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Site Name: Sweetly Tart
Owner: Zoe
Reviewed by: Georgina
Reviewed on: 15th January 2010

Site Name

It doesn’t really make sense. “Sweet Tart” would have been better and more grammatically correct, not to mention simple. I’m sorry to say that I really don’t like the site name. The URL is also different from the site name, which is a bit confusing.

Coding and Validation

I’m only going to touch on this briefly because your coding was not done by you.

Your coding has 10 errors and 4 warnings and your CSS has 24 errors and 2 warnings.

Whoever coded your layout has forgotten some fundamentals of coding such as a doctype and a character encoding. My tutorial on HTML validation can address that for you.

The multiple errors in the CSS are such simple mistakes. There should be px written after unit values, and some semicolons and brackets are missing. An external stylesheet is also preferable.

Browser Compatibility & Usability

Your site is navigable and functions in Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer.

The text is rather small in browsers other than Internet Explorer, and you should make it bigger. Perhaps if your site had the CSS better set out and more organised, you could properly set a font size.

In Internet Explorer, you don’t have a background on the page. It’s white and appears rather empty. To fix all these errors you could look into validating your stylesheet.

You’re using images for your navigation, which is not a good idea. When images are turned off or visitors cannot view images for whatever reason, they will be lost on your site. It would be a good idea to place alt and title text on the images you use in your navigation.

Additionally, “me” and “you” can be quite confusing – try using “owner” or “Zoe” and “visitor”, or something that better describes your visitor content.

Layout

It’s quite a cute layout, but you didn’t code it yourself. I noticed that your previous layout was a premade. This one is very cute, but I think what you could improve on is the size and colours.

The text on the navigation sections should be less fancy and more subtle – it looks a bit tacky in that bubbly font. It would be a lot clearer as a simple bold font. Your site name on the layout would be a nice addition too.

I notice that you don’t know much about coding but your stylesheet needs some essence!

Content

You

On this page you can remove the border on the arrow link by putting border="0" in the image code.

The adoptables are very cute! You could do with a bit of shading on ones like the ice cream cones. I can see you’ve attempted to shade the ornaments, which have such cute expressions! Perhaps having other facial expressions on the ornaments would be good too. I think the mushrooms are the best here – cute, not too pixelated, not too washed out or bright, and just the right size. If you could make your other pixels in a similar sort of style they would look better.

On the Shugo Chara Eggs page, CHara should be Chara.

The special adoptions look alright – the quality could be improved though. They look rather rigid and the edges could be refined, and the shading improved.

There’s only one background, a rather Christmassy one. It looks cute but the larger candy looks pixelated. Also, because of the size of your layout it might be best to display this image as a thumbnail which visitors can click to view in full.

Button bases are coming soon. You should leave these pages until they’re actually done, so visitors won’t be misled.

Most of these site names are oxymorons. They are really weird though – an oxymoron like bittersweet works well, but “Happy Depression”? It doesn’t really work out. “Sad joy”? These emotions sound like a mess when bundled together. They’re not really very interesting and I think you could come up with more interesting ones.

Site

“Affies” should be “Affiliates”. “Affies” is not a word. Also on the affiliates page, use border="0" in the image code to remove the border on linked images – it doesn’t look appealing.

On the link back page:
site,it should be site, it
me(either should be me (either.
Under the 88 by 31 buttons, you have three dead images.

On the credits page affiesfor should be affiliates for.

The gifts/awards page is a bit disorganised. Space out the images a bit more, and remove the borders on the linked images, because they look rather tacky.

Me

On your profile you blank out your date of birth, but you give your age. Anyone could guess you were born in 1997 from calculations…
Sent,& should be Sent, &.

On the toybox page Adoptions(adoptables should be Adoptions (adoptables. Under “Pocky Boxes” there is a dead image, and under “Teacups” there is a dead image.

The gifts page has some dead images.

Originality & Creativity

You’ve got quite a cute and original site. A lot of your content was just collected gifts and awards though. I think you can add a bit more original content. I have to admit that your graphic and pixelling skills are not the best but it really makes me smile when I see that someone tries hard to create their own graphics, even if they aren’t the best.

I think your layout looks great though – for someone who doesn’t know that much about coding. It’s simple but cute.

Organisation & Errors

Fairly well organised – pages with images could be a little more spread out.

Overall Comment

You’ve got a cute and original site, Zoe, but you should really try your hand at coding yourself. You’ve got to get out there and code something yourself. It will really familiarise you with how websites work and get you to better understand coding.

Your graphics need a bit more work – depending on the style – they do need some shading and some “softer” colours. Most of all you need to work on your coding because I think this will help you step ahead particularly in stylesheets where you can use stylesheets to brighten up your site in a subtle way.

Rating

(out of 5)