Staff

Past Staff

Review for Iridescent Moon Designs

Score, new layout. Pale colors, beautifully designed. I’ve visited before, I enjoyed my visits before, and I come back regularly. I was actually jumping for the chance to review this site [well, aren’t you lucky?] I have a feeling that a closer look at this site would make me like it more. My only problem so far? Everything seems a little too pale and too bright. But that just might be the school laptop being difficult.

Information

Site: Iridescent Moon Designs
Type: Resource
Owner: Ichigo & Sora
Reviewed By: Sanosuke
Date Received: 10/29/06
Date Completed: 12/5/06
Preview

Presentation

Aesthetics

Alright, so yay. I like your layout; it’s simple, clean, and pleasing to the eye. But at the same time, after staring for a while at it, my eye starts to hurt and I find myself squinting.

Problem number one: readability. Your font size could go a size bigger if you wanted to; but that might just be my poor, blind eyes… your hover color though, for your links, is a bright blue against a white background. Definitely can’t read it; and I don’t think I want to even try. But just because I’m hovering over the link doesn’t mean I don’t want to read it.
Problem number two: the title. If a newcomer had two seconds to look at your site before they were asked a series of questions about it, they’d probably think that your site’s name was “A Little High”. And why not? That is written in big, bold letters across your layout. Meanwhile, I don’t see a thing that says “Iridescent Moon Designs” [oh wait, I think I see it… maybe.] Point being? Site title should be more prominent than layout title.

Coding

Your coding looks clean overall, there were just a few small errors.

Comments, generally, are written as such:  Anything bigger [such as ] is technically incorrect.

Also, instead of <body leftmargin=0 topmargin=0>, you can simply have <body> and add in your stylesheet:

body { margin: 0; }
I ran your stylesheet through a validator [because I’m lazy like that] and came up with two errors with the below portion: (1) I’m not sure if the !important is necessary, but the validator seems to be rejecting it. (2) your margin needs a px after the 10 so it looks like margin: -270px 0 10px 86px.

div#content {width: 388px; float: left; !important; margin: -270px 0 10 86px;}

Content

Main

“Clear”

What exactly am I “clear”ing? Perhaps the heading “Updates” or “Home” would work more effectively.

“You, somehow, has just found another (aaah, another one? Well, hey, what do you expect?) growing graphics site - Iridescent Moon - on the World Wide Web, owned by Ichigo and Sora.” –> I’ve just found another graphics site owned by Ichigo and Sora? Wow, you guys must be super-designers or something if you can keep up with more than one. The sidenote also distracts from the main point of the sentence. Try: “You have just found yet another growing graphics site - Ichigo and Sora’s Iridescent Moon Designs - on the World Wide Web (aaah, another one? Well, hey, what do you expect?)” Note that since your site is “Iridescent Moon Designs“, you should be consistent.
“Not much to see, but we offer quality graphics for you all to download. Before you use our materials, please read the Terms of Use first.” –> The first sentence kind of goes against itself. You offer “quality” graphics, but there’s not much to see? “We offer quality graphics for you to download and use. Please read the Terms of Use before you download our materials.

About

It would be nice if you went further with the name. Why did you choose it, and how do you think it fits the nature/philosophy of your site?

There’s no need to link to Saikoubi.org if it’s down. You can just mention it without the link.

You refer to yourselves as “Ichigo and Sora” and then later in the same paragraph as “we”. It’d be more consitant if you just used “we” throughout. We know who you are by now, and if we didn’t, we’d try to find out through the “Webmistresses” page.

‘Iridescent Moon’, a name that Ichigo and Sora found at Soundless Words.net. Based by one of Leiko’s tutorial, we found these 2 words and combined it together. Iridescent Moon itself means ‘A Moon that varying in different colors when seen in different lights/angles.’ –> “Ichigo and Sora discovered ‘Iridescent Moon’ through Soundless Words.net. Based on one of Leiko’s tutorials, we found these 2 words and combined them together. ‘Iridescent Moon’ means ‘a moon that varies in different colors when seen in different lights/angles.’”
“We know (and of course you do know too) that Iridescent Moon is just yet another small graphics site on the World Wide Web. So why is it still here?” –> “We know - and you probably do too - that Iridescent Moon is just another small graphics site on the World Wide Web. So why is it still here?”
“The reason is as simple as it is; we think webdesigning is a fun and a cool thing to do. Maybe there are some other reasons, such as gaining popularity, to help people, etc. (well, that’s what graphics sites are, right?). But the main reason is that we like - no, we love to webdesign and we’d love to share what we made to other people (umm, that means you).” –> “The reason is simple: we think webdesigning is a fun and a cool thing to do. Maybe there are other reasons, such as gaining popularity, helping people, etc. (well, that’s what graphics sites are for, right?) but the main reason is that we like - no, we love - webdesign and we love to share what we’ve made with other people (that means you.)”
“[…] Iridescent Moon as their hostee. Now that Samantha has closed down Saikoubi.org, we became one of June’s hostees and until now, Iridescent Moon is as it is today.” –> “[…] Iridescent Moon. Now that Samantha has closed Saikoubi, we’ve become one of June’s hostees.”

Webmistresses

You’ve linked Photoshop, but you didn’t link Notepad.

>_> I’m a friend whore… *hides* [But I love pink, so don’t kill me?]

*Ahem* But no, seriously. I like how this is all laid out, and how you go into detail about yourselves. I would like to note though, that [again] we know who you are, so the third-person mixed with first-person speech can go, because it makes the entire profile hard to read. Similar to how Sanosuke is not addressing her self in both first and third person when she writes this review.

“The other webmistress of Iridescent Moon. I usually take care of the ‘coding’ things.” –> “[I’m t]he other webmistress of Iridescent Moon” can be assumed, you don’t really need to say that. “I usually take care of the coding-related aspects.” Would be a better way to word the second sentence.
“Though I don’t think I have a ’stable’ style yet, I did many blendings. I also learnt how to vector, but I think I like blending better” –> “Though I don’t think I have a stable style yet, I do a lot of blending; I’ve also learned how to vector, but I like blending better.”
“[…] learned how to make a simple divider layout on Celestial Star.” –> “[…] learned how to make a simple divider layout from Celestial Star.” You [both of you? One of you?] do this a lot; you learn from a site/tutorial, not on.
“Finally, me and Ichigo agreed to make a graphics site (named Iridescent Moon).” –> “Finally, Ichigo and I agreed to create this graphic site.”

Contact

It’d be easier if you typed out the email [for example, instead of “email us here“, we write “email us at fhreviews[at]gmail[dot]com.] It’s for people like me who are using public computers and want to email someone but don’t actually want to click on a “here” and have the default Outlook Express open. [If you really want to, you can do both: “email us at fhreviews[at]gmail[dot]com“.]

Credits

Actually stating what each of the sites on your “current layout” credits list did would be nice. If I wanted to find the image that you used on your site, do I got to Minitokyo.net or Hybrid Genesis.net?

Your “Brushes, Textures, Patterns, etc.” header falls down onto the next line. If you shortened it to “Brushes, Textures, & Patterns” it might actually work better. I doubt you really need the “etc.”

Linkage

For the link that says “click here for banner”, you might want to specify what size the banner is. Like, if it’s 300 x 50, the link should read “click here for 300 x 50 banner”.

I advise that you type out the entire site’s name when linking it. For example, your site is “Iridescent Moon Designs“, and Mel’s site is “Elysium Designs“. You’ve got the room, and it’d be more respectful to the sites to spell out their full name. [Akutenshi Designs, Ambrosial Designs, BlueNeptune Graphics - yes, that’s one word - Element: Rain Designs, and Elysium Designs. I haven’t checked through your Link Exchange list though.]

You spelled “Bouncing Kitten” wrong on your Link Exchange list.
“following” is spelled wrong under your Links Out list.
Akutenshi is Invisus Designs now.

Past Layouts

Like with the Credits page, you should specify what each site provided for the credits for each layout. You can do so with the title="" tag. So if Minitokyo is where you got the image from, title="Image"

I’ve noticed that the first sentence for most of your descriptions are fragments. Fragments like “Featured Naruto, Sakura, and Sasuke from the anime Naruto.” don’t make sense and should be “This layout featured…” You should always make them complete sentences and not assume the visitor knows what you’re talking about. [Plus, it sounds weird if you’re just reading “featured Naruto” opposed to “this layout featured Naruto”.]

[Sidenote: be careful with your tenses…]

“It sounds crazy, but Ichigo made this for just about a half hour.” –> “It sounds crazy, but Ichigo worked on this for just about half an hour.”
“Had been in our site for about 5 months. Longest record. It featured Sora from the game Kingdom Hearts, blended all the way with many colors.” –> “This layout was on our site for about 5 months; the longest record. It featured Sore from the game Kingdom Hearts and was completely blended with many colors.”
“It was 2 months old, and we think that we’ll never get bored of it.” –> “It lasted for 2 months, but we dont’ think we’ll ever get bored of it.”
“But of course, Iridescent Moon needs a new look.” –> “But of course, Iridescent Moon needed a new look.”
“It featured Panelo from Final Fantasy XI, taken from Minitokyo.net. Ichigo said it was cool but Sora got bored and now Sora hate it. Sora thought that the image’s too small and she didn’t like how the CSS goes.” –> You odn’t need to link Minitokyo if you use the title="" tag I mentioned before. “Ichigo thought it was cool, but Sora got bored and now Sora hates it. Sora thought that the image was too small and she didn’t like how the CSS was built.”
“Made by Ichigo, this layout featured Sakura and Syaoran from Tsubasa RESERVoir CHRoNICLE.” –> You need the “this layout” part to make it a complete sentence, but you don’t need “Made by Ichigo”
“This layout was made by Sora. Personally me, Ichigo really likes this layout since I love the soft colors that blend so well and in my opinion people get bored very easily with anime layout and with floral layout like this one people can look at it and.. well, not get bored. Tee-hee, it’s a thing of beauty!” –> This is the only description that uses “I” and not “Sora” and “Ichigo”. It doesn’t flow with the page.

Terms of Use

Your navigation calls this page “Terms of Usage” and your actual page header says “Terms of Use”. Consider changing to one or the other for both and stay consistant.

“Like any other graphics sites, we have rules that you have to follow when you are using the graphics on our site.” –> “Like any other graphic site, we have rules that you have to follow if you are goign to use the graphics on our site.”
“A link back to us (and the resources) is a must. A text-link is fine, as long as it is visible. This includes avatars if you’re using it on a forum. ” –> Do I have to link the resources you used if I’m using an avatar? As far as I know, there aren’t any resources for the avatars page. Maybe “(and any resources specifically listed)” might be better wording.
“No direct-linking. We got hosted by someone else. She has been such a good host to us, please appreciate her.” –> What is this direct-linking you speak of? Refer to my terms of use for my own graphic site: “What is direct-linking? Its taking the URL of the graphic and displaying it on your site. No way. Upload them onto your own servers.” While I’m not saying use mine or else, it would be nice if you explained direct-linking instead of just saying that people need to be considerate to your host.
“Do not edit, modified, or alter any graphics (editing the image, removing the watermarks, etc.).” –> (why format this differently?) “Do not edit, modify, or alter any graphics. This includes editing the images, removing the watermarks, etc.” And while I’m on that topic, what does “etc.” include? It might be nice just to be straight and list all the ones you could possibly think of. “etc.” is a bit vague.

Layouts

I’m going to assuming that your “latest additions” page houses all of your layouts. Though, using “latest additions” would usually make visitors think that it’s the lastest 5 or latest 10, not all of them. But because I like browsing layouts when they’re all on one page [because, what if you don’t know if you want tables or div?] I suggest changing the page name to “view all” or “all layouts” or something along those lines. And in the introduction for the page mention that it’s from newest to oldest.

Your navigation is confusing. How would someone know how many layouts there are, and what if someone wanted to go to a specific page? [Like how I left off on this review half way through the layouts and now have to click five times to find my way back to where I was.] Not to mention, the links are next to each other and makes it hard to see what exactly you’re clicking. Add a few more spaces between the two.

I noticed that you have “Credits goes to” on most of your recent layouts [not sure if it’s on them all, but I have a feeling they might be.] It should be “Credits go to”. And again, that title="" tag would come in handy now. What did the credited sites help provide?
The correct way to do unordered lists is explained here. Note how there’s an opening tag and an end one. [<li>Bullet</li>] Right now you only have the opening. [<li>Bullet]
A lot of your layouts have complicated coding. Usually, someone who is using a premade does not know how to code very well, and having so many tables, styles, etc. on one file can become confusing [heck, I’d be confused trying to add my own content to some of these.] Since you now know how to code in complete DIV, I suggest going back to some of the older layouts and recoding them so they’re easier to manipulate.
Your “How To Use [this layout]” instructions are vague. You should add more comments in your coding to help the people who don’t know what to do after opening the index.html; what/where would they have to edit?
Your watermark is huge in most cases. Generally, having a watermark means having your site name appear on the layout, but not dominating. In fact, watermarks should not only in the background, but blended in a bit.
You have “How to use [this layout]” appear twice for Beloved Daughter, Vanille.
Devotee has a side-scrolling problem in Firefox.
Oh-mah-Gosh… Voices has got to be the most blinding layout I’ve ever come across… Especially the white link hovers. Slumber Deep, Orenji Kioku, Goodnight, and Chaotic also have insanely bright white hovers.
The background on the content-area/navigation of Delusional is too bold for any text above it to be read properly. Fade it back a bit, or choose lighter, more complimenting colors. Or, just make the text darker…
I like Unwavering Soul but as a general rule, anything that scrolls more than once is just bulky and big; and yours scrolls twice: [and the text could be a bit darker…] The same concept applies to Empyreal Skies and Chaotic.
I like Sentimental a lot, but it has the smallest font ever and if I were to come across a site using that premade, I’d close the window immediately. Because, really, who can read that without leaning two inches in front of the screen?
The large gap to the left of Love Sensation could be eliminated. Picture a child with a huge head and a body like a stick; that’s how awkward that layout looks right now.
Essence of Color is huge. My personal rule is that if a visitor with the 800 x 600 resolution has to scroll at all to read any content, it’s too big. And your header is definately way too long. Same concept goes along with a lot of your other, older DIV/Tables layouts.
My personal favorite layouts are Deep Sigh by Sora and Unwavering Soul by Ichigo.

I’ll generalize the rest of your layouts: I’d say, starting around this page [see what I mean about numbering pages?] or Slumber Deep, Ichigo’s layouts start going down-hill. They become increasingly large, they’ve all got the same, blinding white [or otherwise bright] link hover, and small text. [Then again, starting from that point and moving backwards, there isn’t as much from Sora.] I’m not trying to point one out over the other, but your later designs don’t reflect how great you are now.

I’d suggest going back and pruning out some of the ones you personally feel aren’t up to par and recoding the older ones into a more organized format.

100 x 100 Avatars

Again with the navigation. I had to press “next” about ten times to get to the end of your avatars.

You have an odd gap in your first line:

You’ll need to specify more than just the image. You can do this two ways:

One: specify in the file itself. Instead of just img src="" mce_src="", add also img src="" mce_src="" width="100px" height="100px" vspace="1" hspace="1" border="0" obviously, you know what width and height are for; adding those helps the page load quicker on slower computers. vspace and hspace are padding; it’ll tell the page to space between each icon: hspace is the horizontal padding and vspace is the vertical padding.

Two: Or, you can do everything in the stylesheet and on the actual page, put something like: img src="" mce_src="" class="avatar" The following is an example of the basics you should have:

.avatar { margin: #px; padding: #px; width: 100px; height: 100px; border: #px; }

Replace the # signs with whatever you want, but those should be there to help the page load faster and look cleaner.

Wallpapers

Your wallpapers have a navigation error. By the time it reaches the last page, it goes on for another page before stopping. I don’t know how you set up your paging, so I can’t be of much help.

Affiliates

The buttons for Anime Rain, Autistic Fidelity, and novideriDesigns are broken.

“They’re also webmistresses, just like Sora and Ichigo!” –> We’re all webmistresses. Perhaps “co-owners” is more what you meant? Or something closer to that.

Final Statement

I somehow feel like I rewrote about 80% of your site for you. Go over some of the more text-oriented pages and check up on your grammar; it’s not bad, but at the same time, it doesn’t give off a very professional air.

I came into this review expecting to be impressed, and I can honestly say that I’m finishing this review extremely impressed, if not more attached to your site than I was.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 12:10 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 “Iridescent Moon Designs”

Sora Says:
December 6th, 2006 at 5:42 am
Thanks so much for the review! It’s exactly what we need, especially because I know that there are going to be so many grammar mistakes.

About the pagination thing, I’m currently working on it. I was going to learn about MySQL but I just didn’t have the time. So I’ll be databasing my layouts and other pages sometime in the future (I hope)

I’ll re-read this review again. Again, thanks!

Ichigo Chan Says:
December 6th, 2006 at 6:40 am
I thank you for taking the time to review our site
We will most definitely correct the mistakes you pointed out.
And I guess we should act more professional even though we’re not exactly professional designers yet.
Once again, thank you! Hopefully we’ll come back again to ask for another review maybe?