and functions to work with.
Your pages need to be cleaned up and your coding needs some attention, particularly in the CSS area. You need to add styling to your website; it’s looking quite bland and boring.
I can see that you can be quite creative. You have some wallpapers that definitely stand out from the rest. You can clearly see what is good and what is not. Cleaning out your content and putting up your best content is better. Remember, quality, not quantity.
Good luck with your website.
