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Review for Cocoa In Sun
The style of the layout and brushes is done wonderfully. However, the choice of colour leans more on the side of feminine power with your choice of character. The oversized curly braces seem very bold and overused and the text size is a bit too small to be read. Overall, the layout seems simple yet elegant and very well-made, though slightly on the small side.
Information
Site: Cocoa In Sun
Type: Domain
Owner: Marsha
Reviewed By: Misao
Date Received: 03/04/06
Date Completed: 05/19/06
Preview
Presentation
The layout is very simple and elegant. I especially like the purple on purple brush work over the layout header, with the occasional handwritten text. However, as mentioned, the colour seems rather feminine. I’m not sure if you coloured the Rupee’s shirt purple or was it initially purple to start off with, but it creates a sense of feminine mood and soft surrender. The greyscale Rupee is a nice touch, but he is missing a chunk of his hat, shoulder and upper arm. The curly braces are nicely positioned to frame the actual content frame. (Note: These braces are overly used.) Although your navigation is clear and easily accessible, it is positioned too far up. You’ll notice the extra blank space below the navigation links. It looks rather bland. Have you thought about making image links to match the same font style you used for the title? I think it would have a greater effect.
The text size is rather small. It is harder to see especially with that everyone is using a much larger resolution now. I use 1280×800 on my laptop and your fonts looks so tiny. It won’t hurt to make it a size larger. It won’t damage the overall quality of your website nor will it take up more space and time. Thanks for plugging FHR on your main updates page.
Since you declare your web page as HTML 4.01 Transitional, I put it through a validation test and your coding came up with 8 errors. They’re mainly errors in the way you classify your margins. If you set the margin at 0, obviously the margin height and width will be at 0 as well; so including the extra attributes is redundant. This can be simplified by inputting them into a style sheet. I see that you incorporated the CSS style into your main page since it is a shell for your internal frame. Since the styling is rather lengthy (defining links, scrollbar and input), try making a second style sheet (IE. style_2.css). It is easier to manage.
Since you use scrollbar colouring, you need to indicate on your main page that Internet Explorer is required, because that is the only browser that will support coloured scrollbars. I don’t understand why you list background-image to your body attribute even though there is nothing specified. If you are only using a background colour, that’s all you need to specify. Once you specify a background colour, the entire background will be that colour; you can’t repeat it nor can you tell it not to repeat. This also applies to background-attachment and background-repeat. Save your time by using the tab bar instead of spacebar spaces before each attribute. Here is a condensed version of the CSS style on your index page minus the scrollbar.
text-align: left;
color: #000000;
font: 10px tahoma;
background: #BFAFBC;
As for your body tag, you can also condensed your attributes to margin=”0″. The reason why people assign an id=”–” to their divider layers or tables or paragraphs is because it points back to specifications in the style sheet. In your case, you’re only doing it to make it look fancy. Nowhere in your CSS style does it have anything related to id=”Table_01″. You have a weird way of coding everything, with the column and row span. I find it easier to stick in numeric values for width and height but your way seems to be perfectly fine. You have your navigation links located in a table (that is inside the whole layout table) even though it isn’t required. When you want to add style to a certain row or column, you can use the id tag that you were using for the table. For example, replace your navigation column coding with:
<td rowspan="2" width="156" height="117" id="row_01">
and stick the following into your CSS style.
td#row_01 { background: URL(images/version6_08.gif) no-repeat; }
It looks much simpler, no? I’ve noticed that you specified a filter style to your iframe. Again, this is only supported in Internet Explorer so make sure that you list the browser requirement on the main page. Else if someone visits your site using Firefox or Netscape, they might see something completely different. It is good habit to specify the width and height of image sources and alt tags, but alt tags are only specific to IE. Try to use title tags, as that is compatible across all browsers. Make sure that you use quotations around your entire HTML. It is missing from your navigation table.
Even though iframe means internal frame and it is embedded into a HTML shell, it still requires to be written as a normal HTML file. That includes starting the page off as:
<HTML>
<head>
<title> </title>
</head>
<body>
These tags also need to be closed at the bottom of the file. What you have is incorrect, even though it is visibly correct. It is not even classified as HTML coding. Your external style sheet for this page is exactly the same as the one that is embedded into your index page. So why didn’t you also use a link pointer to style.css? Makes perfectly sense why you should. It’s exactly the same besides the font size, which can be easily dealt with if you assign a class specification to your navigation paragraph and have the font size specified in your style sheet (IE. <p class=”navigation”>). All modifications to this style sheet are already mentioned above.
Content
Your main is kept short, simple, and to the point. Besides the small font size, try to do add a different style to your section headers such as ‘Updates’ and page titles. Some ideas include a larger font size with underline, uppercase letters with wide letter spacing, a different font colour, etc. It helps distinguishes each section. As well, instead of “Welcome to my collective domain”, replace it with “Welcome to Marsha’s collective domain”. There is nothing on this page to indicate who is the webmistress so it is hard to define ‘my’. It is safer to the third person in this case to provide clarity and ambiguity.
Domain
It is interesting that the links are sorted in random order. Usually the links are sorted by pages that hold most relevance to the section (such as history, webmistress, past layouts, hosting) to the least important/frequent matters (site stuff such as contact, credits, links out) or alphabetical order. You did neither. If I am going to go to your Domain section to learn more about the site, having ‘contact’ and ‘credits’ as the first two links isn’t going to be my first choices to visit. Try arranging the links in a fashion that creates some sort of order.
Contact - What a useless page. Why would you waste an entire page just to list your email address? I find that very useless. If you’re going to have a contact page, try to have an online contact form or multiple ways to contact you: email, AOL, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, etc. You might as well transfer the single sentence to the directory of this section underneath the page title or at the bottom of the page.
Credits - Since you made a new layout, update this page immediately after you upload the new layout to include the most current. There are errors with the two Script links since they are both linked internally. Although it is not required, how have they sites contributed to your sites under this category? Did Dynamic Drive help provide Javascript? Both the links to ‘Novider Designs’ and ‘Night Frost’ do not work. I believe the sites are no longer online. All sentences underneath ‘Tools’ are incomplete and grammatically wrong. You are missing verbs. For example: “Notepad is used to construct and adjust HTML, PHP, CSSstylesheets and other coding scripts.” As much as these are scripts, the process of writing them to make a web page is called coding. By the way, you can’t ‘adjust’ HTML; the proper word is edit or manage.
Disclaimer - This page speaks for itself. To make the paragraph more grammatically correct and to give it more strength, keep the third person point of view by “No content may be duplicated from this site without Marsha’s permission.”
FAQ - Some of the questions here are not appropriate for the site. When you say ‘content’, what part do you mean? After all this is a domain collective so there isn’t much ‘content’ to take unless the want to claim ownership over your sites or use your history page as their own. How can a person assist in giving information when this page is solely about you and the sites you’ve made? Perhaps you forgot when one of your site opened and someone offers a date to you?
Links In - You’re one of the few that actually provides the URL for linking so bravo for that. However, I am disappointed to find only two options for buttons, one in which is not of standard size. The standard size for buttons is 88×31 pixels. The text on your first button is rather small and blends into the background colour. Since you made a new layout, why not make a button using that theme?
Affiliates - Regarding rule 3, if my site is a shrine to a Hollywood actress or a stock image site, I guess I can’t apply for affiliates? But if my site is about West-Indian culture, I can apply? This rule is somewhat confusing since your list of acceptance is rather small and not very specific. Rule 4 is grammatically incorrect. There is one too many verbs in different tenses. Within emails, it’s called email subject, and not ‘email title’. Should people also address the subject as “CIS Affiliation” in case you use the same email address for all your other sites?
Hosting - Perhaps you should put a strike through this link, and make a separate page for ‘Hostees’. Or better yet, have a ‘Hostees’ page but don’t bother with a ‘Hosting’ page since you’re not accepting anyway. For clarifications, this needs to be addressed in the FAQ section.
Links Out - You should state the reason for your fondness of West-Indian sites in the FAQ. The link to ‘Point Alive’ is broken. By the way, what is ‘Trini’? Perhaps you should also have links to other domain sites similar to your own.
Webmistress - All the basic information that is expected on an ‘about me’ page is here. Perhaps you should state your gender in the basic stats too, in case some people misunderstand. Although you clarified at the top that you’re indeed a woman, MAP is not a name that most people would attach to a female. Separate your link to ‘Tasuki Forever’ on a second line. The change in letter spacing on hover is making it very hard to click on the link (since it moves). What is “going to electronic”? Electronic is not a place; it is an object. “Artiste” is spelt wrong, and you’ll “name a few”. Since you separate the long descriptions of ‘likes and dislikes’ into paragraphs, perhaps you can do the same to ‘hobbies’?
History - When you mention how you want a site where your “fellow trinis can hang out and relax” in the first paragraph, I believe you’re talking about another site of yours. Scratch that. It becomes clear in the later paragraphs that these were past ideas of yours and it has evolved to what is now called ‘Cocoa in Sun’. The site doesn’t have a lot of history but the process of you deciding on make the site contains a lot of history.
Past Layouts - You’re missing the most recent layout. I like the previous layout of Guild Wars. It has pretty colours. With version 2, the last sentence should read “It was a horizontal layout, also yellow and a bit of orange in colour.” No need for the word ‘also’ since you haven’t mentioned anything about colour or yellow anywhere else in the paragraph. With version 1, “The layout is inconsists of DIV layers.” The layers is what creates the layout, therefore the layout can’t be in the layers (there is a difference between the navigation links appearing in a specific div layer).
Network
I don’t like the use of small text size and added effects (like box outlines) around the title on the banner. It makes it all the harder to read. The banner preview for ‘Swordsman-Spirit’ is too blurry. You condensed the actual preview of the layout too much vertically so now it just looks deformer. A preview of the top half of the layout is good enough, like you did for your other sites. It would be wiser to separate this page with ‘Active Sites’ and ‘Upcoming Sites’. You can use internal links for this. It’s easier to separate the section, especially if one of your fans is more interested in your upcoming projects.
Final Statement
Overall, I like your site. It’s rather small, but that’s expected for a domain collective. I’ve learned lots about you and the history of your domain. Besides the coding issues and grammar errors pointed out in the review, your site looks great.