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Site Name: Defeated
Owner: Tammy
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 5th May 2009
Site Name
So is the site name Defeated or Defeated Lyts? It’s a bit confusing when you notified me that it was “Defeated”, and yet you say “DefeatedLyts.co.cc” in your image and site.
I don’t know what’s with this “lyts” thing. I have heard that it’s short for layouts – why must we shorten words unnecessarily? Besides, “lyts” reads as “lights” and no new person to web would even understand that.
Coding and Validation
Your coding has 28 errors and 4 warnings.
You don’t even have a doctype, or html or head tags. This is essential to an HTML document and if you don’t know these, go and learn the proper structure of an HTML document.
You need those head tags to surround the information that is before the content of the site. You have <body> which is good. Now, directly before that, you need to put a </head> to signify the end of the header coding.
Then, the following needs to be placed at the top of EVERY document. It is the doctype (HTML 4.01 Transitional) and html and head tags:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
At the end of everything, you should have </html>.
You’re completely forgetting <tr> in your tables. This is the correct structure of a table, and you can find more on my tutorial:
<table>
<tr>
<td>This is your first cell</td>
<td>This is your second cell</td>
</tr>
</table>
Therefore you need to fix your tables. In your affiliates table, you forget to close the link for “apply”, and that link should be in a cell. It currently isn’t. You need to look over your tables and fix them.
You’re using a textarea for that silly comment thing, and in textarea you have to specify rows and columns:
<textarea rows="5" cols="5">
All images should also have an alt attribute, even if it is blank. This also includes your Cutenews entries, which are half of the problem.
All scripts should have a type specified. Usually it is type="text/javascript" which you need in your hits counter. (Which is inaccurate by the way, because every time I refresh the page, it counts as a hit. Bulldust.)
You forgot to end a </div> after your Cutenews entries and before your tracker. And you forget to add </center>.
You’re not ending a large number of divs, which is causing errors. Make sure you look through and end every div. I just added a large bunch of </div> to the end of your coding and eventually it validated. So make sure you end them.
Visit my tutorial on HTML validation if you need further help.
Your CSS is valid with 144 warnings.
To remove these warnings, you should be quoting fonts with whitespace. That means that font name with a space in them should be quoted, for example, “small fonts”.
You are also using the same colours in two contexts, in many places. Try and clean up your CSS a bit and use more different colours.
Browser Compatibility & Usability
Your popup that greets me when I visit your site is ridiculous. You can’t just tell your visitors to go and use a specific browser because you, the webmaster, don’t even know if your site works in browsers other than Firefox. As if a visitor would bother to change their browser just to view your site. You should be be catering for your visitors, not them catering for you.
The popup is very annoying and unprofessional. And you’re telling people to comment? That’s just rude.
I should also mention that your site looks fine in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari. So there really is no point in that message.
Browsershots.org is also fine with your layout. If you were unaware of what your site looked like in other browsers, THEN CHECK.
Your navigation is way too small. I visit your site and what stands out to me? All these titles you have reading “I went to a school dance”, “updates, blah” and so on. I even have to scroll to see your navigation. Wouldn’t it make more sense to place it at the top of the page and make it bigger? The alternating effects are also ridiclous. Just keep all the links the same style. It doesn’t even look like navigation like that.
When I hover over the first one, it dodges to the right. The second one – dodges to the left. This alternating sequence is very annoying.
What’s with the tiny font ‘small fonts’? So many people use it and the truth is – it is very hard to read. Some people don’t have very good eyesight, and some people wear glasses. You cannot expect someone to squint at your site just to read something. It isn’t all about how things look – obviously if something is too small it cannot be read.
Besides, you have such extremely large font for your headings and extremely small font for your text. How much does that contrast? A lot. And with navigation that small, your site isn’t very user-friendly.
Layout
It’s a fairly simple but working colour scheme. The image is nice and has a nice effect. This style of layout isn’t often used, so that’s good to see.
There are so many colours that could be picked from the image, but you haven’t used many blues at all. If you’re stuck, Degraeve’s color palette generator can generate a colour palette for you!
I don’t really see the point of two sidebars. Besides, one is only about half full. It’s also confusing and having two sidebars just looks tacky. The welcome message isn’t needed; it’s obviously we are at defeatedlyts.co.cc and you obviously would like us to look around.
It’s not a bad layout and the image is quite nice. I suggest tweaking the CSS and also centering your layout (visit that page and search for the section about containers).
Content
What’s with the ‘i used (blank); thanks!’ in your sidebar? And “your welcome” should be you’re welcome. Well, blah, it just leads to a MySpace. It would have been nice to say ‘comment on MySpace‘ somewhere.
Hosting
This leads to another site and I am not reviewing it.
Site MySpace
Clearly also leads to another site and I am not reviewing a MySpace.
Backup
Not reviewing this. Perhaps it would be nice to let us all know that these open in a new window. This isn’t even part of the navigation of the site. It’s more like a “network”.
Contact/About Owner
I think it’s ridiculous that your affiliates have to ‘have myspace added’ prior to applying. Not everyone has MySpace and not everyone will want to use it just for affiliation with you. What’s this helping, in people adding you to MySpace?
Support
Support “us”? Who is “us”? I thought you were the only owner.
100% made by you? So you took that photo of that girl? You drew Tare Panda? You made the fonts that you used, did you? You should be careful with what you say. You must have used some resources somewhere.
Credits
Fair.
Plugboard
then should be than
your banned should be you’re banned.
Chat Box
I don’t see why you couldn’t integrate this into your layout instead of having it open with a different look.
Premades
Why can’t you have the link read ‘premade signs’ instead? I didn’t know what kind of premades they were.
What is the point of these signs? What can people use them for? You don’t say. Can’t you make layouts out of them? Which would be more useful.
So these were 100% made by you too? You made the effects yourself? You took all the photos too, did you?
PNGs
These are cut well. Why are they called “PNGs” all the time? PNG is simply a file extension – portable network graphics much?
Besides, the use of celebrity images is illegal unless the photos were taken by you. Did you take these photos of Ashley Tisdale? I’d think not.
Therefore you shouldn’t be redistributing these photos that were taken by other people and edited by you. It’s also fair to say that you should credit where you got these from in the first place.
Sun Vectors
There’s only one here. I don’t see these used often but they would be useful for those who do.
Tutorials
The MySpace tutorial to find your friend ID is useless. It’s not even a tutorial.
The tutorial for making a picture black and white isn’t really a tutorial either. It just tells you how to click a function.
What is with putting “403656494″ on all your images? I’m guessing it’s your “MySpace ID” thing? Well, even if it is, I have to work at it to figure it out. Perhaps you should have noted something like “credit is on my images as a MySpace ID; some as defeatedlyts.co.cc”.
You’re just telling someone how to click Filter, Color, and Tarnish Colors? What kind of tutorial is that?
Ditto for the other Photofiltre tutorials. If you’re teaching people something, teach them how to make a graphic instead of just an effect.
The banning ip addresses tutorial is pointless. Not everyone has a cPanel – and it just so happens that there is a “help” button at the top of the screen in this section of the cPanel which tells you how to ban an ip. Yes.
The installing Cutenews tutorial is okay – but all this is outlined in the documentation of the script anyway…
have download should be have to download
cutenews should be Cutenews
Viola should be Voila
in, just should be in; just.
Originality & Creativity
You have some creative graphics, even though you don’t have many. Some things aren’t so original and are rather generic – like the PNGs.
You do have a fair bit of content but these could be developed into more useful things for visitors.
Organisation & Errors
The pages were fairly well organised. The navigation could be sorted out though.
There weren’t any broken links or images, and spelling/grammar was fairly good.
Overall Comment
For a “MySpace” related site, yours isn’t bad. It just needs some spicing up and tweaking in the CSS and usability-wise practices.
Remove things like the tacky double sidebar, tweak the layout, add more colours, don’t make the fonts and navigation so small.
Your coding wasn’t awful but be sure to get it validated and stop those errors. If you use simple coding, chances are it will work in all browsers. You don’t need that ridiculous message.
You have good graphic skill. However you should use it to make more useful things like layouts, and offer more useful content and add more. Good luck with your site!
