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Review for Angelcakez
I’m not sure if I am too fond of the idea using the splash page as a portal. The most logical guess for ‘Design’ is a graphic site (among the choice of a fashion site, an art portfolio, and a generic site title), but what is ‘Main’? Main page? Homepage? But am I not at the homepage? If I’m not at your homepage, then what am I currently looking at? By the way, only your graphic site is reviewed at your request.
Information
Site: Angelcakez Production
Type: Resource
Owner: Kat
Reviewed By: Misao
Date Received: 02/09/06
Date Completed: 03/20/06
Preview
Presentation
The splash page takes up too much and is rather empty, and loses the focus and purpose of a splash page. One, you should be more specific about which link will lead to which site. Try a short caption underneath the title or an alt tag. Second, it is all one big image that isn’t even aligned or attracting. Because you used the left border of your screenshot as the centre axis, everything is aligned slightly to the right. Did I mention that you used too much outer glow on your text, making it look really blurry? I had the initial reaction that I forgot to put my glasses on even though they are sitting on my nose. The stencil you used in your site logo is bigger, brighter and stands out more than your site title. Should you be advertising the logo or the title? On a side note, google ads should be placed on the main web site, not on a splash page, where you use as a portal. You want to take people into your site, not advertise for hurricane relief, and honestly, which would they be more interested in? Advertising on this page probably doesn’t give you a lot of clicks.
This is entirely a suggestion. Take away the screenshots. What is the point? They’ll see what the site will look like once they enter. And I won’t be entering a site based on a 100-pixel screenshot. Text links works perfectly fine too. If you prefer larger text size, that can be easily manipulated. If your site contains any script that is only visible in one browser, you need to state this requirement on the index page. The whole point of a splash page is to say ‘enter’ in the simplest way. Get straight to the point. For a visual descriptive of what I am getting at, click here.
On the other hand, the entire ‘main’ subdomain should move to the parent directory (/index). For starters, even though your graphic site is a production of Angelcakez, it is a site by itself. Same goes for your blog/domain collective. For the most part, collectives are usually placed on the actual domain itself rather than a subdomain. It sure makes more sense. When visitors visit angelcakez.net, they see your domain collective and blog. They learn about you, Lauren and the domain. When they visit angelcakez.net/design/, they see your graphic site. Isn’t that more simple and logical?
Your index file is short but yet contains a lot of errors. Although it is technically correct not to use quotations when addressing attributes, it is recommended to use for reducing very long lines, with CRLF line terminators. Plus, you use quotations in your image map and google coding. Rather than addressing a specific margin, write margin=”0″ and this will be apply to all four margins. Since you’ve already set the margins at zero, there is no need to specify the margin width and height. You can set it at 100 but it’ll remain at zero because you specify zero pixels for the margin. You misplaced the End ImageReady Slices tag. You can’t end the tag before it begins. This should be placed after the end tag for map. You have an open tag (div align=”center”) before your image source but there is no end tag for the divider layer at the bottom of your file.
I like the layout! The razor sharp outline of the actress is very flattering and stylish. The style of transparent rectangular shapes behind the title and navigation category is very unique. I really like it. But there is no site title. Or are both the sites just named ‘Angelcakez Production’? If so, that is very confusing. Try to add something to the title to make it distinguishable like Angelcakez Graphical Production. Your layout abruptly ends on the right. The soft lilac doesn’t finish the feather effect to blend into the background. There is a sudden and very apparent straight line about 50 pixels to the right of the navigation column. The length of the header is very lengthy. I use a very high resolution (due to my widescreen laptop monitor) and yet I had to scroll to see the beginning of the content. I can’t imagine how much scrolling I would have to do with an 800×600 resolution. People don’t like scrolling all that much. Although the layout is very pretty, it doesn’t need to fill up the entire screen. Cropping the header a tad smaller won’t damage the overall quality of the image.
The alignment of your content field is one pixel off to the left. Hence, there is one pixel of empty space between the header background colour and the background of the content column. The text is all squished together too. There is no distinguishable paragraph separation, which makes reading very difficult. Here is a visual example:
The navigation links need some space to separate each category. It is so crowded and busy. Try adding an extra <br> tag after the last link in each category, or enclose the links in one category in paragraph tags. I am not sure if it is necessary to add in the Angelcakez before ‘Gallery’ and ‘Guestbook’. Since these network links are related to the site, most people would assume they are a production of Angelcakez. Plus, with your hover effects, hovering over the ‘Guestbook’ link moves everything below that done a line. I don’t understand the x, x, x link underneath ‘Affiliates’. Be more specific and clear by replacing it with ‘Apply for Affiliation’ or something along those lines. Substituting the obvious with x’s doesn’t produce a grand effect; it more or less is pointless, and looks out of place. All the links to your ‘Sponsor’s (besides the first one) are mislinked. Even though the links to ‘Extreme Tracker’ and ‘Who links to me?’ are primarily for your benefit, they should link to a new window browser. The latter link is also mislinked. There is no use for the Angelcakez mini banner. The banner looks pretty and all, but it is useless. Why would I want to click on your banner that takes me back to a your portal page? The google advertisement looks out of place. Google allows you to modify the colours of the ads to fit your page.
HTML-wise, for someone who owns a graphic site and web designs, there are numerous errors. As mentioned above, try to include quotations in your coding to reduce errors and keeping it constant. You obviously don’t make use of your style sheet. Many things in your HTML can be moved to your style sheet, hence, the reason and purpose of them. For example, rather than writing TD valign=top style=”background: URL(images/index_05.jpg) no-repeat;” width=168 rowspan=5, you’ll only need to write TD id=”index05″ rowspan=”5″ width=”168″ in your main file and the rest will appear in the style sheet as:
td#index05 { background: #COLOUR URL(images/index_05.jpg) no-repeat;
vertical-align: top;
text-align: right; }
The format of your coding is so confusing. I would have chosen an easier, more efficient, less bothersome style of coding. But how you choose to code your site is your decision. I don’t understand why you would include a style sheet link relation in the middle of the page, right before your updates. You do know that you already have this much higher up in the file right? Inputting it twice in two different locations won’t do anything, especially when both are pointing to the same style sheet. Scratch that, it appears five times in your HTML. Do you understand what is a style sheet and how to use it? Why do you add the alt tag and size specifications to some of your image sources and not to the others? You should clear up your updates and post the most recent two on the main page. Your updates are fairly lengthy and there is no need for four of them to increase the scrolling. Secondly, it is March. Updates from January should be archived.
In your style sheet, the attributes for body are specified twice in two different locations. You do know that they can all be combined into one right? I don’t understand why you specified a background repeat and attachment when there is no background image. If you chose a background colour, it automatically applies to the entire background. Did you expect a small patch of the lavender purple in only one area? By the way, the scrollbar colours will only show up properly in Internet Explorer. Why do you have all those border specifications for link hovers when you set the width at zero? What a waste of space and time considering if doesn’t do anything. If by chance, you do want to have a border, use shorthand. (IE) border: 1px #547E66 dashed. If you wish for the font weight to be normal (or default since you used the two terms interchangeably), you don’t need to specify them. Anything that is left unspecified will appear as default. You can use shorthand for the padding attributes too. (IE) padding: TOP RIGHT BOTTOM LEFT. You fail to include the # symbol before the background colour code in the con3 specifications. I almost forgot to ask why you made the text and link colours the same? Do you know how hard it is to locate a link in the middle of your content? Add some sort of decoration to them so links can be recognized like underline, different text colour, border, etc.
Content
Your welcome paragraph does exactly what it should do. But there are two words spelt wrong: critisism and prequently. The misspelling in the first word is understandable when you’re trying to spell from sounding out the word, but how did you manage the typo in the second? ‘P’ is halfway across the keyboard from ‘f’. “Feel free to tell us” should be a new sentence. Replace the comma before this sentence with a period. There are numerous grammar and spelling mistakes in your updates as well. I copied and pasted it in Microsoft Word, and the most common mistakes are forgetting to capitalize the first letter of a sentence, and either missing a letter in a word or typing far too many letters. (IE) pluged, reallly, offff. Cutenews provides an edit option in which you can read over your updates for errors right after adding the news. You’re missing an ’s’ after ‘graphic’ in the image source underneath navigation. There is no need to link the ‘Term of Usage’ three times in the same column, just list the link once underneath ‘Sitely’. Again, it is more logical. And it is ‘Terms‘ since I’m positive you have more than one term.Your WHOLE LIST of affiliates is pretty small considering that on the navigation column, you claim to have three. I don’t see the use and purpose of a separate layout just to host a page with redirection stats.
Sitely - It is rather quizzical to have a SITELY link underneath the ‘Sitely’ category. Change the name of this section to ABOUT SITE or SITE HISTORY. You certainly made your history story short. Since this is written in a first person pronoun, I assume it is written by… Angel S. I had to scroll all the way down to the bottom layout image to find out who it is. Maybe you should introduce yourself first before jumping into the site history. Wow… look at the grammar mistakes! It is the perfect paragraph to give an English class to correct as a grammar exercise. Your first sentence is a run-on sentence of three. Read the one I’ve rewritten below and compare it to yours.
Angelcakez began on the first of January 2004. It started off as Baby Doll Design. Three or four months after I created the site, I had no choice but to go on hiatus, which lasted a long time. When I finally got the site back up, I changed the name to Twillight Design. After another one or two months, I went on another hiatus. Why? Because I messed up.
This is where Rini-chan came along and asked me if I would like to run a domain with her. I agreed. Soon after, a girl named Kim joined our group, and we became the three webmistress running the Angelcakez domain. Since then, a lot of things happened, so now Rini and myself are running the domain. Kim has started her own site. The reason why I started this site is because I wanted something that is completely mine. I use my domain not just for the random crap going on in my life, but as storage and to share with my friends.
The ‘credits’ should be on a separate page because you’ll need more than what you have. You’ll need specific sites to where you took images from, where the fonts are from (if they are taken from another graphic site), and a link to the program you are using to power the site. A title is not enough, links are required. Try to reframe from using ‘brushes @ me’ because honestly, I don’t know who me is. There is nothing so far into the site that tells me who is running the site besides the first person pronoun. Try making a ’staff’ page. The program that you used to edit your HTML is Notepad, not Notebook.The ‘credits’ should be on a separate page because you’ll need more than what you have. You’ll need specific sites to where you took images from, where the fonts are from (if they are taken from another graphic site), and a link to the program you are using to power the site. A title is not enough, links are required. Try to reframe from using ‘brushes @ me’ because honestly, I don’t know who me is. There is nothing so far into the site that tells me who is running the site besides the first person pronoun. Try making a ’staff’ page. The program that you used to edit your HTML is Notepad, not Notebook.PAST LAYOUT: Your layout is deformed. There are gaps between the alignments of the last three images to your header. There are multiple grammar mistakes on this page too. “Well this is made in Adobe Photoshop 7.0, using one of my newest and favourite style: kinda grungey-like. I used a total of maybe 40+ layers. It is very similar to my blog layout at the time, because well its a network, I decided to make it alike.=]” On a side note, this style is not grunge, it is not even close. The style uses sharp cut-out edges and stencils.
The ‘credits’ should be on a separate page because you’ll need more than what you have. You’ll need specific sites to where you took images from, where the fonts are from (if they are taken from another graphic site), and a link to the program you are using to power the site. A title is not enough, links are required. Try to reframe from using ‘brushes @ me’ because honestly, I don’t know who me is. There is nothing so far into the site that tells me who is running the site besides the first person pronoun. Try making a ’staff’ page. The program that you used to edit your HTML is Notepad, not Notebook.The ‘credits’ should be on a separate page because you’ll need more than what you have. You’ll need specific sites to where you took images from, where the fonts are from (if they are taken from another graphic site), and a link to the program you are using to power the site. A title is not enough, links are required. Try to reframe from using ‘brushes @ me’ because honestly, I don’t know who me is. There is nothing so far into the site that tells me who is running the site besides the first person pronoun. Try making a ’staff’ page. The program that you used to edit your HTML is Notepad, not Notebook.PAST LAYOUT: Your layout is deformed. There are gaps between the alignments of the last three images to your header. There are multiple grammar mistakes on this page too. “Well is made in Adobe Photoshop 7.0 one of my newest and style grunge. a total of 40+ layers It is very similar to my blog layout at the time, because I decided to make it alike=]” On a side note, this style is not grunge, it is not even close. The style uses sharp cut-out edges and stencils.The ‘credits’ should be on a separate page because you’ll need more than what you have. You’ll need specific sites to where you took images from, where the fonts are from (if they are taken from another graphic site), and a link to the program you are using to power the site. A title is not enough, links are required. Try to reframe from using ‘brushes @ me’ because honestly, I don’t know who me is. There is nothing so far into the site that tells me who is running the site besides the first person pronoun. Try making a ’staff’ page. The program that you used to edit your HTML is Notepad, not Notebook.PAST LAYOUT: Your layout is deformed. There are gaps between the alignments of the last three images to your header. There are multiple grammar mistakes on this page too. “Well is made in Adobe Photoshop 7.0 one of my newest and style grunge. a total of 40+ layers It is very similar to my blog layout at the time, because I decided to make it alike=]” On a side note, this style is not grunge, it is not even close. The style uses sharp cut-out edges and stencils.LINK IN/OUT: A URL specifying where to link to would be helpful. Instead of using a table and text links to display your link exchanges, try linkware buttons. It’ll make the page much more appealing. Why do none of the links open in a new browser? If I wasn’t in the middle of a review, I would have left your site browsed through Xentia Hosting, who is linked twice by the way. The links to ‘Celestial Hikari Design’ and ‘Shukumei Design’ are mislinked. I think you meant to say ‘if you wish to be an link exchange with Angelcakez.” The only time when you use ‘an’ instead of ‘a’ is when the next word following right after starts with a vowel.
Graphic - Same alignment issue on the TERM OF USAGE page. Wow… another perfect example of the worst grammatical problems. I am not going to bother correcting it because 1) I’ll have to correct every single page, and 2) I’ll be rewriting everything for you. If you need help, copy and paste it in Microsoft Word, and have a friend or adult look over it. There is a difference between ‘cannot’ and ‘will not’. Cannot means that you forbid a person from participating in a certain act. Will not implies certainly and force that the person will not be engaging in a certain act. The former is the correct usage on pages like these. I don’t understand why you start talking about the usage of avatars and buttons underneath the heading for ‘layouts’. What is the “proper way” for linking? Even though you pointed out the essentials and they came out pretty clear, you need to reword to make it firm and correct. For example, try here or here or our rules page.
AVATAR: Since there is more than one, add a ’s’ to the word. Some of the avatar’s divider area is larger than others. There is no need to display them the way you have it. If you would like to add in the info about ID number and series, it can be done with an alt or title tag. Some avatars are done very nicely, while some are of complete poor and lowest quality. I have reasonable doubt that they are either not made by the same artist or some are extractions from pre-made graphics. When I click on ‘next’, I am brought to the main updates page. By the way, who is Honey Babee (The reason why a ‘Staff’ page is required!)? ENTER SIGNS: The ‘report’ link is useless. What is the use when the link takes me to a page with directions to post the error in the guestbook. What happened to the traditional contact forms? Twins are not a series, they’re celebrities. Enter sign #4 is mislinked. There is the same a continuous problem with the ‘next’ link on all pages. BRUSHES: There is no need to link the downloads to a new browser since a window will automatically POP up asking whether to save or open the file, or a name to save the file under. Always zip brushes. Do not upload and link them to the original files. They can easily be corrupted and be infected with viruses. Unless brush set #2 are photographs taken by you, I think you should take it down. It could very well be photography copyrighted by a certain artist. WALLPAPER: Alignment issues also appear on this page. You mixed up the resolution links. The overall quality of the wallpapers is debatable.
Layouts - LATTEST ADDED consists of a spelling error in the title. “I hope you enjoy the additions”, what additions? You mean, if I refresh the page, something different will appear? Or do you mean, “enjoy the layouts”? The latest is on the very first? First what? First page of the section, first page of the site, first visit? I think you understand the point. Why is there graphic links to preview and download in this section and not the others? The quality of your layouts (primarily the more recent ones) is of great quality, but lacking in coding.
DIV LAYOUT: There are background issues with ‘Seventh Heaven’ and ‘Blood Sisters’ (both previews are depicted 90 degrees counter clockwise), wrong reference in ‘Broken Heart’ (the celebrity is not from Final Fantasy), and background repetition and style sheet issue with ‘Beautiful Illusions’.
TABLE LAYOUT: There is an alignment issue with ‘Ambrosial’, the preview and download links to ‘Amour’ and ‘Childlike Innocence’ doesn’t work, and what happened to layouts #3-6? There is the header image alignment issue on the second page.
IFRAME LAYOUT: Same image alignment issue. Where is the previous 12 layouts?
POPUP LAYOUT: Same image alignment issue. Again, where are the previous 13 layouts? You might want to edit the target attribute of the splash image link. The POP-up appeared in the same window. Given that it opens in a popup window, you are misunderstanding what POP-up is. For an example, view a sample from Tiger Whispers Design. The quality of the image itself is really poor, because you try to resize it larger from a smaller source. The download link doesn’t work.
SPECIAL LAYOUT: What is so special about these? The first two are not layouts; they are splash images. The third one is a table layout. There are also problems with the left and right of the content column. The image suddenly stops. There is no feather effect whatsoever blending into the background. The background image itself has started to repeat horizontally. I recognize some of the brushes (primarily the flower ones) from Aethereality so you should give due credit. It is not very impressive when you own a graphic site but use brushes from another graphic site (that is much more well-known and popular) without addressing proper credits. It is rude and disrespectful.
The preview size of your older layouts is not consistent with the newer ones. I am not sure if I am looking at layout thumbnails or avatars. You need to start using plurals (IE. layoutS, graphicS, wallpaperS, avatarS) because you obviously have more than one. You should include the image credit link with each of your layout. Even though most images are very popular and easy to find on the Internet, proper credit is due. Especially when you ask the same of your graphics.
Transparent PNGs - Rather than formatting the ‘SORT BY SERIES’ page the way you have it, try using a drop down menu. It is easier, faster, and is much more appealing. Look to Aethereality for an example. There is no need to have a ‘Back to List’ link after every PNG. One at the bottom of the page is sufficient. By the way, the table you use to enclose and display your PNG previews have distorted your layout appearance. There is the header alignment issue with some of your pages. You probably need to update your PNG count. The ‘Alicia Keys’ PNG link doesn’t work. Some of your PNGs have the Angelcakez signature while some have the Cherry Kiss signature. As I recall from your history, you never owned a site called Cherry Kiss. The two ‘Korean Art’ PNGs are exactly the same. The download to ‘Lindsay Lohan’ directs to Jennifer Lopez. ‘Travel Time Stranger’ cannot be found. I think the title is also incorrect. Judging from the image, it is un-doubtfully the work of Tanemura Arina, and that would make a probably guess that the series is Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne. There is an error with ‘Ziyi Zhang’ as well. With your most recent additions, the extraction work is awesome. The older ones (those numbered roughly around 50 and below) just suck, to put it bluntly. You should prune out the old ones and keep the new ones. No one is going to download a PNG that is extracted so poorly that they had to redraw the details around the edge.
Final Statement
After I finish reviewing your site, I just realized that I probably gave you about 100+ hits from one visit due to your numerous pages and my tendency to refresh a page if the page doesn’t work or there is something wrong with the appearance. It is a cheap and dirty way to earn hits. At least it answered my question of how your graphic site could have obtained such a high number of hits. The counter should either be removed, placed only on the main page or only on the index page.
Your site itself is not too bad, in speaking about recent graphics. The quality is great. I can see a definite improvement from when you first started graphic designing. However you’re lacking in a lot of areas: coding, grammar, spelling, organization, and amount of content. The first four pretty much speaks for itself. You can find comments throughout the entire review pointing to those four areas. For a graphic site, yours sure do have a lot of coding errors compared to other sites, which is funny. How do you expect to spread your layouts and have people use them if they contain errors? The last area speaks directly to quality over quantity. As much as it makes your site look big because you have more graphics, it doesn’t help if the graphics are of poor quality. You should clean out the older ones and only showcase your recent and better graphics. Since you are so busy at the moment to update, a hiatus to clear up the old files and replace them with new ones, and as a chance to fix your errors, is an option you should take into consideration.