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Review for Aquilus
I love the layout (and I’ve said so before). The colours are very soft and comforting. The site organization can only be described by one word, pretty. I just can’t get over the prettiness of the layout. The blending is absolutely great. Did I mention that I love the layout? No wait, I am in love with the layout.
Information
Site: Aquilus
Type: Resource
Owner: Sakuya Kira
Reviewed By: Misao
Date Received: 06/14/06
Date Completed: 08/20/06
Preview
Presentation
Although you did a wonderful job on the blending, you could touch-up a little on the title. The last two letters of Aquilus are rather hard to see against the light background blend, for the fact that the letters are transparent. It might be due to the white pencil-thin line running through the last two letters. If it was shifted about 15 pixels to the right (so that it runs through the last stroke of the ’s’), the problem would be fixed. I like the links to your other websites directly below the site title. However, one of the three links is a completely separate website, thus making the link location seem inappropriate. Usually the links include, but not exclusively, on-site directories: image gallery, guestbook, forum, etc. Since your website is a graphic/resource site, the link to LJ Icons is appropriate. The link to Review is more suited in the Webmistress section under ‘Other Sites’. (However, speaking for the WPR, the link is great at the top with 100% visibility.)
The coordinates for your image map are slightly off. The bottom coordinates point directly to the bottom of the each character. Shifting the coordinates slightly lower allows maximum linking space around the word - meaning if I click at a space two pixels below the actual word, the link still works. The first two letters of Icons seem rather faint too.
I like your welcoming paragraph. It is very warm and friendly. I notice the strike through ‘dump’. The strike through means that the word is not needed. So why is it still there? It should be deleted. Have you considered showcasing more than one update on the main page? Your updates are rather frequent, and so having two or three on the main page allows fan to be aware of what you added in the last two weeks (should they miss an update), and make the page look less empty. And I love the way you designed the update box. It is very pretty.
In Internet Explorer, your navigation link’s hover style does not run across the entire column. The background colour is approximately 10+ pixels short of the right column border. This is how it currently looks like:
The reason being that you specified the width of your navigation links as 142 pixels, whereas your navigation table width is 158 pixels. I am not sure if this is intentional, but it looks odd. You might also notice the extra spacing above the background colour block. Although it looks fine the way it is, it would look better if the background colour covered the entire space between the white borderlines.
The navigation categories are very closely attached to the links. Try to give it the same amount of padding below the heading as it has above. Click here for a visual. The heading ‘Downloadables’ is the only one with double the amount of padding. This is due to your hidden counter. To prevent this, try putting it where it won’t affect the surrounding text, such as beneath the link to ‘Past Updates’.
Your footer image is rather large in height. There is so much empty space at the bottom. I was going to suggest using the image as your table background and position it at the bottom. However, you already have a background for that. You can consider moving the copyright text toward the center of the image, crop out the left side of the image, and set it as the background to your content column (where the updates are) like this. You then can code the column with the same background properties as the other (no-repeat, align=bottom, etc.).
Your source looks great. You know what you’re doing and it seems well organized and clean, just like your layout appearance. The only suggestion is to make use of your style sheet. Instead of specifying your table properties in your main HTML file, do it in your style sheet. For example:
<table width=”700″ border=”0″ cellpadding=”0″ cellspacing=”0″ style=”background: URL(images/bg.jpg); background-repeat: repeat-y; width: 700px;” align=”center”>
This is your first table property. Simplify it with
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" id="container">
Then in your style sheet, you would include:
table#container {
background: URL(images/bg.jpg) repeat-y;
width: 700px;
text-align: center;
margin: 0;
}
It saves space, and provides faster and efficient editing. The same procedure applies to the other tables. Just replace the (table)#(name) with whichever you like. For example: td#navigation or div#updates.
In your style sheet, there is no need for background-colour. Inserting a colour in the background attribute does the same thing. You can string common specifications together such as “font: 11px trebuchet MS, verdana, arial;” and “background: #COLOUR URL(FILENAME.jpg) repeat;”. The only one that does not apply is text alignment. Text decoration is specified twice in your normal hyperlink section. Besides this, it looks great.
Content
Aquilus
As I already said above, I love your Update organization. The textbox background is lovely. Your Terms of Use is very clear-cut. There isn’t room for wrong interpretation. There is a small error in the first bullet. “Other graphics don’t require a link back, but it would be appreciated if you did, any ways out of common courtesy.” In the third bullet, a brief instruction on how to get around the direct linking is helpful to people who don’t know how (and there are many who don’t). Something along the lines of “Please save the images to your computer, and then upload them to your server.” Bullet four is missing a word. “Don’t take anything on this site and place elsewhere to be distrubuted in any way, shape, or form.” Of which distributed is spelt wrong. Many people don’t understand why they can’t redistribute other people’s graphics, therefore a statement about the legality of stealing and plagiarism, and the designer’s hard work gives reason to your statement. The same applies to the last bullet.
I didn’t realize that you took less than a month to complete Aquilus since you’ve closed Frozen-Rain. I notice the same way you strike through the word ‘dump’ on this page as well. As I’ve said above, if you don’t need it, don’t have it. There is no use in striking out the word. Plus, your site is definitely not a dump. I believe Lycentia’s SM Graphics is inspirational to many other web designers. I was also inspired by her graphics. I don’t think you could have come up with a better name than Aquilus for the site. There are two small errors on the site, mainly the absence of comma punctuation. Firstly, “I felt that my old graphic site, which had been alive for years, had a lot of old memories that I couldn’t shake myself from.” Secondly, “while surfing the web one day, I found a website that had a name too close to my own similar to Nuwar, and it was back to square one.”
You explained yourself quite thorough on the FAQ page, and answered the most common questions. I didn’t use your Contact Form to confirm whether it works or not, but according to your HTML, it should be working fine. It is disappointing that you did not talk about web designing and why you do it on the Webmistress page. Usually, there is a snippet of the web designing history. It would be nice to allow your fans know a little more about you. Why is it that most people specify a birth date but never an age? (Not that I don’t know your age.) One small error on the page, “a yaoi/yuri freak fangirl.”
Downloadables
I love your Avatars. They are all so beautifully made. And they all certainly display a small touch of angst to them. I really like the Gravitation avatar that features Yuki. I know that many web designers will take an image and make a graphic out of it, without knowing who is in the image or which anime/manga series it came from. Yet, it is useful (not mandatory) if there is an alt tag to all the avatars with the character name (if you know it) and the series title. But what is Cirque Du Solei? I like your Textures. They are really useful to people like me, who can never figure out what to do with an avatar’s background.
Your layouts are beautifully made, just like your avatars. My personal favourite is Sonata. The way you blended the violin is absolutely beautiful. There is a slight error with this layout. The width of the navigation heading exceeds the width of the navigation background column. The bottom border runs about 5 pixels over the right side. There is also a problem with the navigation heading alignment for Antiquity. The header falls 2 pixels short of the right side, displaying a thin line of the green background. The blending for this layout is also excellent. I just simply love your layouts!
For the most part, the transparent PNGs look great. However, some of the images are blurry, whereas some of them require better extraction. The manga PNG of Ed (on page 1) from FMA is very blurry. I’m sure you just left it like the original, but sharpening the image a few times certainly would bring up the clarity quality of the PNG. The other FMA extraction (on page 1) of Ed and a robot requires some touch up. The hair-like thing on the robot’s helmet is done poorly. Pieces of the black outline is missing, the edges aren’t smooth, the ends are rough, and the robot’s left shoulder is missing pieces of the black outline. But overall speaking, you did a great job on the PNGs. My extracting skills still suck.
Wallpapers
I like your wallpapers. Rather than slapping on an image and a bunch of brush work, you do more. You actually give them a background texture or stock image, and stay away from too much brush work (or none at all). I really like the vector wallpaper. The moon and star look so cute! You might consider offering a resolution of 1280×960 for larger desktops and 1280×800 for laptops. Many people are now using larger resolutions, and 1024×768 looks distorted on my wide screen resolution.
Exits
Dividing the Credit links into sections and then further down into subsections is a great way of organization. Suspicious Acorns is a really old site, and I believe it is no longer online. I don’t believe you linked CardCaptor Studio. ^^ You probably want to allow some empty space between Aquilus buttons and the heading to your Admired links. The small paragraph about your top favourites is a great idea, but for Joyce, I don’t understand “Not to mention, her vectors pwn indefinately.” Indefinitely is also spelt wrong. All links besides Animekandi Designs and Joukai are working. The most recent contest that Aquilus hosted is a Layout Contest, but your link says Music Contest. Shouldn’t it be Music Layout Contest? Vector Skies Reviews is no longer online.
Partners
The links work perfectly fine. The affiliation page provides a detailed description about your affiliates and the owners. I really like that. It seems that you and your affiliates enjoy stalking each other. Your affiliation requirement is also straightforward. I’m glad you provided a link to your contact form along with an email address regarding affiliation request. There is one spelling error on this page. In Fake Wings’ description, the word believe in “I blieve I even conned her with yaoi…” is spelt wrong.
Final Statement
I like the site. It looks great! You don’t have many graphics at the moment (besides avatars) but that is okay. The graphics that you do have on the site are of your greatest quality, and that is what every graphic site needs to be about. Quality over quantity. Hopefully you’ll be able to add other graphics to your site. Overall, I love your site.