Reviewing Carly’s site, One Blonde, in Firefox on Mac OS X Leopard

First Impressions

You say you’re “a web site dedicated to quality web design and graphic design”, but I can think of many other people whose portfolios are, at first glance, far more impressive. This design isn’t TERRIBLE, but it could stand to be improved upon. It’s monochromatic, and in this case is a bit bland. Your text is far too small and centered, and the welcome message just lacks a professional feel.

Design

I like to start with colour scheme, but you don’t really have a colour scheme. Greyscale layouts can, of course, work quite well, but they generally have a few interesting details—details that involve colour. The concept of your layout is cute enough, but it’s just lacking that extra something, mainly because of the colour choice. Even greyscale layouts that don’t have any real colours have varying shades of grey. You just have white and black.

The header is decent; the whole “cut here” scheme is, as I said, cute, and I like the images (although more for a personal site than a portfolio). But what’s with all the empty space? There are over 300 pixels of complete nothingness in between the “OB Design” text and the navigation. It looks bad.

I’m going to touch on the whole OB Design thing now—it does’t sound professional. If you honestly expect people to pay you to design things for them, why don’t you just write the full name of your company, which is “One Blonde Design”?

Moving on. Your text is miniscule, and I actually had to enlarge your layout so I could read it properly. This is really not good, particularly since you are trying to run a BUSINESS here! Also, the fact that it’s centered isn’t very readable, as this article suggests.

I’m also seeing some (tiny) Comic Sans on your footer. Do I seriously need to explain why Comic Sans is the devil?

Your coding is enough to make me not want to hire you, and to tell everyone else I know not to hire you. You are charging good money for layouts that will potentially have internal stylesheets, imagemapping, <txt> tags (what?), non-semantic coding, and 30 validation errors on your portfolio page? This makes me want to cry.

Content

I normally don’t review home pages, but for a portfolio, yours isn’t set up well. Firstly, the welcome message could potentially be rewritten. This just seems so 12-year-old-girl-celebrity-blends-galore-design-site reminiscent! Why not read the introductions on Brent’s portfolio and Sarai’s portfolio to get a better feel of how these introductory statements are set up? I would also recommend adding a few thumbnail samples of your work to this page to really catch potential customers’ attention.

Portfolio

This isn’t set up well at all. For one thing, you can’t tell anything from the thumbnails. For another… Myspace layouts? Really? If you truly want to sell your work, I would strongly advise against displaying work like this. A company that wants a nicely designed website is not going to be impressed by Myspace layouts (and the fact that they need to have a Myspace account to even view your work is just mindboggling). What’s more, you haven’t uploaded any of these images to your own server (they’re all hosted off of Myspace) and they open up in new windows. Très professionel, non? I would suggest using Lightbox for your images.

The work you’ve listed in your portfolio isn’t impressive at all. I’ve seen it all a thousand times. It’s illegal. It’s boring. It’s not anything that will make anyone want to pay you money.

Get a Quote

I price each project differently, based on difficulty, ammount, and time.

Why not elaborate on this a bit? What makes a website “difficult”? Extra features, I’m guessing? Well then, list all the extra features that would potentially make a website “difficult”. What do you mean by amount? Amount of pages? Specify, please. As for time, I guess this means you charge hourly? It would be a smart idea to put up your hourly charge, then. In fact, it’s really unprofessional to not have this information up. See how many questions I asked that could have been avoided had you posted this information to begin with?

My number one goal for websites is to make them easy to navigate.

Hahaha. I guess that means not using imagemapping… oh wait, never mind…

Labor Charges - $20 (flat rate)

Exactly what does this mean?

Assistance in Purchase of Domain Name & Hosting - $20 (flat rate)

Why would somebody pay you $20 to help them purchase a $10 domain name, which is so easy that even an idiot could do it?

I would recommend taking the Myspace layouts section down, because NOBODY is going to pay you for a Myspace layout. Trust me.

I can make anything you ask, and will notify you if I cannot.

Oh, so, you can make anything I ask except not really? Got it.

I won’t bother really commenting on your other services except to say that they’re pointless. Seriously. This whole thing is pointless.

*I have the right to refuse service to any difficult or rude clients. I will refund any money paid, and terminate any work I have created.

Sometimes you have to deal with difficult clients. Get over it. Do you want their money or not?

One Blonde

Not nearly enough information here, lacking in a portfolio-type feel. This should be a page that really talks about why people would want to hire you specifically, not a half-assed description of your website (complete with spelling errors, yay) and some codes for link buttons in textareas. Really now.

Linkage

This is a PORTFOLIO, is it not? Why, then, are you offering a link exchange?

Extras

It’s all coming soon, and would all better fit under a personal site.

Summary

I’m confused, to be honest. You’ve set up this website so that you can charge people money for layouts (yet you’re very vague about how much it would cost), yet One Blonde is really lacking any sort of professional feel. You have coming-soon visitor content that would belong on a personal site, link exchanges, celebrity blends, Myspace layouts, lacklustre grammar, and horrendous coding. Really, even if this website was a personal site you wouldn’t get a good score. The idea that you actually expect people to pay money for things you create is ridiculous.

Anyway, I worked on Mobile for a few weeks, and I’m fairly happy with the outcome. I’m going to be tweaking it some more, but it’s open now, and there’s a new review up right below this post if you’re interested!

In the transfer, I lost all of the comments so I’m going to have to manually add them again. (Luckily I had backups!) This is a pain in the butt and very time-consuming, so don’t expect every entry to have comments for another few weeks.

I want to thank Morgan for her honest review of Mobile; she pointed out the things that I knew about but was too lazy to fix, so thanks for that! Also, the “Recently Updated” widget in the sidebar is thanks to the wonderful Amelie, and of course Aisling for requesting such a widget in the first place!

Reviewing Brian’s site, Lyrical, in Firefox on Mac OS X Leopard

First Impressions

About a year and a quarter ago, I wrote a rather scatching review of your website. I remember you blogged about it; don’t think I wasn’t aware. You didn’t handle it completely maturely, but I was more amused by the comments on the post than by the post itself. Anyway, I don’t take back what I said, nor do I regret it. This time around, though, I sense that I won’t have to be quite as harsh.

Your website has changed rather drastically since my last review, and I’m pleased with what I see. Your layout could definitely use some tweaking, but overall I like it. I’m also pleased by your most recent blog post; you have good grammar, and the post is quite interesting. Let’s hope the rest of your website reflects my first impression!

Layout

I love blue if it’s used correctly, and I think you’ve done an outstanding job with your colour choice. Blue can look quite corporate, but you’ve picked the perfect tones and used them sparingly.

Normally I’m not a big fan of this whole random-brushes-slapped-together trend, but I think it looks nice in this instance. I also generally dislike script fonts, but, again, somehow it works here. This is definitely a feat in itself—you’ve taken two things that I dislike nine times out of ten and somehow made them appeal to me! Your header does have a few issues, though: firstly, I think it’s a little too small. This isn’t the end of the world, and it’s not exactly top priority, but it just seems too short. Another hundred pixels would make me a lot happier. Secondly, there’s a dotted line underneath the header that’s really distracting. Would you mind removing it? Finally, I think it would look nicer if there was a margin of about ten pixels above the header, so that it wasn’t touching the top of the screen. I know this sounds very pedantic, and it probably is, but with such a small header I just feel that a margin would look nicer.

Your navigation is the next big issue here. I generally dislike sidebar navigation, unless it really stands out like it does on Jem’s current layout. Yours just doesn’t, so I would suggest either making it stand out more or creating a horizontal block navigation that rests either above or below your header. Come to think of it, if you did it correctly, that would solve the issue of the-header-is-too-small.

Your font is too small; increase it just a bit and it’ll be much more readable. Your <h2> is, quite frankly, boring. I generally hate Arial, but I think it can work well for headings, better than Verdana does (although for a body text, Verdana is king).

If you’re going to add that margin above your header, I would strongly suggest also adding the same amount underneath your footer for continuity. Speaking of your footer, I like it a lot. Lots of people neglect their footers, but yours is very nice.

Despite the fact that it’s generally quite good, I think your layout is missing something. I know, I know, I’m really not one to talk, but I am working on it! I think if you look at exceptionally well-designed sites such as Dubious, Dreamling.ca, and Lilula, you’ll see that there’s an amazing amount of attention paid to details. For instance, on Dubious, she uses cute bullets, and the blog titles are styled in a fairly interesting way. On Dreamling, she’s used a variety of colours and interesting link hovers (and link hovers make the world go round, yo), and on Lilula… well, I don’t think you need me to point all the different details that make it amazing! Make your links more interesting, spice up your entries’ titles, do something!

In all, I think you’ve done a good job creating a simple, accessible, and aesthetically-pleasing layout with a personality of its own. It’s quite some contrast if you compare it to the layout you were sporting last year!

I’ve made a mock-up of what I think your layout could be if you tweaked it a bit. Please take these ideas into consideration. (Also, just remember that this is only a mock-up, so it’s definitely far from perfect!)

Content

About

I was thrown off by the large picture at the top of this page. It’s fine to include it, but shrink it down and align it to the left or right with the text wrapping around it so that it’s less distracting!

A few of your sentences could use rewriting to make them flow a little bit better. For instance,

“Really? I can’t see any other name working for me. Why don’t I look like a Brian?” I was a tad bit shocked. I even tried to think of names that work for me… nothing.

could be changed to

“Really?” I asked. “Why don’t I look like a Brian?” I was a bit shocked. I couldn’t imagine myself with any other name. I even tried to think of other names that fit me, but came up with nothing.

Pickily speaking, you have a few minor grammatical errors. For example, in the third paragraph alone, you should change “oh so sarcastically” to “oh-so-sarcastically” (and what about Oklahoma is oh-so-sarcastic, anyway?), “I’m am” to “I am” (or “I’m”), “eye sight” to “eyesight”, “Jack-Russel” to “Jack Russell”.

This sentence sounds a bit awkward:

When most of my time isn’t consumed by my studies, I’ll take a break with one of my hobbies.

It could sound a lot smoother if you rewrote it, something like this:

Most of my time is consumed by my studies, but occasionally I’ll take a break for one of my hobbies.

This sentence is a bit of a non-sequitur:

Since I was tiny child, speaking in minuscule sentences, I was always writing.

Besides the fact that you’re missing “a” before “tiny child”, exactly what does the fact that you spoke in miniscule sentences have to do with your love of writing? Also, the tense sounds stilted here. It should be more along the lines of “Since I was a tiny child, I have always been writing.”

I really like this sentence:

My life revolves around words.

I couldn’t agree more; this sums up my own life quite succintly and fittingly.

Rewrite this to make it sound a little less stitled and awkward:

Photography also lingers around in my cramped brain. I have been taking pictures since Christmas of 2006 when I was given my first camera. Since then, however, the camera has fallen into shambles, and I refuse to take pictures on the piece of crap. Unfortunately, my photography has almost been nonexistent in the last couple of months. Optimistically, the hobby will come back to me, especially since I have access to Canon through my Yearbook class.

How about something more like this?

Photography is also constantly lingering in my cramped brain. I have been taking pictures since Christmas of 2006 when I was given my first camera. Since then, however, the camera has fallen into shambles, and I refuse to take pictures with it. Unfortunately, my photography has been almost nonexistent for the last couple of months. Hopefully the hobby will come back to me, especially since I have access to a Canon camera through my Yearbook class.

Exactly what does this sentence mean?

The name, coming from my passion for music, was simply stated in addition to the ever so clear .nu extension.

I get that you’re trying to be poetic, but try to talk some sense while you’re at it! Why is the .nu extension “ever so clear”? Why is the name “simply stated”? Please explain.

Also, remember that “it’s XHTML” should be “its XHTML”.

Thank you for bearing with me while I picked through every sentence and paragraph on this page. Overall, I think you’ve done a good job with it. You’ve provided the exact right amount of information about yourself and presented it in an interesting way. I think you’re a fairly decent writer if this page is anything to judge by, but I noticed that you have a tendency to write in an almost stilted manner and make minor grammatical errors that you could easily have picked up on yourself had you given this page a once-over before publishing.

Writings

I really enjoyed reading “The LGBT Wrongdoing”. It’s rare that somebody writes from this angle, and I’m glad that you did! There are a few minor errors, though, which I’d like to point out.

should know the most that, discrimination

Take away the comma and you’re golden.

The one’s who are attacked should not be the one’s creating the negative words.

The one’s what? What belongs to the one? Or did you mean “ones”, as in the plural form of “one”?

If you have been attacked, do not attack back, because you will be exactly like them.

I think you should clarify to whom “them” refers. Why not to change it to “the original attackers” or something like that?

should not be excalimed

“exclaimed” is the correct spelling, as I’m sure you know; it’s worth reading over your posts to make sure you haven’t made any stupid typos like this one.

the phrase, “That’s so straight!”

Remove the comma.

I believe that the word, [], is so dispicable

Take the first comma away and change “dispicable” to “despicable”. (I removed the word because I, like you, abhor it.)

Again, thank you very much for writing this article. I have a feeling you could go much more in-depth, and I would be interested in hearing what you have to say.

A Host’s Con Job—This is an external link; thank you for defining it as such. It makes my life easier.

Community Curriculum—I found this article quite interesting. Where I live, you have to have 40 hours of community service to graduate from high school, and most people try to get more. When you think about it, that’s not too much to ask—it averages out to 10 hours a year, 1 hour a month.

Now for the pickiness that you may have come to expect from me!

make you fell better

I think you can find the mistake there yourself!

What makes your transcript shout

What does this mean? It’s a very strange choice of words, and very vague and confusing. Do you mean to say something more along the lines of “What makes your application stand out”?

Participating in an easy, short and sweet activity

You’ve used serial commas elsewhere in this piece, so keep up the consistency and use one here.

students with be actively participating

This is why you proofread before you hit that Publish button!

Community service is an assortment of wonderful things; helping others, expressing new emotions, and training you for future experiences.

Change the semi-colon to a colon.

School curriculum should involve students in life-improving skills.

Again, a strange, almost stilted choice of words. This would sound better as “School curriculum should help students gain life-improving skills”. I’m actually not sure about the whole “life-improving” thing, but I would definitely change “involve” to something else!

Spelling mistakes aside, this was a very convincing piece—not that I needed convincing, but it’s hard to argue with the points you raise.

Power at the Polls—I’ll do my whole grammar thing first so we can get it out of the way.

women lined up at the voting booths to utilize their new right

I hate that word: utilise. It sounds so pretentious; why not just say “use”. I don’t actually think that either word is the best choice in this instance; something like “take advantage of” works so much better. “Utilise” immediately jumped out at me as a strange choice in words (this is becoming something of a pattern!), which of course destroys the flow of the text.

Before 1919, not all citizens could vote or have any kind of say in the government they were controlled by.

I may be wrong here, since history, particularly American history (I am proudly Canadian), isn’t my strong suit, but I don’t think this is true. Wasn’t there still racial discrimination when it came to voting? I’m not sure, I could just be getting mixed up with Canadian history, although admittedly I don’t know much about that either!

Now that I’m done being pedantic, this is a concise, well-written article. I agree with it—have you ever heard anybody say “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain”? Well, that’s how I feel about it.

The Fight For Freedom—I will firstly say that, again, this is overall a well-written article that brings attention to something important. Before I comment on it too much, I’m going to… well, you know!

They don’t want to feel embarrassed, to be avoided, shunned, or be rejected by their friends.

Change this to something more along the lines of “They don’t want to feel embarrassed or be avoided, shunned, or rejected by friends”.

Words no longer intimidated me, the death threats… they’re what intimidated me.

Change this to “Words no longer intimidated me; the death threats are what did” or something like that.

This was your best essay, in my opinion. It isn’t that the other two weren’t important, but this is the one that I feel most strongly about. I’m lucky to live in a diverse and generally accepting city and go to a school that mirrors that; of course there are bigoted people in my city and in my school, but as a whole everyone is surprisingly tolerant, and, dare I say it, accepting. I’m very sorry about what you’ve had to go through; it’s entirely unfair, and it angers me so much that I can’t even properly express my feelings.

Lyrics and Poetry—I won’t be reviewing this; it would be unfair since I know next to nothing about poetry, and I rarely review it anyway.

Hosting Reviews—I won’t individually review each of the three pages you have here, but this is good content. Your reviews are informative and in-depth and should help out quite few people!

Contact

Straightforward.

Links

Very well-organised.

Summary

Well, well, well. A little over a year ago, I wrote a rather harsh review of your website, which I do not regret in the least. You have come leaps and bounds since then, and you proved me wrong on one count—I said that you didn’t have any potential, but it seems that you do have the capacity to take criticism and turn it into a fairly well-designed website with well-written articles.

In all, I think that Lyrical is quite a good website. I thoroughly enjoyed reading your articles, which were thought-provoking and interesting, although I feel that your choice of words was sometimes a bit odd and threw off the flow of most of your pieces. The About page was quite good, although you could have added some more information about the website. Your design was decent, although as I pointed out it was lacking that extra something (I know my designs are too, but I’m working on something new and interesting). I would have to say that Lyrical is quite a memorable website that stands out in a good way. You do have some room for improvement, but overall I must commend you on your massive improvements since this time last year!

Reviewing Hannah’s site, Leaving Town, in Firefox on Mac OS X Leopard

First Impressions

Quite honestly, it’s websites like yours that have turned me into a sporadic reviewer. You can’t judge a book by its cover, I guess, but nine times out of ten, a website with a layout like yours will have content that makes me want to rip my hair out. I’ve written review after review of these teenybopper sites, and they all blend together. What makes one teenybopper submit their website, which is almost identical to one that I’ve just posted a scathing review on? No idea.

The first thing I notice, other than the fact that this is one of those left-aligned celebrity blends, is that the colours are pretty dreary. Colour choice is pretty important, and yours just isn’t doing much for me.

Layout

So, as I’ve established, your colour choice isn’t the best. I dislike the mustard yellow you’ve got going on rather intensely; as for the green, it’s okay, but it would be nicer if you used a few brighter colours to complement it. The whole thing is rather dark, and while that can work well, here it just looks dreary.

Moving onto your header, well… it’s a bit of a disaster. I have no idea what’s going on, and I don’t really care—you’re using copyrighted images, it’s boring, etc. One thing I can say is that I like the font you’ve used for the site title, and that’s saying something since I almost always despise script fonts.

Your layout is verging on weborexic; it isn’t terrible, but I would make it a little wider. I would also center it. As I’ve explained almost countless times before, the average person’s eyes fall to the middle of the screen by default. Since your content isn’t right in the middle, there’s a short moment of adjustment. From a more aesthetic point of view, all that blank space to the right looks bad on my big screen resolution!

Your text is about as small as I can stand it; I would definitely suggest increasing it a bit. On the top of your text, it’s extremely irritating that you’ve got your bolds and italics styled so that they’re different colours and fonts. It’s really disconcerting when I’m reading, and all of a sudden there’s a random word that’s a different colour/size/font/all three. I mean, is this REALLY necessary?

When I hover over your links, my cursor doesn’t change to the little hand. I thought people had stopped changing the default cursors, but apparently I was wrong. As I hovered over one of your links, I wondered if it was, in fact, not a link, because the cursor didn’t change.

Your sidebar isn’t actually very cluttered, but most of that information doesn’t need to be there. The About blurb is okay (though, as I mentioned, that excessive font-changing gives me a not-so-slight headache), but nothing else is really necessary. All of the link-type things can easily go on, you know, a links page; the copyright notice (as well as the BlogBox link) can be placed on a (currently nonexistent) footer. It would also be sensible to provide archive/category links on the sidebar, as well as a search bar and feed link.

If you want to see some of the different kinds of layouts you make without using copyrighted images, why not check out some CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) galleries?

Content

L-T.org

Normal people call this section “domain” or “site”, and it comes AFTER the visitor content and personal info. Just sayin’. It would also be a good idea to have basic site info on the main page, then, in case the visitor wants more, have a list of subpages on the sidebar/at the bottom of the page.

Site History—These things are usually pretty boring. Yours isn’t really an exception. Remember that basic site info main page idea I told you about before? You could shorten this and put it on that page. For example:

When I was in fifth or sixth grade and way into Xanga, I came across the stylesheet for Xanga layouts and fiddled around with it for months. Without knowing it, I had taught myself CSS. Towards the end of sixth grade, my Xanga obsession was replaced by a new interest in Paint Shop Pro 9. One day, I stumbled across Aethereality, which was what made me decided I wanted a website of my own. I used a premade layout from Aethereality and was hosted on Freewebs. After reading tons of tutorials, carefully studying the coding of my pre-made layout, and spending endless hours fooling with PSP, I had finally created my own layout. In September 2007, my friend Vasilios gave me subdomain hosting on his website, and eventually I bought a domain and my own hosting so I could be in complete control of my own website.

Past Layouts—Or past LAYOUT, as the case may be. There’s nothing really to comment on, so… I’ll just move on.

Credits—I would suggest using unordered lists to further organise this page; there’s also a spare < next to “Moargh”. Other than that, fine.

Links Buttons—Mhm, mhm, whatever.

Mistress

Get rid of the kitty talk thing (it just interrupts the flow), the “Anyway”s, and the bold and italics and underlines, and you’ll be good to go! This is actually surprising—you know, a decent About page on a seemingly teenybopper website? Congratulations!

Visitor

Oh boy…

Animated Avatars—Okay, the fourth one is animated way too quickly. If you can honestly read that, props to you. All the Yo Mama ones are hideous, just to put it bluntly; the others are, I guess, okay for what they are. To be honest, I never really “got” the whole typically popular avatar phenomenon, and I generally hate them if they’re animated, but, like I said, for what these are they’re decent.

Non-Animated Avatars—Ooh, Twilight, big surprise there! Like every other site offering avatars doesn’t have some of these. Anyway. No idea where you got these images from, but some of these are actually rather cute! That doesn’t justify stealing the images, but I will hand it to you that your nature avatars are really quite nice.

Blank Buttons—I wouldn’t use them, but I’m sure somebody else in your more immediate demographic will have a use for these.

Brushes—I am getting SO. TIRED. of brushes. They all look the same! Yours are in no way unique, and you don’t even specify if they’re for GIMP/PSP/PS/whatever.

Colour Schemes—I wouldn’t use “Break of Day”; way too bright. I can actually see using some of the other ones, but normally when I look for colour palettes, I go to ColourLovers. I would definitely suggest putting your palettes on there, because most of them are quite good.

Premade Layouts—I definitely wouldn’t use these. They’re not very well-made, and definitely not cross-browser compatible. So I would suggest taking them down until you really know what you’re doing.

Hosting

Ho-hum, hosting. All the basic rules: I have to like your site, keep in touch with me, know HTML/CSS, no long hiatuses, no illegal content. Good to see that you’re discouraging the use of Cutenews, though. If only more people would do that! However, and this is a big however, I would strongly recommend reading about the dangers of subdomain hosting.

Reviews

External link; I won’t review it.

Summary

Well, Hannah, I’m struggling a bit with your rating. On the one hand, your visitor content was lacking. The avatars were good for what they were, though I have a sneaking suspicion that you don’t have rights to those images. Your colour palettes were pretty good, surprisingly, but your premade layouts and brushes just weren’t up to par. As for your About section, I was happily surprised! You seem like a decent writer with a good sense of humour, and I’d like to see that shine through more. I believe that your site has buckets of potential—if you made a better layout, tweaked your visitor content and Domain section, and added some samples of your writing (opinion articles, short stories, etc.), you could have a wonderful site. For now, though… not so much.

Reviewing Marieke’s site, Misplaced, in Firefox on Mac OS X Leopard

First Impressions

Upon loading your site, I’m not blinded, which is good. I’m also not wowed, which is not so good. My infamous Firefox-tabs test states that, had your website been in a long lineup of tabs waiting for me to read, I would leave upon seeing it. It’s boring, far too beige, and has a few basic flaws.

I’m not loving your title tag. Firstly, “Misplaced.org” implies that your url is, indeed, http://misplaced.org, when it’s http://mis-placed.org. This could confuse people who want to find your website again. Secondly, “never mind the - :)”. What exactly does this mean? Is there a point to it? There’s a reason that most people generally just put their website’s name in the title tag, and that’s because in this case, simplicity is king.

Layout

As I mentioned, your layout is very beige. And I do mean very—the only other colour present is brown, and there’s not much of it. Your main background is beige, your header is beige, your sidebar is beiege, your content area is beige. Now, beige is probably one of my least favourite “colours”, but even if it wasn’t, some contrast would be excellent. Making the background of your content area white would make a world of difference.

I’m not a huge fan of the pattern you’re using; the pattern itself combined with the dreary colours remind me of a couch you might see at an old lady’s house. This is definitely a matter of personal preference, though.

Your header seems a little too big for me. The strip that says “Misplaced.org” is fine, and in theory the part underneath it is okay too—but it’s too tall, and since there’s nothing there but a pattern, its size could be decreased significantly.

I find it strange that your navigation doesn’t span across the screen like your header does; it looks a bit awkward, but, again, that just comes down to personal preference. However, I would strongly suggest giving the navigation more padding on the top and bottom; it’s very cramped at the moment.

The sidebar isn’t horrible, though there’s room for improvement. Firstly, add about ten pixels of padding to the top. It might seem like a picky detail, but I have issues with padding. Secondly, I would suggest combining your welcome message/”The Duchess”. Try something like, “Welcome to Misplaced, where I, Marieke, blah blah blah. I am a 20-year-old Christian blah blah blah.” “My Agenda” could be removed, since most of your visitors don’t know what you’re talking about, and, quite frankly, don’t care. Your links could technically be moved to a Links page, but in this case you’ve organised them well so it’s not a pressing concern.

I find that the spacing of your text isn’t quite sufficient, so I would suggest increasing it. Finally, the credits on your sidebar as well as the Fanupdate search bar/archives/feed link can be placed on your (currently empty) footer.

Overall, I think your design is neat and accessible. I just had a few issues with the colours and, of course, some picky details.

Content

Miss

I want to touch on the coding quickly. Firstly, the tag is deprecated and shouldn’t be used; if you want emphasis, you can use or , which are bold and italics respectively. Secondly, there’s no need for these constant
s. If you want space between, say, the heading and the unordered list, set some padding underneath your


(which, for the page title, should be


, by the way) and you’ll be good to go. Remember to wrap your paragraph tags between

and

instead of using
. Also, remember to substitute for and for !

As for the actual content, I’ve never been one for quick facts lists. I’d much rather read a few paragraphs on you than the list. The little “not an autobiography” blurb isn’t really necessary; if it’s not an autobiography, there’s no real need to tell us (us being the visitors) this piece of information. (Also, add some padding to the photo; it’s too close to the text.) In the “Hi there!” section, add a period after “acquaintance”, and make “aslong” two words (as long).

Try rewriting the “What I see in the mirror” section to get rid of those run-on sentences. A suggested rewrite:

I am not really all that slim, and since I’m only 5′3, that works against me. I am working on it though—in May of 2008 I simply decided I had been chubby for long enough. Currently I have already lost 30 pounds, but I intend to lose 20 more to reach my goal!

I have green/blue/brown/grey/orange eyes; the shades may vary depending on if I’m tired or not, but green is most prominent. My hair is dark brown and very curly.

I do not have any tattoos yet, because my parents believe that as long as I live in their home, I am to abide by their rules. (I don’t blame them for that!) I’m planning on getting tattoos when I leave their home.

I left out the rest because there was nothing wrong with it.

The “My style” section wasn’t particularly interesting to me; you could easily mention it in one or two sentences in the “What I see when I look in the mirror” section, something along the lines of, “My style varies from day to day—one day I’m your typical metal head, whereas the next I look like a hippie.”

Again, the Personality section could be rewritten to be a little less chatty:

I consider myself a rather outgoing and spontaneous person, although I can be quite shy when I meet someone new. I love helping other people, and my friends say I’m a good listener. When I’m not serious I’m quite the clown; I don’t care if I make a fool of myself and you.

I have a sharp tongue—I always speak my mind, even when it may not be the best idea, and I can be a little sarcastic at times. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that because I’m a very caring person and I’d never intentionally hurt someone I care about.

I’m not likely to hold a grudge—I tend to forgive a lot. But if I’m unable to, said person must’ve screwed up really badly, and then I’m not very likely to be friendly to that person anymore at all.

Same with “Education” and “Party time, excelleeent!”, really.

I spend most of my time at school; you may call it “college” since it sounds fancier and if I lived in England that’s what it would be called. In September 2007 I entered the Marnix Academie, which is a school that trains you to become an elementary school teacher.

I want to be a teacher because I don’t feel like ending up working in a store or office (most of those jobs seem quite dull to me; I prefer real interaction with people and I don’t think you can go further than having sale-talks at that type of jobs), and I actually like children. Hell, I like them a lot more than I like adults. They’re not as ruined by the world yet, and most of them still know the meaning of the word honesty.

Most importantly, I just want to do my part in making our society a little better, by teaching children not only what they need to know like math and spelling, but also to value other people, to have respect, and to just be a good person overall. You see, a child spends more than 70% of his waking life at school between the ages of 4 and 12. As a teacher you’re able to accomplish quite a lot with a child if you give him the care and attention he needs!

After I graduate from college, I might study History at the university in the evening time while working daytime. I don’t have any particular reason for that, except that History—mainly the cultural aspect—interests me quite a lot!

and

Outside school I like to spend quality time with my friends, both on- and off-line. I used to be not very socially talented and very insecure so I sought my friends mostly online; people appear to be more accepting online despite your imperfections. Presently, I’ve learned to accept myself for who I am and to conceal my still-present insecurities better and I’m hanging out with more and more people offline.

I love to go shopping (mainly for jewelry and cds/dvds/books), but I don’t like buying clothes - I usually order those via the internet and I buy band shirts at concerts.

Attending a metal/rock/folk concert must be my favourite type of night out, and I also go to a lot of (free) festivals.

I also really enjoy meeting new people, which I do quite frequently. Since studying in Holland goes together with getting an all-access train/bus card for free, I travel all over the country to see new places and meet new people. Sometime in a not too distant future I’m planning to go to Scotland, to meet my oldest online-only friend, Kirsty.

When I’m not going out or at school, I enjoy watching a good film, reading a book, and spending time with my family. (Saturday evening is normally family-night, so most of the time I won’t go out then. Family comes first!)

And finally, I like to fiddle with my website. I’ve had websites for over 10 years now and even though I do not plan to skill myself more at web development, I do always try to make my site look the best it possibly can! I think having a personal site is a great way of getting in touch with a lot of people all over the world! As I said, I love meeting new people - through my various websites I met a few very wonderful people: Kirsty, Amy, Sammy and Caroline.

This page is in general quite good. You give a lot of information without there being an overload, but you need to work on its chatty style and your overuse of ellipses.

Agenda—On the sidebar, this has been misspelled as “Adenda”. Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, there’s really no point to having this here. Most of your visitors won’t care about the various concerts and festivals you’re going to attend, unless you blog about them in an interesting way.

Concerts—Same with this page. It could potentially be interesting if you posted about the concerts after you saw them, along with pictures, a mini-review, etc.

Dollhouse—I didn’t think most people still had these. Again, this seems a lot like filler content to me.

Friends—There’s not much to say either way. This will be helpful to first-time readers if you mention your friends a lot in your blog; I don’t have any real issues with this page.

3 Words From Friends—This is a very nice idea. All of the quotes are bolded except the first, so aim for consistency. Also, the opening paragraph has a few minor errors; it could be phrased as

Because I was working on a Dutch blog before this one, I had asked my friends to describe me in three words. As you may have guessed, most of my friends are Dutch, so most of the answers were in Dutch. I translated them into English for Misplaced. That would explain the “alotoffun” and “truefriend”; there’s one word in Dutch for it, but it takes more words in English to say the exact same thing.

Musica Maestro—A bit of a boring read for me. It just seemed a bit like a repeat of the Concerts page; couldn’t the two possibly be combined?

Random Facts—Some of these aren’t very interesting; if you really want people to know these things about you, they could probably be worked into your main About page. The first two are fairly interesting, as is the one about silence. A lot of these facts are just repeated from other parts of this section.

Writing

The Almighty Rules for Power Metal—As you yourself said, “If you do not know anything about it, it might not appear very interesting to you though.” This sums it up quite neatly; I don’t know a thing about power metal, so this article doesn’t hold my interest.

The Music Is Dead—You really need to proofread before you publish! If you had checked this article over, you would have noticed such mistakes as “tehri stuff” and “onlyh”. That and other minor grammatical errors aside, I agree with this article completely. It’s what I keep trying to explain to my friends, but they just don’t seem to understand. Thank you for writing it. One other issue I have is the title—it would make more sense if you changed it to “The Music Industry Is Dead”.

Lose Weight Without Starving Yourself—Again, thank you for writing this. Lots of people seem to think that the only way to lose weight is to go on insane diets, which isn’t healthy and generally results in them gaining the weight back. This is a very good article, and hopefully it will inspire people to lose weight the healthy way.

Book Reviews—I think you could benefit from adding more of a review rather than just a synopsis—exactly what did you like and dislike? Why? I understand it can be hard—I have that problem too with my book reviews.

Music Reviews—I think you’ve done a better job with these; you give quite a lot of opinion and back it up well. These could prove to be quite helpful.

Dracula Reviews—Unique idea, and quite well-done. I’ll have to show my brother this comparison; he’s interested in Dracula movies. I think he’s seen Nosferatu, but that’s it.

Domain

Decent. There really isn’t much to say - no glaring errors (although you could work on that chatty writing style I addressed earlier), nothing very interesting to comment on.

Contact Me—Fine.

Credits—Nicely organised.

Hostees—Nothing to comment on.

Past Layouts—Again, fine, nothing really to comment on. No problems at least.

Web History—VERY long. The average visitor is absolutely not going to sit through this. You’ve given a decent history on the main Domain page, so I would recommend ditching this page entirely.

Summary

That concludes this review. I had mixed feelings while browsing through your website; on the one hand, I was pleasantly surprised by most of the articles under Writing; on the other, I felt that you had some definite filler pages in your About section, and that your Site section was, while decent, fairly boring. Like I said, you need to work on your writing style: you don’t have to write extremely formally, but it sounds like you’re chatting a friend, which is not right for your personal website. In all, I’d say that Misplaced is an average blog that is bursting at the seams with potential to become something more.

]]> http://mobile.ohclementine.com/review-43-misplaced/feed/ http://mobile.ohclementine.com/review-42-apple-traffic/ http://mobile.ohclementine.com/review-42-apple-traffic/#comments Sun, 17 Aug 2008 15:59:51 +0000 Clem http://mobile.ohclementine.com/?p=10

Reviewing Sam’s site, Apple Traffic, in Firefox on Mac OS X Leopard

First Impressions

“Moved! I got hosted!” Well, nice to know. You could have told me, but meh. What can you do?

So. Weborexic layout? Check. Randomly coloured words that aren’t links? Check. Badly cut-out images that you probably didn’t take yourself? Check. Tiny font? Bad line height? Sidebar that’s longer than the content? Impossible-to-find navigation? Cluttered sidebar? Button advertising? A MARQUEE, for god’s sake? Check, check, check, check, check, check, and check. Unfortunately. Yes, it looks like we’ve got ourselves a case of Teen Bopperitis.

Your title tag is… bleh. You don’t need the all-caps, or the asterisk, or the [dot] stuff. Simply “Apple Traffic” should be adequate. (Believe me, I’ve been there. I believe I have a screenshot somewhere of my site when the title tag was Clemwalrusness{dot}com.)

Layout

Okay, where to start? Colour choice, perhaps? It’s not bad; you’ve picked three colours that go together decently. The green is a little too bright for my taste, and hard to read on the white background, but overall the colours aren’t bad.

Your header image, where to begin? Firstly, just skimming through your sidebar I don’t notice any credits for the tulip image, so I’m going to display a rare bout of niceness and give you the benefit of the doubt. I’ll assume that you have the right to this image. Now, I am all for layouts that use the owner’s photography, but you haven’t quite pulled this off. The tulip image, for starters, is badly cut-out. Then you just have so much going on—it looks like a spiral bound notebook, a bunch of random textures, blah blah blah. None of these things tie in together! I think the header image could be nice if you got rid of everything except the blue background—the texture is nice, and I like how it kind of looks like a burst of light coming from a point somewhere in the middle—and your site’s name. Also, try to keep the header image a little smaller. I find that your content is too far down, and I have to scroll to get to your navigation, even on a fairly large screen resolution.

Now, your layout is far too thin. The sidebar is just barely wide enough, and for lots of people it probably isn’t. My handy dandy MeasureIt Firefox extension tells me that your sidebar is about 180px wide. It’s definitely not the thinnest sidebar I’ve seen, but if you added even 20px it would help. As for your content, 370px is WAY too skinny. I generally like content divs to be AT LEAST 500px, if not wider. The next thing that really irritates me is that your sidebar is longer than your content. Try using a “container” div so that the sidebar doesn’t extend so far, leaving blank space below the content.

HTML:

BLAH BLAH BLAH

BLAH BLAH BLAH

CSS:


#container: {
width: 000px; */set to whatever width you want it to be */
background: #FFFFFF;
}


Now, your sidebar is a bit cluttered. The welcome message is fine, although I would choose either that or your “behind the scenes”, not both. Your navigation should be moved up—after the welcome message is fine, just as long as it’s visible without scrolling. “What’s New” needs to be annihilated. You’re using a scrolling marquee, and you could always just post those updates in your blog. All of those links on your sidebar? Ditch them. They can be put on a Links page, easy.

You could benefit from a proper footer, one that spans across your sidebar AND content. I always recommend Jem’s CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) templates to people like you, who, I assume, aren’t very clued-in on semantics. These templates are easily-customisable and easy to use, so you might want to play around with them.

Onto the picky details: I really hate how you’ve emboldened and italicised your text. I realise it’s a trend common among teenyboppers, but it doesn’t make any sense. Firstly, you’ve changed the font for your (you should be using for italics and for bold, by the way—why not read XHTML Introduction?), which is ridiculous, and the fact that your bold and italicised text are different colours from the rest of the text makes it look like the words are links. Even though I know better, I always find myself trying to click words on teenybopper sites that are really just bold and italicised, on the off chance that they might be links. Your actual links are capitalised, which I hate, and get smaller on the hover. This pushes the surrounding text out of the way, which is a strange effect. A good rule of thumb is do not ever style your links so that they move surrounding text.

Your block navigation could use some work. It’s too small and doesn’t stand out enough. The font spacing and size changes on hover, which is a no-no, and the way you have the background and the borders changing colour on hover just screams teenybopper. There’s nothing technically wrong with this except that it’s not as aesthetically-pleasing to people like me who prefer simplicity.

Your coding isn’t terrible by any means, although it isn’t great. As I mentioned, it would be worth your while to look into XHTML and semantics so that you can tidy up your coding a bit. The tag is deprecated and you shouldn’t be using it; or would suffice if you’re looking for emphasis. It’s okay to use div classes for your sidebar’s boxes since there are lots of them, but since your content div only appears once on each page, you should use div ids.

is also deprecated; there are other ways of centering your layout.
is a self-closing tag and should be
, not that there’s any need for any of the
tags that you’ve inserted into your coding. Your content div should come before the sidebar in the coding; keep semantics in mind!

Content

About Sam

The first thing I think is, “Stereotypical flash-head Facebook picture anyone?” I mean, I guess if it floats your boat, but I’m not convinced. Anyway, moving on, you basically have a list of likes/dislikes, which doesn’t really help me know you. Why not write three or four paragraphs that describe your dreams, personality, etc. in depth? If you want you can even write a list as long as it could actually, you know, help people get to know you. For some good examples of About pages, try Ava Rae, Silencios, Chiklita, and Aisling B., for starters.

Basically, all the list stuff is boring. Seriously, it does not excite me that you like the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. Why not make a separate likes/dislikes page if you’re so adamant about keeping this and explain why you like these things? If not, put it into paragraph form and mention just a few things. For example, “I’m a music lover—you can often find me listening to x, x, x, and x. I also love to read; a few of my favourite books include x, x, and x.”

The one paragraph you’ve actually written is flawed grammatically/too chatty. I mean, so, basically you took about twelve seconds to write a paragraph and you didn’t even make sure you were using decent grammar? Thanks. Change it to the following and then expand!

I’m Sam, and I’m a Gemini. I’m usually easy to get along with, and I try to be nice to everyone even if I hate them. I’m described by others as shy, funny, kind, weird, and creative. I’m also forgetful, I can be crazy and loud if I want to, and I have several OCD and social issues.

I don’t know why you feel the need to mention the fact that you’re a Gemini. I mean, I am too, but nobody cares. It would make more sense if you mentioned it and wrote, “Geminis are typically nice, sociable, blah, blah, and blah, which describes me well,” or something like that.

Pets—This page is very cluttered and not structured at all. Why not have a picture of the pet, write a paragraph about them, start a new paragraph with a picture, etc.? It will make it much more structured and nice-looking.

Random Facts—Lots of random boldening, italicising, and underlining, which is most definitely giving me a headache. Most of these are not interesting at all. I have to wonder why you put the first one there. If you HONESTLY don’t think you’re pretty, then why did you include it? I usually like random facts pages; they can be pretty interesting, but yours just isn’t.

About Apple Traffic

You ramble a lot on this page; the quality of writing just isn’t great. Here’s a suggested rewrite:

Apple Traffic is a personal/graphics site that was opened on June 23rd, 2008. I first started out with a Comcast.net site, which was not good. You cannot use a lot of HTML on it, and when I first started getting into HTML, I got really frustrated when the whole thing wouldn’t work and I had to start over. I finally asked my dad to let me have a Freewebs, and it took a lot of convincing. My first Freewebs was www.freewebs.com/sammox, and I had more after that. I got pretty good at coding when I was on Freewebs. Then I made my last Freewebs site, Apple Traffic. I started coding my own layouts by using tutorials, but I didn’t have an image program. Then, I downloaded Photoline, so I can now make my own graphics. I was finally able to make it “public” and I started making online friends and getting affiliates.

I recently got hosted by Lily at Paint The Silence. I’m going to keep improving on my site by getting reviewed and trying new things, and eventually I’ll probably get my own domain.

Still not great, but I had to work with what you had.

Awards, Gifts, and Reviews—You should be using unordered lists for this page.

Link Back—Ugly link buttons, and, um, most people should know how to code a link without you providing the coding (in textareas, no less).

Credits—Remember those unordered lists! This made me laugh:

I would never take anything without crediting on purpose. Sometimes I forget though, so please do not take any legal action without contacting me so I can fix it.

Yeah, because teenybopper website owners take legal action against “omgz stealerz” all the time.

Apply for Affiliates—The whole concept of affiliates gives me teh lulz, and your rules are pretty… well, typical of people who like the concept of affiliates. You want them to keep in contact with you? Yeah, okay, in your dreams. Just because they’re linking you doesn’t mean they have to be your best friend. Also, your rules should be within unordered list tags.

Content

Content=your whole site. Visitor content=this section. Just thought I’d clear that up. Oh my, multicoloured rules, like there’s really any point in that.

Photography—lol @ you talking about not using celebrity photos and then providing images of Demi Lovato. Anyway, these pages shouldn’t open up in a new tab unless I tell them to, and most of them aren’t great, to tell you the truth.

The nature photos have potential; some are too dark/not well-taken, but some could be cut out and used in layouts if that’s your thing. I can’t really see why anyone would want to use or even look at the animal pictures. That might sound harsh, but they aren’t well-taken, so they’re not even nice to look at. Most of the objects are okay; I can’t see using them for a layout or anything, but some are good for general viewing pleasure. My advice to you would be that if you know an image can’t really be used on a layout/other graphic, make it visually interesting. The iPod picture, for instance, serves no real purpose. Can’t be used for anything, isn’t interesting to look at, lighting isn’t great. The New York pictures are fine; the Demi Lovato page looks like this:

Not great, I’d say.

Layouts—Generally badly-structured, bad colour choices, etc. I wouldn’t be offering free layouts until you actually know how to make them properly, including decent coding.

Quote Banners—I seem to have missed out on this phenomenon; exactly what does one use a quote banner for?

Icon Backgrounds—I don’t like my icons to have this kind of background, but these are generally decent. I’m sure someone will have a use for these.

100×100 Icons—Good to see you’re using your own photography for these! They’re cute cute, except the second and the last, in my opinion.

Brushes—Most of these are generic, but I do like “Filmstrip” and “Curlies” quite a lot!

Summary

Your site was pretty stereotypically teenybopper. The layout wasn’t the worst I’ve seen, nor was your coding, but there was virtually nothing in the way of personal/site information. Your visitor content was lacking, although there were a few diamonds in the rust. You seem to be slowly working towards shedding the teenybopperness; you’re using your own images, if that’s anything to go by. For now, though, I can’t give you a high score.

]]> http://mobile.ohclementine.com/review-42-apple-traffic/feed/ http://mobile.ohclementine.com/applications-closed/ http://mobile.ohclementine.com/applications-closed/#comments Sat, 16 Aug 2008 15:40:45 +0000 Clem http://mobile.ohclementine.com/?p=26 Due to the enormous queue and lack of time on my part, review applications will be closed until further notice. Sorry for any inconvenience.

]]> http://mobile.ohclementine.com/applications-closed/feed/ http://mobile.ohclementine.com/review-41-ipinky-promise/ http://mobile.ohclementine.com/review-41-ipinky-promise/#comments Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:53:08 +0000 Clem http://mobile.ohclementine.com/?p=68

Reviewing Amy’s site, iPinky Promise, in Firefox on Mac OS X Panther

First Impressions

Oh, yeah. There it is: one of the dead-giveaways of Teen Bopperitis. The article provided doesn’t outline names, but let me tell you, it’s a fairly normal occurrence in the world of teenyboppers to name their site iThis or iThat. Is your website an Apple product? I didn’t think so.

Honestly, I’m becoming more and more scared about the fate of the world as we know it. Why must you teenyboppers insist on submitting your website to be reviewed here, thinking you’ll get a good score (as most of you do think), but fail to read past reviews or the so aptly-titled about page, all of which would be good indicators of what types of sites get bad scores and what types get good scores?

My first impression is “Oh ick, not another teemybopper site with a tiny iframe and a grossly cute header image! Oh, no, and HaloScan, when they could easily be using FanUpdate!” That’s about it, really. It’s all I can think; I’m so deeply shocked. (Although I guess I shouldn’t be; it’s not exactly out of the norm for teenybopper sites to be cropping up by the dozen.)

Layout

I’m not sure where to start, really. I guess I should follow my usual pattern, which would mean discussing your colour choice. It isn’t bad; I’m personally not a fan of pastels (I like to have at least one bright colour), but it doesn’t hurt my eyes, clash immensely, etc. I do notice, after staring for a bit, that you’ve got one yellow that you use in the center and then another on either side. There’s barely any contrast between the two; if you want the center strip to stand out, more contrast is in order.

Okay, so. Your header. I’m not sure if that’s some kind of anime bunny (in which case it would be copyrighted and therefore illegal to use—looking closely, I think I can see a copyright notice on it), but either way it’s very… overly cute. I mean, if you can do cute properly (BubblesSOC is a great example), it’s great, but as it is it seems like you’ve basically just slapped a random cute image next to an iframe and called it a day.

The navigation is pretty cute; it’s a bit small, but I’m a fan of rainbow navigation. You’re not using a block navigation, though, are you? When I hover over the coloured part, it’s not a link. It would be easier if the whole thing was a link; I generally refer people to Tutorialtastic’s articles on block navigation, and since yours is vertical, try reading Semantic (Vertical) CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) Block Navigation. Why is there an animated pixelly thing underneath it, though? It just crowds your layout and looks amateur. There’s no need for it.

The most gaping problem with your layout right now is the “sidebar”. It doesn’t even look like a sidebar; it’s more of a column of links and things that’s been pushed off to the side. If your layout followed a more conventional format (why not use these Basic CSS Templates?), the sidebar would be fine, although a little crowded. (You could easily get rid of… well, everything on it. All of those things could go onto a links page.)

You shouldn’t be using iframes; I can’t believe I almost forgot to explain it to you. I would strongly suggest reading Exactly WHY Are Frames So Bad and Why Frames Are Bad. These articles explain each point more eloquently than I possibly could. If you’re unsure of how to make a good layout using DIV layers, you can use those CSS templates that I provided you with; it would also do you well to read Converting From Iframes. Oh, okay, you ARE using DIVs. Why on earth would you want it to look like you’re using frames? That’s just terrible. See, if they looked like proper DIVs, all the confusion would have been averted in the first place; I wouldn’t have had to spend time looking up articles; and I certainly wouldn’t have had to type it all up.

The title at the top of your iframe lacks sufficient contrast; white against pale yellow doesn’t show up very well. Georgia is a serif font, which means that as a body font (small size), the serifs get in the way and make it hard to read. Finally, there’s no need for your JavaScript forward and back buttons. Every browser has them built in; including them is just redundant, and useless for those who have JavaScript disabled.

Content

I’m not expecting much, to be perfectly honest. It would be nice if you could prove me wrong and break the teenybopper mold, but if not, what can you do? This is all part of my duty.

Owner

Oh, okay, a zillion subpages. How perfectly teenybopper. I peronsally hate it when the first page in a section is just full of links; it’s best to have an introduction then the links. That way I can decide if I want to read on.

Quick Facts—Oh. Great. Quick facts. Yum. Completely pointless; I don’t care about your hair colour or pets at all, really. Oh, lord! I did find something intersting here, actually. You’re 20? Now, age shouldn’t be an excuse, but at age 20 you should know better! I suppose you started “webdesigning” back when iframes were popular and never managed to get out of the past. Still, though—it’s quite horrifying; I would have pegged you as 12 or 13.

Biography—Grammar time.

I also spent a lot of time across the road, at my childhood best friend, Michaels.

Change that to

I also spent a lot of time across the road at my childhood best friend Michael’s house.

(I have a bad memory lol)

For the love of god, just take out the lol.

the times I do remember; are the funny ones.

Semi-colon is unnecessary.

Here’s a few quick ones… I fell off Michaels front wall,

Change that to

Here are a few quick ones: I fell off Michael’s front wall,

Anyways, when I was 10; we moved to Kingsbury, Staffordshire (5-10 minutes away). I didn’t really like the primary school there, but I made a friend; that turned out to be a real geek by the time we went to high school.

Change to

Anyway, when I was 10 we moved to Kingsbury, Staffordshire (5-10 minutes away). I didn’t really like the primary school there, but I made a friend who turned out to be a real geek by the time we went to high school.

What’s up with your love of random semi-colons?

High school was pretty standard… crap lol I hung around with Kirsty and Emma from Hurley school.

Change to

High school was pretty standard: crap. I hung around with Kirsty and Emma from Hurley school.

But after high school ended; she moved to Canada with her parents; and we’ve lost contact.

More strangely-placed semi-colons! Change to

But after high school ended, she moved to Canada with her parents, and we’ve lost contact.

so did Kirsty and Mikaela; who coincidently were both in my class.

Change to

so did Kirsty and Mikaela, who coincidently were both in my class.

We had an all girl class of around Fourteen; of which half were stuck up snobs. Me, Mikaela and quite often Kirsty would always go to ‘Mr. Bs’ for lunch and skip Irenes lessons hehe. Anyway….

Change to

We had an all girl class of around fourteen, of which half were stuck up snobs. Me, Mikaela, and quite often Kirsty would always go to ‘Mr. B’s’ for lunch and skip Irene’s lessons.

After Kirsty and Nathan went home; I went back to Darrens with him

Change to

After Kirsty and Nathan went home, I went back to Darren’s with him

That night… well early morning; me and Darren started going out. From then on we were hardly ever apart; only when he was at work or I was at college. After about a month of going out; Darren went on holiday for a week.

Change to

Early the enext morning, Darren and I started going out. From then on we were hardly ever apart; only when he was at work or I was at college. After about a month of going out, Darren went on holiday for a week.

And a week or two after; Darren proposed to me. We also got our first pet in October; a kitten who was about 3 months old. We called her Kiari, after a ‘Kingdom Hearts’ character. On December 21st ‘06; we got married, and I became Mrs. Johnson. It was the best day of my life so far; and all that was left to do was find our own place.

Change to

And a week or two after, Darren proposed to me. We also got our first pet in October: a kitten who was about 3 months old. We called her Kiari, after a ‘Kingdom Hearts’ character. On December 21st ‘06, we got married, and I became Mrs. Johnson. It was the best day of my life so far; all that was left to do was find our own place.

Now were still as happy as ever; with our mischievous little kitties

Change to

Now we’re still as happy as ever with our mischievous little kitties

You quite obviously need to go into extensive semi-colon therapy. You can’t replace a comma with a semi-colon; the mere thought makes my skin crawl in horror!

Now that I’ve gone through all those heinous grammatical crimes, I’d like to say that this page is quite boring. I’m not very into reading biographies on pesonal websites (or autobiographies, as they generally are); your life hasn’t exactly been thrilling, and you’d be lucky if three people read all the way through this. It’s so much more interesting to read through a paragraph or two about the very important events in somebody’s life and a few more paragraphs about their personality, interests, etc.

Top 10s—Under construction, and nobody really cares about your top 10s anyway.

Hobbies—Okay. Adding onto what I said earlier: make one general about page, put some of this onto it, put the important events in your life onto it, describe your personality in another paragraph. No need for so many pages!

Music and Movies and TV are filler content: completely pointless and boring.

Photos—Very grainy, not good quality. If you’re going to post pictures, make sure they’re nice: you know, good quality, nicely-lit, all that good stuff.

Pets—Yeah, okay.

Gallery—To be quite honest, these are mainly quite childish; I see no point in posting generic ten-year-old girl art. I have no problem with posting art, but make it amazing art, like Lene’s.

Fanlistings—Mhm… nothing wrong here.

Contact Me—Wow, that is one tiny textarea! How are people supposed to write anything in it?

Domain

Terms of Use—Would fit better under Visitors.

History—Blah blah blah, totally boring. You don’t need such a long page. A paragraph or two will do quite nicely, and even two is pushing it.

Past Layouts—Yeah, okay, whatever. Nicely organised, I guess, but that’s about it.

Affiliates—Affiliates, lulz. Okay, though, you’ve organised this page decently enough, although… affiliates? Really?

Site Awards and Gifts—It just gets more and more teenybopper. The funniest part? Well, let’s see… oh yeah! You’re not a teen! I thought (or wishfully thought, I guess) that these things had finally disappeared.

Link Me—I found Mr. Turtle and I get a special award to show on my website. Um. No. I am totally not doing that.

…

Oh what the heck. I can’t see what I’m highlighting in your tiny textarea, and I’m validating the coding, but here goes nothing:

OMGZ I FUOND MR. TRUTLE!!!!111111oneone11`!“~

Credits—Mhm, mhm, mhm. Try to make use of unordered lists.

Visitors

Graphics—Generic, boring, teenybopper. Gah.

Downloads—See above.

Stock Photos—Not great quality. I mean, they’re not terrible, but they could be better. I can’t see anyone using these on their own layout, because that would make their layout look medium-quality.

Tutorials—Yep, all the basic “I don’t know what I’m talking about” indicators. Why are your CSS and PHP tutorials lumped together? Surely if you’re qualified to be teaching us about them you’d know that they’re completely different? No? Okay. Not learning from you.

Birthday Book—Right. I submitted my birthday to one of these, back in the day. Now, though? Yeah right.

Articles—There was only one here. It wasn’t bad; it was a bit of a generic and overdone topic, but you handled it decently. Your semi-colons bugged the crap out of me, though, just to let you know. There’s nothing I hate more than… well, bad grammar in general.

HTMLs—I actually laughed out loud at the terminology. “A variety of HTMLs”, hmm? So… a very of hypertext markup languages? Yeah, okay, we can go with that if it makes you feel better. Okay, all basic, boring, crappy tutorials. Can we move on?

Can You Find Mr. Turtle?—I already did, and it was a pointless waste of my time.

Plugboard—Sigh. More generic and horrible content. Never again.

Summary

All of your content was generic, boring, not fun to go through, etc. Anything written was also lacking: boring and full of grammatical errors. I remember thinking these sites were so cool back in the day, but there is nothing original or interesting about yours. It’s a bit sad that you’re twenty, too, because this is what I’d expect from an eleven-year-old.

]]> http://mobile.ohclementine.com/review-41-ipinky-promise/feed/ http://mobile.ohclementine.com/trimming-the-queue/ http://mobile.ohclementine.com/trimming-the-queue/#comments Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:22:03 +0000 Clem http://mobile.ohclementine.com/?p=112 The following websites have been removed from the queue due to dead links:

• Heartless Wind
• One Blonde Design

If you own these websites and you have moved (or if your website is back up) please comment below to let me know.

]]> http://mobile.ohclementine.com/trimming-the-queue/feed/ http://mobile.ohclementine.com/review-40-in-the-louvre/ http://mobile.ohclementine.com/review-40-in-the-louvre/#comments Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:42:57 +0000 Clem http://mobile.ohclementine.com/?p=66

Reviewing Michelle’s site, In The Louvre, in Firefox on Mac OS X Panther

First Impressions

Hi there, Michelle. I remember reviewing your site quite a few months ago and giving you a very high score. To be quite honest, I’ve been wondering how to approach this review; it’s been quite intimidating figuring out how to structure and phrase my critique. When I first started writing this review, you had your other layout up. It’s a bit of an inconvenience to me, but I guess it’s partly my fault for taking so long. You can’t expect people to keep their layouts up forever, after all!

Anyway, I’ll start with my first impressions, as the section title would indicate. When I first saw your other layout, I was taken aback. I just didn’t like it, although I could seem to find anything fundamentally wrong wtih it. I’m glad you’ve changed it. There are some definite issues here, but it’s a much nicer layout than your last.

Look at the screenshot of your layout for a second, before we move on here. For such a simple layout, it’s a bit cluttered, especially around the sidebar area.

Layout

Really the thing that’s keeping me from getting all “ZOMG I LOVE IT” with your layout is the fact that colour scheme is really quite bland. This is a huge contrast from your last layout, which I found to be using too many clashing colours, so maybe it’s time to find a balance. Currently your layout is mainly grey, brown, white, and beige. These are all neutral colours, and neutral in this case means bland. Even the green you’re using is fairy neutral. I’m sure there’s a way for you to work in some brighter colours; not necessarily something overwhelming, but perhaps you can brighten the ornaments hanging off the tree and work those colours into your links, headings, etc. The particular grey you’ve chosen is quite depressing; such pale greys, to me, seem like they’re not sure if they want to be truly grey or just white; they look watery; and they make any layout automatically blander. I’m fine with grey, sure, but generally only if it’s a nice dark grey, à la Jemjabella.

Now, your header itself is very cute—and I mean cute as in “cute but not overly so”. It’s almost poetic; it may sound like a strange analogy, but it looks like a painting of a poem to me. There are, however, some definite aspects of the header that I dislike. The first and most apparent thing to me is, of course, the dreary grey. I’ve already outlined this, though, so I think it’s okay if I move on without saying too much more on the subject. Next, this “Once upon a time” seems a tad out of place. Yes, I understand that it fits in with the overall theme of your website, but it looks funny in this theme. The main image looks so dreamy, for lack of a better adjective, while this “Once upon a time” seems to be the Michelle equivalent of random lyric brushes splattered on layouts: pointless and out of place. You might be able to work it into the footer, but on the header it just jumps out at me as an afterthought. Next, there’s the fact that the header image doesn’t extend all the way across the screen. It looks quite strange for part of the sidebar to be on the same level as the girl and the tree; I’m not sure if this was an effect you were trying to achieve, but if so, it hasn’t been executed properly, especially considering the fact that you have a dotted line dividing the content from the sidebar. It looks very awkward. I would also suggest a little more space between the header and the content, because as it stands the date on your most recent entry almost looks like it’s a part of the header image itself.

I’m also noticing a lot of niggly details. Firstly, the Arial. Oh, no, not Arial. This font is the bane of my existence. I’ve seen it work on only a handful of sites, and yours is sadly not one of them. Arial is boring and ugly and the spacing is wonky. It looks so default text-y. Verdana is so much prettier.

Another thing I’ve noticed, which is really quite small, is the fact that you’ve got your sidebar headings in (ugly grey) boxes with rounded corners—and the fact that your text seems to have trouble deciding where to go. You’ve got a definite margin on the left side, but the text isn’t quite centered. I would suggest centering the text, because it will look nicer like that if you’re going to keep them in those boxes. (Also, as a quick side note, could you increase the text size of your sidebar’s unordered lists?)

Moving on, I see you have a separator between posts. This is a good thing to do, but only if it’s done right. Post dividers should be subtle, and they should most definitely tie in with the layout. Yours is neither subtle nor remotely related to anything in the layout but the “Once upon a time”, which, as I’ve already stated, is out of place.

Your text is justified! This is hard to read, leaves large gaps between words, and is just generally a bad idea.

Your footer is fine; the colour is awful, but it’s well-organised. I don’t really like the idea of using a footer as something other than a copyright notice and a few links to important things (sitemap, feeds, host), but yours isn’t bad as these creative footers go.

Okay, now. I really want to address the issue of your comments. They look terrible on the sidebar! Firstly, it’s hard to locate them in this unconvential place. Then, when you do, they’re all squished to one side, which makes reading them awkward. As if that’s not bad enough, they are, of course, weborexic comments, since the sidebar is only about 300px wide. Lastly, it looks funny to have a sidebar extending to the bottom of the page but with so much empty space in the content area. I can see that you were trying to be creative, and I don’t have a problem with this in principle. It’s just that it doesn’t quite work.

Content

About

I’ve never particularly liked those fast-fact sections above the main content. They don’t really serve much purpose; they certainly don’t invite me to read more.

Your first sentence caught me off-guard, as I know you’re a very good writer—this surprised me.

I live in the Commonwealth of Virginia but I someday dream of residing in Maryland; however, my favorite part of life is the independent bookstore job I currently use as an excuse to collect more books.

Why the “however”? As I’m sure you are well-aware, “however” indicates a contradictory statement. The two statements have nothing to do with each other and certainly aren’t contradictory!

Your next paragraph, about books, made me smile. It’s subtly humourous, and quite endearing. (This could just be my rather large inner book lover speaking, though.)

I find this sentence a little awkward:

I spend my rare creative spurts designing, painting, drawing, pixelling, etc.

I assume that by the “etc.”, you mean you like to engage in different types of visual arts; however, the “etc.” just seems lazy, and a bit out of place on your about page, particularly considered the fact that it’s you we’re talking about: a very good writer withimpeccable grammar. Why not replace it with “and engaging in other sorts of creative activities” or something to that effect?

This also sounds a bit awkward:

I’ll not write the next great American novel, but I may self-publish a few along the way

This seems to be implying that you won’t write the next great American novel, but you may self-publish a few great American novels along the way. (And what way would that be? It might sound better to say “during the course of my life”.)

Past these few nit-picky things, this page was enjoyable. It lacked the humour that I generally like to see in About pages, but somehow you made it work. Holding my attention without using humour is a feat to be proud of!

Best Of—Took a while to load, unfortunately. I got a bit lost here, because I found most of these very interesting to read. I suppose that’s the danger of reviewing an interesting site; it’s easy to get distracted from the review itself.

Movies Challenge—Nothing particularly interesting here, as there are no reviews, but okay nonetheless. I’m a bit worried about the coding, though! You should be using (un)ordered lists for this page, and instead of using Movie Name, you should use the more semantically-correct Movie Name.

Domain—Oh, see this section is a jumble of personal information and domain information? I’m not keen on this set-up, mainly because people might be a bit confused about how to get to the domain page if there’s no link on the navigation. Anyway, I have no real problems with this page. It’s to-the-point and has no grammatical (or other) errors that I can see.

Links—Very nicely-organised; I’ll admit to being a bit of a sucker for two-column link lists.

Credits—I’m noticing a distinct lack of semantics here! This is your current page structure:

Section Heading

·Credit, quick description

Yes, it displays nicely, but you could easily do the same thing with semantically-correct coding! Try changing that to something more like this:

Section Heading

• Credit, quick description

Besides that issue, you’ve done a fine job with this page. I like how you added short descriptions without going overboard.

Contact—I don’t think I’ve ever been able to comment on a contact page; yours is no exception. Nothing creative, but then again, that would be nearly impossible.

Plugins—This could probably be combined with the Credits page; after all, I don’t think most people want to go through two pages when one is essentially just an extension of the other. I see you’re making use of unordered lists here, which is good to see. Nitpicking time:

However, there are a few which I’ve found necessary - no, VITAL - to running this blog.

Why not make those masquerading hyphens into actual em dashes? Just use the character code —. It will look so much prettier, I promise you. (Also, the phrasing is a bit odd; it would make more sense to say that the plugins are vital in running your blog.)

Library

Mmm, all these book covers are making me hungry. (Or maybe it’s just that I haven’t eaten breakfast or lunch yet. I’m so busy working away on this review and reading your old posts!) I like what you’ve written here a lot:

No one should ever be ashamed of what they’ve read (or what they haven’t read). Likewise, no one should feel guilt over their thoughts of a certain book or genre, even if several people disagree with them.

I won’t say much about this, because I would just be repeating what you already said, but I do agree with this and I think it says a lot about you. (In a good way, of course.)

Why I Read—This sums it up nicely:

You’ve clicked this link to find out why I read, not about my reading history or how much I would like to lick every book that comes across my path, if not just to claim it as mine.

The title of the page is a big misleading; I personally would change it to “Reading History” and move the fairly short section that’s actually “Why I Read” to the main Library page. That said, I enjoyed reading this page a lot. There’s nothing better than reading about a book lover.

Book Lust—You’ve taken a lot of time to create this page, I can tell. It takes a lot of patience to be able to do something like this, and I applaud you for it. It’s very well-organised, and you seem to have written it all rather thoughtfully (which is a good word to describe the majority of your writing).

Read in 200X—I’m going to review these pages collectively, as my comments apply to all of them. These pages are fine, really; I only have two suggestions. The first is that, since I’ve noticed that you write book reviews in your blog, it would be helpful to link the titles of the books in these lists to the reviews you’ve written. The second has to do with coding. Like , the tag is deprecated and should be replaced with .

Book Links—One could argue that these could easily be placed in your regular links section, and I’m torn. It would really make more sense that way; however, it does seem to fit nicely in this section. Maybe you could make a note on the main Links page that you have a whole other page of book links. That would solve the problem and keep both parties happy. Again, remember to make use of unordered lists; past that, excellent compilation of links.

Fiction

There is a lot to go through here. Your short stories flow very strangely; I had to read Eloise twice before I fully understood. The other pieces went more smoothly for me; I’m not sure if this is because the flow was just better, or if it was because reading Eloise got me accustomed to your style. You are a wonderful storyteller, just bursting with good ideas, it seems. Out of all these pieces, Eloise was definitely the least enjoyable, but it was still a good piece of fiction.

The fragments are the same way: they take some getting used to, but they’re high-quality and enjoyable. I can honestly say that if you were ever to make these fragments into novels, I would read them. Same thing with the Sunday Scribblings, really; as you said yourself, they’re the same thing as fragments, except they have a specific purpose.

Under “A Thought”, change

it had a small snipped

to

it had a small snippet

Speaking of your thoughts, I like this idea. They’re halfway between a regular blog post and a sideblog post; an enjoyable read, for sure.

The bits you’ve posted from your NaNoWriMo novel are great! I would love to see these expanded into a novel; I would absolutely read it. See, reading the snippets from your own novel (however horrible you think it is) makes me feel so down on my own. I almost want to delete all 20,000 words and start over from the beginning!

I remember seeing Poesia Breve last time I reviewed your site and really loving it. Haiku is really the only form of poetry I can get into. I love the poems you’ve written, especially the second. It made me laugh. It’s a shame that the link to the book design doesn’t work, though, because I remember thinking the design was beautiful too.

I think it goes without saying that I enjoyed the pieces under Older Writing as well, though I didn’t read all of Fifteen (not enough time!).

Articles

Firstly, please use unordered lists to display these links. I am quite possibly biased since I love unordered lists, but as a general rule, they are your friend.

I love the PB&J tutorial; the pictures are so cute! I especially like the one for “Enjoy!” And oh does that strawberry shortcake look delicious! Luckily I’ve finally managed to eat (fried my own dumplings; I feel so virtuous), so it’s not making my stomach rumble in agony. I never did get around to trying to make my own little star; I mean, I’ve tried making them countless times before, but they never turned out. I should really use your tutorial. Pictures make everything so much easier to follow! (The pictures are admittedly a little blurry; if you ever need something to do why not retake them?) The banana mush recipe isn’t something I’ll be trying out, being someone who doesn’t like bananas, but I’m sure it will prove to be helpful for others.

The Web Tutorials are external links and should be defined as such. Normally I don’t comment on any external links, and I won’t say too much here, but I think you should know that both of these tutorials are very good. They’re well-thought out and extremely in-depth.

Your Reviews and Thoughts, of course, made for very interesting reading. I particularly liked your review of Ruined By Reading; I thought it was very interesting. Your reviews and blog posts often make me think, which, unless my head is hurting intensely, is a very good thing. I like being challenged; I like finding new ways to think; I like considering new opinions and ideas.

Summary

Well, Michelle, this concludes your review. Going through your site was a very enjoyable experience; as I said before, you always make me think, and it’s not often that a website can get my brain moving as much as yours does. Your writing is all exceptional, and it’s obvious that you put a lot of thought and effort into maintaining your website. However, and there’s almost always a however, some of your coding was lacking. This is not the hugest thing in the world, but I don’t like seeing coding abused, and there’s not much else you can improve upon.

I also missed the art I saw last time I reviewed your website, and I would love it if you could bring it back. Having a book-oriented site is all well and good, but I loved your art and I really want to see it again.

I don’t feel that I can increase your score since the last time you were reviewed, because your art made up a considerable part of your website and did bump your score up accordingly. I don’t feel that your score should go down, however, because the quality of your site is still high. So your original score still stands.

]]> http://mobile.ohclementine.com/review-40-in-the-louvre/feed/