Staff

Past Staff

Review for Ambrosial Designs

Your site rendered quickly, revealing an attractive design with interesting colouring. However, the two borders at each side of the layout stand out and don’t seem to fit in with the rest of the design. I would suggest you change the colour of it to a lighter tone and/or make it thinner. Otherwise, the site seems quite organized. I am looking forward to seeing what it has to offer.

Information

Site: Ambrosial Designs
Type: Resource
Owner: Kidori
Reviewed By: Tomoe
Date Received: 1/06/06
Date Completed: 1/15/06
Preview

Presentation

Layout Design

As I have stated in the opening, you have an attractive design. However, there are several things which could be improved:

In your design, everything is of around the same tone and colour. There is no focal point. Nothing that stands out and draws the attention of the eye. In this particular design, perhaps keeping the image of the three anime characters directly above the title “Ambrosial Designs” in its original colours would be a good idea because its close to the content space and title.
Keep it simple. Your design is a bit over brushed. There’s way too many brushes used that the design doesn’t show off what you can do with your photo editor. I would suggest that you try and rely on your own skills rather than brushes in future designs.
You use only one style of font (minus the A in “Ambrosial”. It gets even a little boring looking at the text in the design. Experiment a little with other fonts. It’ll make your designs more interesting.
The way that the word “Memories” is stretched out somewhat annoys me. It seems out of place. If you want it to be wider then just add more spaces between the letters. Don’t stretch it.
Have a little breathing space on either side of the content. Even 5px more on each side would be good. I’m sure that losing 10px of content space is a tolerable price to pay for a less crowded feel on the layout.
The headers don’t stand out as they should. The graphic underline below the text distracts the eye and make the text hard to read. Perhaps tone it down a bit? Also, put borders on the left and right side as well. It looks rather…odd that the borders only cover the top and bottom. The colour of the text almost fades into the background of the content area. Make it darker. Make the text larger too. And lastly, a font change couldn’t hurt. Maybe something like Georgia would be a good idea.
Get rid of the annoying padding on link images that show up when you hover over them. You can do this by sticking the following in your CSS:

img a:hover { padding: 0; }
At the bottom, I dislike how the little logo with the snake on the cross is half cut off. Either have the whole logo or take off the top part completely.

Coding

Your HTML is quite clean. However, you don’t take enough advantage of CSS. If you used CSS to set background and image properties it would allow your HTML to be more tidier and shorten the loading time. To do this, put in your CSS:

body { background: #E6BD85 URL(”images/bg2.jpg”) top;
margin: 0; }

This way in your HTML, you would only need is <body> instead of the long line of coding which you have. You can also use this method to shorten the coding of your tables.

Also, you are missing the DocType tag at the beginning of your code. This is important as it determines which Mark-up you are using. Judging from your coding, you’re using HTML 4.0 so this should replace the <HTML>:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>

Your headers could be definted easier using <h1>, <h2> Etc. instead of <p class=”head”> and <p class=”head2″>. To do this, your CSS would have to include:

h1 {
font-family: verdana;
font-size: 10pt;
color: #BE7150;
text-align: left;
font-weight: bold;
text-transform: uppercase;
background-image:URL(’images/header.gif’);
height: 25px;
margin-bottom: 5px;
padding-top: 2px;
}
h2 {
font-family: verdana;
font-size: 10pt;
color: #BE7150;
text-align: right;
font-weight: bold;
text-transform: uppercase;
background-image:URL(’images/header.gif’);
height: 25px;
margin-bottom: 5px;
padding-top: 2px;
}

And then in your coding, you would have <h1>Header</h1> instead of <p class=”head”>Header</head>.

Content

Main Page/Updates

The repeated here in your introduction should be taken out. In fact, one of the two sentences starting with the word here should be deleted. It’s not necessary to state the same thing twice.
Same thing goes for the sentences I hope you enjoy your stay here. and Thank you and have fun browsing around. Ditch one.
You’ve stated which resolutions your site is suited for but what about browsers?
Not that I have anything against them or anything, but you use many emoticons and sound very laid back in your updates. It couldn’t hurt to be a little more professional.

Credits

YOu should be You.
I have to commend you on the organization of this page. However, what about the programs you used to produce your site? Your graphics editor? FTP client? HTML editor?

Terms of Use

wil should be will.
Your terms of usage are fair and reasonable. But they miss out a few things. Is the coding and graphics allowed to be edited? Am I allowed to use your graphics to make other graphics?

Linkage

You provide buttons of only one size to link your site with. It would be nice if you had a variety of sizes as not everyone uses 88×31. Perhaps you could consider making 88×15, 100×35, 100×50 or even banners.
EV Listings is not a graphics site. Perhaps add Part of: above it or something similar.

Webmistress

The basic information is fine but the two paragraphs seem like something that would belong in a weblog or personal site rather than a graphics one. Perhaps your could write about your webdesign history, design philosophy etc. instead.
Past staff doesn’t really fit under Webmistress. Maybe you could reconsider naming this page Staff.

Contact

I like how the FAQ and the contact page is combined. However, in your navigation it would be helpful if you linked the page as FAQ & Contact.
Affiliation is closed, but you can still apply. How does that work? Maybe you could put that affiliation is selective instead.

Layouts

The display format of the layouts are neat. However, a bit more space between the thumbnail and the information would be nice.
The layouts themselves are of a good quality. However, after browsing around a bit, I realise that they’re mostly of the same style with the same styling. Experiment a little. Make each of your layouts all unique in their own way.
I don’t think the size of the zipped up file is really necessary as it doesn’t go into MBs and even people with dial-up will be able to download them without worry about time.

Suggestions

I don’t really understand the concept of this page. Is it for visitors to request a particular layout using image/s from a particular series? It would be nice for you to elaborate.
them should be it.

Avatars

These avatars are beautifully made. I love how they’re not just cropped images stuck into templates. This is definitely my favourite section of your site.

PNG’s

Making the thumbnails smaller would allow the page to be more organized.
And again, leave some more space between the thumbnail and text.

Hiatus Signs

The quality of some of these aren’t very good. I think you should go through these and delete the ones that aren’t up to scratch.
Sign’s number’s 1-4 uses CG art. Unless you’ve got permission from the artist to use them, get rid of them.

Wallpapers

Again, the quality of these vary. Clean up the junk as it would save much space and bandwidth.

Award Guidelines

Yaoi and Yuri is not kid-friendly. Perhaps you were looking for the words Shounen-ai and Shoujo-ai?
What’s a WYSIWYG site? Explain please.
Please remember to link the award back to AD if you do win it. But what if I don’t display my award on my site? Do I still have to link back?

Affiliates

Nice descriptions of your affiliates. I like how they’re all different.

Miscellaneous

Either have a key for your dates or use words for the months. Both the formats mm/dd/yy and dd/mm/yy are standard, many visitors will get confused if you don’t have a key.
Stick to one initial for your site. I’ve seen AD, Ad and A.D. throughout the site. Stick to one, it’s less confusing that way.
Quality over quantity. Don’t put up anything for your visitors that you wouldn’t use yourself. It’s better to have 2 well designed layouts than 10 pieces of junk. Junk wastes space and bandwidth, anyway.
Where is your about site page? Visitors might be interested to know about its history or even the meaning behind the name.

Final Statement

In conclusion, you have a decent graphics site that has potential to become very popular. Keep developing your graphics skills and don’t be scared to try something new. Take care with small details and don’t ever stop producing those lovely avatars. Good luck!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 15th, 2006 at 11:16 pm and is filed under Graphics/Resource. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Comments to “Ambrosial Designs”

fanta Says:
January 16th, 2006 at 10:49 am
Question. Why is there only ‘Hiatus Signs’ and not enter signs, moved signs etc?

Kidori Says:
January 16th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
Tomoe: Thank you very much for the elaborate and helpful review. I shall take everything you have mentioned into consideration.

Fanta: There’s only hiatus signs because not many people use moved, 404, etc. signs now.