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Site Name: Celeb Designs
Owner: Sofia
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 13th January 2009
Site Name
Celeb Designs? Could you get any more lame or boring? Not only is using the word ‘designs’ overdone, but celeb?
I get the very bad first impression that your site is going to be riddled with ILLEGAL photos of celebrities.. let’s just hope it’s not, eh?
Coding and Validation
Your coding has 25 errors. Firstly, you’re missing a doctype and your character encoding is wrong. These are essential for a browser to read your site smoothly and effectively, so make sure you add this at the top of every page before <html>. Your doctype is HTML 4.01 Transitional:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" >
However: for your character encoding to work, you need to remove those funny symbols in your welcome message. The funny symbol before ‘Come’. And remove the following:
<HTML> <HEAD> <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-2">
<META http-equiv="Content-Language" content="hr"> <TITLE>Snow </TITLE></HEAD> <BODY>
..because why would you need another opening HTML tag and head tag? And that character encoding you’re using is rarely used. And your snow doesn’t need a title. And your head and body tags are all messed up!
Also, get rid of the </BODY> </HTML< you have after the crappy snowflake effect. You can’t end your document here! Here you should put a </head> and start your body tag with <body>.
Remove the <body> after your image map. It doesn’t belong there either.
You’re forgetting an alt tag on your images. You need one on every image, even if it’s blank.
Many warnings are caused by your FanUpdate entries, as FanUpdate writes your entries in XHTML, not HTML.
Your CSS is crazy. It can’t be checked.
Instead of having so many <style> and </style> tags, remove them and just have one </style> at the end of all your styling. Then we can see the errors you have. You have some blank values and a tendency to write ‘none’ as a background colour. Just delete the attribute if you don’t need it!
Browser Compatibility & Usability
The site looks the same in most browsers according to Browsershots.org.
Your header image is too big. Way too big. Even the file size is too big. Spare a thought for dial-users, why don’t you? No one wants to spend years waiting for your header image to load.
At least the navigation’s huge. But the tutorials link doesn’t even work. Sheesh.
The falling snow is a dodgy out-of-place effect that should go away. Also, the crosshair cursor is annoying; plus it only works in Internet Explorer.
The links on hover are annoying because some text is dodged. You shouldn’t make the text on hover change in letter spacing; it’s quite annoying.
Layout
Ew.
So, care to explain why your header image is SO LARGE? All I can see on my screen is this dodgy photo of some person called ‘Hannah Beth’. Who I find later, is a celebrity.
So Sofia, I take it that you don’t know that using celebrity graphics is illegal? Well, let me educate you. Read this article.
Your header image should be smaller. Who wants to scroll down to see your content? Who wants to be bombarded with a massive photo of a celebrity? You need to make your headers a lot smaller, and don’t use celebrity images.
Besides, the quality of the photo isn’t great. It looks of very low quality especially around the face. And I don’t like how Hannah Beth’s feet just chop off at the bottom of the image.
The navigation and font styles are refined and quite nice. They’re just too damn big.
So it’s a neat layout overall, but too damn big.
The purple you’re using for links should match the purple with which you wrote ‘Hannah Beth’.. Your CSS doesn’t really go well with the layout. Your header text is so big compared to your default text.
Tweak your CSS and make those headers a little smaller – like the ones for your blogs and the ones on your sidebar. I like how they’re different, to add variation.
Content
Looking at your sidebar and homepage.. some images with the alternative text 
aren’t appearing on your blog. I’m guessing it’s a smiley.
Remove your welcome message.. it’s annoying and pointless. People always just look into your site without reading it. Welcome messages are also rather old.
Well, you were kind enough to add an alternate navigation for people who may have images disabled. Why isn’t ‘Ask Me’ on your huge image map?
Why are your affiliates links so big? Well, they deserve all the space I guess, if they’re that special.
The Google advertisements should be customised match your layout. Pink and blue and orange aren’t such great choices..
Visitor Content
‘Coming Soon’ – never a good thing to put on your website. Visitors don’t need to know that your site is incomplete.
How dodgy. You have a different layout on your ‘layouts’ page.
These layouts are just as annoying as your current one.
Your icons are of celebrities.. well, the icons themselves aren’t bad, but they’re boring. Add text and effects, otherwise they just look like they’ve been cropped.
On your free installations page, Cutenews, If should be Cutenews; if.
The lyrics page leads to external links; they obviously won’t be reviewed. People can Google lyrics; so this page is pretty pointless.
Tutorials
This takes me nowhere.
Ask Me
Your layout changes on this page. Sheesh. And this page is self explanatory.
Site
Affiliates is self explanatory.
Your ‘about the site’ page is empty.
Your link buttons are of a dodgy size. They should be standard 88 by 31 pixels, or 100 by 35 pixels. The buttons aren’t of good quality either.
Your ‘about the owner’ page is empty.
Your ‘credits’ page is empty.
Originality & Creativity
Nothing. I can’t find any originality, any creativity. All graphics were of illegal celebrity images.
Organisation & Errors
Badly organised with lots of empty pages and links that led to empty pages.
Noticeable spelling/grammar errors in the blog; these weren’t outlined.
Overall Comment
Sofia, your site needs a lot of work. Your coding isn’t awful but it needs a lot of improvement.
Your layout is ridiculously large and the snowflakes and links effects are very annoying. You have barely any content.
Suggestions:
- Work on coding, learn the basic structure of an HTML document
- Make a layout with a smaller header
- Stop using celebrity images; try a legal image source
- Add more unique content
- Organise the site and don’t leave blank or missing pages
- Make a credits page to credit EVERY source.
Good luck.
