Archived Review
- Reviewer: Susanna
- Review date: 9th Dec 2008
Hello! I'm Susanna and I've decided to review you today, lucky you >:)!
Haha, I'm only joking, I'm sure you'll come out alive after you read it. Well, let's get cracking, shall we?
Aesthetics
Okay, first of all. CELEBRITY IMAGES is being screamed at me! Your layout is lovely and all, but really, why use copyright photos? Why? WHY? I'm sorry. Anyway, I actually really like your layout despite the celebrity but I think adding in the extra film reel effect thing on the side was too much - I think you've tried to get something to put your sidebar under, but it hasn't quite pulled it off. It makes your sharp and clear layout look the teeniest bit tacky on one side. However, I love the font you've used for the name (mind me asking the name?) and I could suggest perhaps moving it so that the site name was still on top of the layout, but the "Gazing into Reality" part was above the sidebar - get me? Also, right now your sidebar sort of overlaps a teeny bit and that is slightly annoying to my OCD tendencies :).
I really love the color you've chosen for the background, it's subtle but really nice.
The content looks okay, but I think your text size could do with being bigger. I'd also suggest switching the colors and styles of your sidebar headers for your blog headers, because right now I feel the ones in the sidebar are much more attracting to the eye than the blog one. Oh - hold on, is the text in the sidebar bigger? Wait a minute... my eyes must be playing tricks on me 'cause that just doesn't make sense at all unless you don't want people to read your blog... You should switch these around too or make them both the bigger size - it's so much clearer!
Okay, now onto your actual content. On the sidebar, first of all, You don't have an awful lot of welcoming words in your "welcome" section, really, do you? I think you should take out the fact that it used to be retrowflaw.net, because really most people wont care much - not so much as to read it in the welcome section, anyway. Also, you should have a full stop at the end of "reply". I don't think you should ever have a "best viewed" section because any visitor who wants to view your site should be able to, no?
Although technically your "Anothermelody" section is fine, I think it would be nicer if you wrote it in a paragraph, like;
A big thank you to Stace for hosting the re-opened (30th May) Retroflaw. You are currently viewing version 8 which has been up since the 29th of October.
* online
I think this would look nicer because right now, it is sort of bare to be honest. If not, I think at least changing the size of the emboldened text to the size of the ordinary text, adding in colons (:) and capital letters (e.g. Re-opened) would be fab!
In the "Add Me" section, the link isn't working!!! It could be because you have underlined it. I would suggest ridding your sidebar of this section anyway, it's pointless. If someone wants to add you to their favourites or bookmarks, they'll do it themselves!
The affiliates section is fine though I don't think you actually need the "affiliate status" wording, "Not accepting" would be fine.
Okay, enough babbling about your homepage, on to your pages!
"Owner"
First of all, I'm disappointed there isn't more information in the first couple of paragraphs. For me, this is the bit that I like to read the most because I feel I always get to know the person better. Sadly, you only have one paragraph!. I think you really lack structure in this page - in every sentence you seem to jump to a different subject that you could have written a bit more about. I'd love to see a bit more written here. You have a few mistakes on this page - "refelcts" instead of "reflects" and a couple of capitalization errors in your facts section. Also, in the music section the "by" being underlined looks really strange!
"My artwork"
Lovely! I love artwork pages. On the first one, you wrote "frawing" instead of "drawing"!
"My Top 10 songs of the month"
Again, I find the underlines under the "by"s strange. Also, you have a different favourite song here than on your original Owner page...
"IPod Survey"
Honestly, I only glanced at this page because I found it incredibly boring and useless. No offense!
"Movies"
Sometimes when I see pages with only one or two things on them, I consider the point in them being there at all. This page, is one of them.
"Content"
First of all, this should be "visitor content" or something, because really your whole site is content - it's such a stupid title!
I really have not a lot good to say about your content :(. It's a shame, because you clearly have good potential for graphic making, but all the things you use are copyrighted images. It's sad :(. Your buttons are good although you say they are made by you even though it is clear the patterns weren't. Also, what's with the plain ones? Seriously, what is the point to these? Who can't make an 88x31 canvas and fill it with a color? waste. of. time.
On your quotes page, I'd suggest taking off the "New Quotes" and "old quotes" arts because , well, if you're a new visitor, like me, it doesn't make any difference. I feel this page is a bit of a space filler because they weren't exactly written by you, and I've seen most of them before to be honest!
"Site Info"
Everything on these pages could easily fit onto one. You have mistakes here too, you need to fix them!
"Blogroll"
Er, this link just takes you to the homepage - is this right? I though it was going to be links or something...
Conclusion
I don't know if you can tell, but I'm growing tired of your website. I know you have potential to make your site a trillion times better, but for now I certainly wont be coming back in a hurry. I was going to review your coding, which has quite a few mistakes in it, but I have spent two hours already reviewing your site so I think I'll leave it at that. I started off hoping this was going to be a great review, but I haven't found anything original or anything that I feel was "well worth a visit", sorry...