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Review for The Falling Snow
This is the first time I’ve ever seen a layout using food before. Especially something like pizza. Its unique, I’ll give you that. But I also get this blank feeling when I look at your layout. There isn’t much to it, other than a picture of a pizza, some fancy textures, and some text. And, maybe its the college cafeteria getting to me, but I don’t quite find the pizza in your header all that appetizing. Overall, it is a very unique idea, but the layout seems bland and lacks substance.
Information
Site: The Falling Snow
Type: Graphics/Resource
Owner: Sandra
Reviewed By: Sanosuke
Date Received: 12/7/06
Date Completed: 11/7/07
Preview
Presentation
As previously mentioned, the layout feels very bland. There’s a header, there’s text… and that’s it. Very anticlimactic. It almost looks as if you took a picture of a pizza, added some textures to it, and then plastered it onto a page. After running your background color and font color through Juicy Studio’s Color Contrast Analyzer, I got the following:
The difference in brightness between the two colours is sufficient. The threshold is 125, and the result of the foreground and background colours is 143.
The difference in colour between the two colours is not sufficient. The threshold is 500, and the result of the foreground and background colours is 412. Whilst the colour difference doesn’t comply with the W3C specified range, it does comply with the range used by Hewlett Packard. Hewlett Packard recommends a colour difference limit of 400.
Running your link color through the analyzer gets worse results:
The difference in brightness between the two colours is not sufficient. The threshold is 125, and the result of the foreground and background colours is 91.
The difference in colour between the two colours is not sufficient. The threshold is 500, and the result of the foreground and background colours is 271.
I don’t think there’s enough of a contrast between the text color and the link colors too. That just further turns the page into one bland blob.
I’m not sure why there are so many slices of such a small header. Slicing an image actually makes loading slower, so since [especially] your header is so slow, slicing it isn’t needed.
Coding looks fine. Its validated and also look very clean. One thing to watch out for is that when using character entities [you used one in your title: »], add a “;” after them [to make »].
Content
Site >> Home
You’ve forgotten to link this to anything, so when people click this link on the navigation, it just refreshes the page. Linking to index.php [or.html or whatever your extension is] would bring it back to the actual home page.
- “You’ve reached a graphics site providing quality graphics for the webmasters’ need and a site where Sandra showcases her designing skills. ” –> “You’ve reached a graphics site that aims to provide quality graphics for the webmasters’ needs and showcases the designing skills of Sandra” would sound a little better and more grammatically correct.
Site >> About
This page has been interesting to read. I’d suggest, however, using <p> to separate between ideas/paragraphs instead of <br>. Also, your main title at the very top of the page should be shortened to “About” like the link on the navigation suggests, since this page isn’t only about the site but also about you as well.
- “And since then, I made this site.” –> “And that was where this site began.”
- miscellanous –> miscellaneous
- I’m not quite sure what the (?) is supposed to represent.
- “The Falling Snow has been quite known to the world (yet unpopular, but I don’t care).” –> That makes no sense. You can’t be known yet unpopular at the same time.
Site >> Awards & Reviews
I don’t quite see a point in your “reviews” page. Most of the time, reviews are listed on a site with commentary from the owner of the site. It seems quite pointless just to copy-and-paste a bunch of reviews. You could have a list of sites that have reviewed you, or you could copy-and-paste the reviews onto your own site and comment on them.
Graphics >> Avatars
45 icons seems excessive. For older computers with slower internet connections, those little icons could take quite a while to load. Maybe limit the number of icons per page to something a bit less. Also, specifying the width and height of each icon would make it load faster on some of the slower internet connections.
Graphics >> Colorizations
Because you don’t specify which way to align the text for your tables, some of the longer names are shifted a bit so that the page looks a little awkward:
I suggest adding align="left" to the text cell and align="right" to the preview image cell.
For the most part, the colorizations look interesting. Though, I fail to see what use they could possibly be to others [I suppose others can use them for graphics?]. It would also be nice if you credited the original website you got the images from.
Graphics >> Layouts
Your layouts, for the most part, look nice; though, some look a lot nicer than others.
- Fly Away doesn’t work in Firefox but looks fine in IE7.
- Drive Carefully! has some issues in Firefox that need to be worked out. If it weren’t for those errors, I’d say that layout is my favorite one.
- The entire content area of Not to Hear a Word is centered. I’m not sure if this is intended or not, but it’d look a lot better if the text was aligned to the left.
- To Throw Myself Away and Inspiration are centered in Firefox but aligned to the left in IE7. Personally, I think they both look a lot better centered, so you might want to check into how to make them centered in both.
- There could be more padding and space between the content area and the navigation in The Music in Me.
- Rock Sensation and In Motion could easily be centered and would look a lot better - in my opinion - when centered, seeing as it’s human instinct to focus on the center of something.
- Blub Blub is… interesting. It might actually look a bit better and more organized if it were centered instead of aligned to the left. Also, the background color doesn’t quite work with the overall layout design, seeing as there’s no other sign of green in the design.
Overall… I feel as though while the designs of most of your layouts look pretty, the coding was slack. You need to pay more attention to the coding of layouts and whether or not they’re compatible in all browsers [I only checked in Firefox and IE7; it’d be smart to check in other browsers as well, such as Opera and IE6.]
Others >> Hall of Fame
What was the contest about exactly, and do we get to see the winning entries?
Final Statement
Overall, there wasn’t anything about your site that really stood out. Your premade layouts look like they had more effort put into them design wise than your main layout did. But at the same time, your main layout’s coding is much cleaner. Watch out for color contrasts, and don’t be afraid to spiff up your pages a little.