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Review for Torn-Wings
Wow. I can tell right now that I’m going to have a lot of trouble completing this review. Your site is incredibly… big. Way too big for a layout. It sidescrolls even in my resolution; imagine it in a 800×600 resolution… The colors you used are dull and not appealing in the least bit. And the image on the layout makes me go, “what the heck…” All in all, I don’t have a very good first impression.
Information
Site: Torn-Wings
Type: Resource
Owner: Katy
Reviewed By: Sanosuke
Date Received: 2/25/06
Date Completed: 7/4/06
Preview
Presentation
I have no idea what your header image is of. It’s blended *way* too far into the background, and quite unpleasant to look at. It’s too saturated, and nobody can tell what it’s of. Not to mention, the color you chose is… not too pleasant on the eyes. Play around with some tutorials to see where those take you. Because right now, your site is just not appealing at all.
Your layout is too big. You honestly don’t need that much space. A lot of people [more than you could actually imagine] use the screen resolution 800×600, so I suggest cutting any layout down to about 750 or less for width and 300 or less for height. The cursor you’ve used isn’t too appealing for the layout itself and I suggest changing that back to default as well. It’s kind of annoying to have this huge chunk of a thing follow me around every time my mouse moves.
I’ve noticed that your background ends in a white horror. You can completely delete the whiteness by adding background-color: #color; in the body entity of your CSS.
I suggest that you read this tutorial explaining CSS stylesheets. Especially the part entitled, Attaching Your Stylesheet. It’d be easier on your coding if you actually separate the stylesheet from the actual files; especially since I see your files are all HTML. [The benefits? You’d only have to edit one file to change every page.] If, however, you want to stay with the way your CSS is originally, you need to stick the <style type="text/css"> and </style> between the head of your document, not after them. And you also don’t want to repeat them too much. Combine all of the body entities into one. It’s easier just to combine everything into one big block than it is to have three separate ones. Again, have a read at that tutorial I gave you and revise your CSS to work with that. Also take a look at the other tutorials on CSS as well.
Now that we’ve got that sorted out, your coding is out of order. Firstly, add in a <htm> tag to your pages. Add <HTML> to the very beginning of each page [the first line] and </html> to the very end [the last line.] Next, your coding should be ordered like so:
<HTML>
<head>
<title> </title>
<style></style>
<body>
</body>
</html>
And of course, you add in the specific things you need in between. But that’s what a basic page should look like.
For your head, you have <center> twice, instead of <center> and </center>. If you don’t fix that, the rest of your page looks funky in IE. Also, I’m surprised you even need a “center” code for it. Chances are, you’ve just added them in there and they’re actually useless. Try doing without and see what happens.
You also don’t need the id=layer1 because it doesn’t do anything for you other than take up space and you’re missing the </center> for all your headers.
I strongly suggest you read this tutorial, because your coding has a lot of errors as far as CSS, classes, id’s, etc. goes. You also need to be careful about closing tags. None of your <center> tags close. At least, not on the main page.
Overall, your coding is a mess and your layout is not pretty at all. Cut down the layout size. Try playing around with online tutorials to get the image to look nicer. Desaturate your image more. And read the above tutorial on CSS. And it would also be wise to read some tutorials on HTML.
Content
You have no “Home” link. At least, there are none that is visible and easily accessible. Also, adding all those exchanges onto your navigation only slows down the loading time of the site. [In fact, I’m not even sure if my browser ever stops trying to load your site…] Instead of putting them on the navigation, make a new page and stick them there instead. You’d be surprised at how fast your layout loads.
Site
My Awards - I’m confused, why can’t you display anime? Don’t put the “Kylosa is currently down” notice next to the introduction; put it next to the site that’s down. Also, instead of so many line breaks, try:
-introduction-<p>
award1<p>
award2
and so forth. Instead of three line-breaks, replace them with one paragraph break. It saves time, energy, and it looks better.
Bumble - I have no idea what this has to do with your site at all. Either way, please stop using the - like it’s the greatest thing to repeat over and over again. Most of the places you put a “-” you could easily put a comma instead. Actually, now that I’ve taken a closer look at your navigation, this page should be moved down to the “Bumble” section of your navigation instead.
Bumble is a happy bee[. H]e goes to church on Sundays[. I]f you’ve been to my site you’ve probably seen Bumble[,] the Happy [B]ee. [Many] people have asked me where he came from[,] and I’m sick of explaining it to everyone. So here is the history of Bumble[.]
You get the point? Another thing you really like typing are periods. It’s quite annoying to see so many ellipses everywhere. The most “periods” you should ever have in a row should be three. Any more and it’s just completely useless. Also, the term “ellipses” means:
Omission or suppression of parts of words or sentences
So unless you’re omitting something or supressing something, don’t use them.
Your description of Bob makes my head spin. Or maybe that’s just because I had very little sleep last night… first you start with, “Bob is not mine” then you go on to ramble for a few lines, and suddenly he’s yours.
but the fact that Bob is a spider is because Jem told me to put Bob in.
Um, what? Bob is a spider because Jem told you to put him in? I’ve changed your entire paragraph to:
Bob the spider was not my idea to begin with. My friend Jem created him and told me to put him in. However, my version of Bob is different from Shell’s spider.
Or something like that. Really, your grammar on this entire page confuses me, but it’s not my job to go through and retype your entire site for you. Just remember, don’t overuse dashes and periods. You mispelled “even” in the second paragraph and “caterpillar” in the last paragraph.
Credits - Links should open in a new window; so add target="_blank" to all your link tags. It’s nice that you have a little description of each link. For the description for Anime Cosmos Reviews, “they offer”, not “these offer”.
Link Exchange - Your page is incredibly crowded. Bold the “Rules” and “Current Link Exchange” texts and then order your page so that it looks something like this:
Rules
- Rule 1
- Rule 2
- etc.
You get the idea.
My Reviews - You’ve named this page “my reviews” on the navigation but it’s named “reviews I’ve recieved” on the actual page. Make up your mind about which one you’d like to use. This entire page is incredibly disorganized [then again, what on your site so far isn’t?] What I suggest is making a list of all the reviews, and then linking to them so that each review is on a different page. It might also help if you actually commented on the reviews instead of just copying-and-pasting them. Because, what’s the use of copying-and-pasting these reviews if you could just link to them?
Webmistress - Again, the navigation name and the actual page name are not the same. Choose one name and stick to it. You spelled “moan” wrong and you had two i’s in “in”. All those abbriviations don’t really help either. Maybe the people who live around you know what you’re talking about, but I’ll bet you 90% of your visitors have no idea what “GCSE” is. Again, you have way too many ellipses where they shouldn’t be.
Graphics
It would be nice to start off this section with a short terms of use so people know what they can download, what they can’t, how to download, and all the legistics.
Also, while it would be nice to offer people the chance to directly link images off of your site, you are - in the end - paying for all those people and you’ll end up running out of bandwidth sooner or later. So it would be better if you told people to save everything onto their own server and uploaded and then used, instead of giving them copiable coding that directly links every image to your site.
Avatars - … I’m not sure where to start. I’m aware that ‘art’ is all in the eyes of the beholder, so I’m not going to comment on your abstract avatars. I do have a fight to pick with your avatars with words. In what world, my dear, does dark purple look good against dark red?
First thing’s first, text is meant to be read. At least, if you have text on anything, it should be readable. Unless if it’s decoration text, but these definately aren’t decoration art. Please tell me which of your icons can actually be read clearly. Your text is either distorted or a really horrible color. Or both. You also have a horrible choice in text, but then again, so do I, so we’ll just leave that bit unmentioned. The blinking is not only annoying, but can you choose a better color for them to change to? A perfectly nice, clear, white is turned into some mushy purple crap.
I also must say that, as a designer, I am horrified at the fact that you take a background color, add text, and call it an avatar. Avatars are designs, even if they’re small. Please tell me what you designed by sticking black text against white.
Backgrounds - Nice. Only one problem, they’re not usable at all. Have you actually tried using these backgrounds for your own site? They’d repeat and no matter what colored text you used, it wouldn’t be the least bit readable. And the whole point of a website is to be read.
You also have a problem with your coding. If you’re going to offer somebody something, offer it correctly. You can’t have a link tag after the body. In fact, other than head, title, and HTML; nothing else should be before the body. So instead of what you currently have, do the body tag first and then put a link to your site after it.
Banners - I actually like a few of these. The lime-green one, for example, looks nice. I would, however, advise you to center these banners and put more space between them. [So, instead of using , use ]
Blinkies - the excessive blinking on some of these gives me a headache. Some of the font color clashes with the background color, and some fonts are so squished in they can’t be read. But, some of them are quite nice. The ones that aren’t spazzing out or weirdly colored. Your first one and your third one are nice.
Blogs - I have no idea what these are, but they don’t seem practical to me. So the font changes with the stylesheet color? But what if my stylesheet’s font color is bright, neon green? I’m pretty sure that no matter how nice your blog is, it won’t fit with the color I want. You should code these specifically and add your own stylesheet on if you’re going to offer them. Usually, only a few colors will work with each “blog” that you have, and nothing else will look nice at all. Giving a default color would be nice.
Dividers - Your first one and your last two make me want to cry. Everything else looks fine. For the coding you give people though, dividers should usually be centered. They look better than way, so add and to the begining and end of each code.
Dolls - Oh god, the text. The text color against the background color… you need to work on your color-coordination. Also, stay away from anything extremely bright [neon purple, for example…]
Icons - They look nice. Just one thing: putting “pixel icons” on the navigation instead of just “icons” would be better and visitors would actually understand what you meant.
Pixel Text - Everything on this page is useless. None of it can be read. The text is too squished together.
Downloads
PSP Brushes - Um… the previews look sickeningly… bad. I advise a simple white background and black brushes, instead of this black-and-red stuff. Because, no matter how ‘cool’ black and red look together, they don’t work.
Templates - Don’t bother zipping them. Allow the visitor to choose from all of them. Display all and just let the visitor select-and-save which ones they want [similar to how Hiro did it here] And uh, you also have two “button set 1″s
Layouts
Don’t link any pages that aren’t up yet. It’s frustrating to click something and get a page that says it’s not up yet.
Interactivity
I don’t think interactivity is a word… rename that section to “interactive” and it’d make more sense.
Button Exchange Rules - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 3, 6? Instead of doing it that way, here is a tutorial on how to make simple lists. Rule number two makes no sense whatsoever [”bad” site? No, I’m sorry, I really don’t know what you mean by that.] Rule 5 seems to be cut off?
Rest of the section - It’d be nice if these links opened in a new window [target=”_blank”] because it’s annoying to have to press “back” all the time. Not to mention, if someone were to join, they’d have to press back a few times.
Bumble
Um, again, new window would be nice.
Site/Rotations
Didn’t you already have a ’site’ section before? Either way, please move these to a separate page and not on your navigation bar. Since they are linked to other sites, you have no control over whether or not the images load. It’s not only unattractive for you to be displaying blank images [or those large, “this image no longer exists” notices that hosts put up] it’ll also take a long time to load.
Final Statement
My first impression was somewhere along the lines of, “oh great…” but now that I’ve taken a look at some of your graphics, and there are some that really aren’t bad. However, I highly advise you to read HTML and CSS tutorials because your coding is nowhere near good enough. I also advise that you read some PSP tutorials [since I think that’s the program you use?] because while some of your graphics are nice, your layouts are not. Also, try keeping layouts smaller… the width shouldn’t go past 800px at most.