Archived Review

First Impressions and Layout
Nice, soft colors with cute, happy-looking birds. That's a good start. Nature layouts are sadly underused. That's why I'm sad to see you're going to scrape that layout soon! Oh well, I guess it might be different if you've been staring at it everyday for a while.

Anyway, one thing that bothers me with the layout is that, as the background repeats, you clearly see the line where one image ends and the other one starts. It's not as bad as some things I've seen, but it's still a bit annoying as it gives a grid feeling to the layout.

I also think it would be good if you put some more space between each section in your sidebar and between each entry in the blog/updates log, as it looks a bit crushed together right now.

In your sidebar, "tingley" should be "tingly".

Content - About
You have a tendency to use capital letters on words that need none - like "animal", "dog" or "guinea pig".

"purely for it’s looks" = "purely for its looks"

You love Tim Burton! This is absolutely awesome!

An overall clean page, no endless babbling about things nobody cares about.

You also seem to have great taste in music. But, well, I disgress. This is a review, not a praise of your taste. ;)

Content - Portfolio
I've never been much of a fan of the script you use. I find it a bit annoying and never know where to click. If you visit the creator's page, you'll see even s/he has created a new version that doesn't rely on AJAX.

You have some pretty good works there. I like how we can easily see that you evolved from a simple, basically image-less style to a more personal style. Do you like yellow and beige or do they just happen to be used a lot in your layouts?

Content - Resources: Textures
More AJAX (see above). The textures might not be mind-blowing, but I still like them. They're different from the usual splatter-of-brushes you see around. Am I right to think some of these are based on photographs? These are my favorite ones.

Content - Resources: Brushes
I perfectly understand using DeviantArt for the very reasons you have stated, but one thing that would be great would be a full preview of the brushes. Or maybe not, since I haven't actually seen the final result, I can't tell if there is anything hard to see on the current previews...

Content - Resources: Web Icons
Cute! And you have fleur-de-lysées!

I don't think "favicon" needs a capital I. Perhaps you should also include a .zip file? I know you already have .rar, but up to very recently I had no idea how to decompress a rar file, and I might not be the only one who hasn't seen the light yet.

Content - Resources: Wordpress Templates
Under Theme 0002 - Orange, "you own" should be "your own". Under all the themes, "Colums" should be "Columns".

They look nice and clean. Perhaps a good thing would be to tell what resolution you were using when you took the screen capture, particularly for the one with a fixed width.

Also, once again, perhaps .zip files would be good?

Content - Articles: A quick guide to FTP
"There’s many" should be "There are many".

I really, really like the way you explained FTP using a back and front door analogy. It's so rare to see non-professionals successfully explain something like that! You should give some people tips on how to make sense.

Content - Articles: How to create a seamless background
One thing I really like when I'm reading tutorials involving images is to have the images right in front of me, as I read the tutorial. It helps me visualize what I'm going to do, see what I've done up to now, and the images sort of serve as a seperation between each step.

You should mention right at the beginning that this tutorial was written for Adobe Photoshop, so that people who use other programs don't spend an hour looking for Canvas Size.

Content - Reviews

I don’t do private reviews.

Does this only mean that you will put up all reviews on your site for everyone to see?

"I will write have" should only have either one of the verbs (write or have).

"an generally aesthetic look" = "a generally aesthetic look"

"Summery" = summary

"if its near impossible" = if it's near impossible

The reviews themselves seem to be of good quality. You manage not to come across as a complete bitch, while still giving some advice for improvement.

Content - Links
Broken links to: guitarangel (you forgot the extension), pootato (replaced by a search engine thing), Kaylee (mentions moving to LJ), Mia

Leave me five minutes to recover from the mind-blowingness of all those design sites you link to.

Contact
In previous pages, I have mentioned that the script you use for image previews could be updated to a non-Javascript version. This was not all that important, because of the following line of logic: if I'm looking at someone's portfolio, I'm probably not blind (!), which means I'm probably using a browser that supports Javascript, which means that, even if I have disabled Javascript, I can re-enable it to view content. With your contact form, however, it's another story. If I disable Javascript, I could think the page simply doesn't exist and is linked to "nothing" for that reason.

Coding
It looks clean overall. Why is your navigation inside <span> tags? If it's merely for styling reasons, you can easily rely on what you already have in the rest of your markup (i.e. a container div, a container <ul> and your actual <li> tags).

In your stylesheet, you are using relative font sizes, which is awesome, but then you proceed to use fixed values (pt) for line-height. This could potentially cause problems in some resolutions.

When you define the width of some elements, you do it twice, once with an underscore (e.g. width:215px;_width:220px;). Is it some sort of fix for IE?

Summary
Good, good. Your site looks clean and is clean. For lack of a better word...

Your spelling was good (for real ;)), you know your stuff and you are able to make sense when you speak. I think if you were trying your hand out at writing some more tutorials, you would be very good at it. Just try focusing on things you know and that haven't been done a million times before (two rules you already seem to abide to).

There were a couple of things I would change here and there in your layout but, as I said right at the start, you mention your intention of changing it anyway, so just keep them in mind when creating the next layout.

That said, I wish you luck and all that jazz with your website.

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