Archived Review

You've been giving out some crazy long reviews, so let's see if I can return the favour :-)

I'm pretty sure you're somehow involved with partyofme.com, right? If so, I apologize if I'm repeating some of the things I said for that site!
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Layout
I like the header image, but I feel like you could have done more with it. I really like the idea of it being black, and then each musical note having a sort of drop shadow that's a different colour of the rainbow. Not a fuzzy shadow, just a duplicate of the original taken down two px right and two px downwards and then made red or blue or green or purple, etc.

Also, although it makes sense for the right hand side of the image to be flush with the edge of the content section, the butterfly's antenna looks weird flush up against the left hand side. So quite a bit more padding (20px?) to the left would be good.

Okee.
So the cross hair cursor = not feeling at all. That kind of thing is enough to make me close a browser window without viewing the rest of the site. I love my default cursor, and I think most people would agree with me.

Also, the link effect on hover isn't something that I find very attractive. Especially on entry titles, when they already have an underline and then you're adding two more. Something a little more simple for most of the links (if you love the dashed underline, maybe just a dashed and not the regular?) and for the titles of posts, how about just a colour change and no additional underline?

If I were going to have links stand out as grey, I'd probably make the text #333 and the links #000. That way both text and links are readable (right now they're a little on the light side) and the links stand out MORE than the text, rather than being faded compared to the text. I think this is important :)

The idea of highlighted text is fine and dandy, but it's also small and hard to read. I would - #1 give it 5px padding on every side (so that the yellow background isn't flush up against the text, my usual complaint :P) and #2 make the text itself a bit bigger. The caps lock seems unnecessary.

I'd love to see the navigation stand out a bit more. It's in a good place right now and it's easy to find and use, which is great, but making it bolder, more exciting, would also be good. Check out, say, this site's navigation. I realize that what she has going on isn't possible with your layout, but you notice how her navigation is very important compared to the rest of the sidebar? It's not just regular text! It's images! It's OBVIOUSLY the navigation, and very tempting to click on.

I'm loving that you have some consistency with your sidebar headers, though - I'm so sick of giving people a hard time because their sidebar is unorganized and all over the place and every header looks different and out of place.

A few final notes about the layout:
-When I went to the artist section, I noticed that the title of the subsections is RIGHT underneath the paragraph above it from the previous section. There's no spacing at all. a margin-top of 15px on the headers should fix this and look much better.

-Also, the text feels a bit mushed together - a bit more padding on the right and a bit more line-height would probably be good. (not too much line height though! You're very close to it being good.)

On the other hand, when I go to, say, visitor, the green headers (uh oh, header inconsistency!) have lots of space... almost too much! The sublinks that they're a header for are too far away from them. Keeping the margin of the top where it is, maybe just get rid of the margin-bottom a bit?

Coding
I won't get too into coding, but I'm sure someone else will.

So all I'll mention is:
When listing lists of links you should really be using the <ul> tag and then styling it so it doesn't have any bullet points and the readers can't tell that's what you're doing. It's considered bad practice to use a bunch of <br /> tags. Because you really care, right? :-P

Content
I'm running out of time here and I should be really getting dressed right now, so forgive me for skimming over this part?

The start to "The Girl" seemed sort of pointless. I understand that you want everyone to know about the situation with your money and the other site, but for a lot of us, we've never even been to your site before! I would put this as a footnote, and people who are interested can find it, or can email you.

I think your about page also was way too much about religion. Noting wrong with writing about it, but I feel like everything I learned about you was related to your faith. I'd say keep that the way it is, but expand and write about other things as well in that section.

...

Under 'the site', the way that hosting linked to a completely different site = annoying! Have an "offsite" disclaimer next to it or something...

...

You def. need more user content! There was very little on your site to keep me interested. One font? A couple of revamp images? I personally never use revamp images, and even if I was revamping my site, I'd make my own. I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way.

Things people might be more interested in are emoticons, articles you've written, portfolio work by you (are you really good at art or photography or something?), interactive surveys that eventually write in a blog post compiling all the info you collected...

All this stuff would be cool!

Anyway, that's it, and now I'm late for work :D

Good luck!

UPDATED 07 Nov 09:
reply
I don't understand why you replied with so much focus on coding, when the coding section of my review was the smallest part! All I mentioned is that for semantic correctness, it would be a good idea to use a list tag. Which, by the way, I did not mean that you should have bullets like you seemed to think. You can hide the bullets with CSS.

However, if you're interested in valid html and such as you seem to be saying, there's a really good article on semantics here: http://brainstormsandraves.com/articles/semantics/structure/. There's a lot more to coding than just having it validate ;)

Also, if you're interested in the progress of HTML and XHTML, you might find it interesting that further work on xhtml has been abandoned and things are moving away from xhtml and towards HTML 5, which is looking fantastic, by the way. You can read about this here and here, and I'm sure you can google lots more.

And, because I can't resist re:mango penguin.
I don't care how many visitors you had - the about you page is about you, not about your previous site.

If you want to have that message somewhere, put it in the about the site page! somewhere where it's relevant!

And highlighted text = small = I can't read it = I have less respect for you as a designer. Especially if I point it out and you laugh at me.

I have no problem with you taking my critiques with a grain of salt, but there's no need to be rude. Especially when it was a ridiculously valid point.

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