Archived Review
- Reviewer: Lisa
- Review date: 23rd Feb 2010
First impression
I love the moose. The whole look and the overall mood of your layout has a very soothing and relaxing effect. The rounded corners are lovely (actually read somewhere that round shapes have a calming effect).
What hits me after this feeling is the size of everything - your font, the header, the main frame and so on. The fact that the text is incredibly small makes your whole website look almost weborexic and very hard to read what you're writing. Usually adding a margin: 0 auto to your container will give this effect.
Your title strikes me as unnecessary. Remove the underlines and whatnot. It does not look pleasing otherwise.
Layout
I adore the way you've presented the moose and heart together. I have my doubts whether you drew the moose or not, but am not going to draw any conclusions.. As I mentioned earlier, the size of your header is rather tiny. I didn't notice the title on the heart and moose until much later, and it's quite impossible to read. I read it as "dovepar[dot]earl".
I don't like the "Friends&Affiliates" box on the top of your page. Is the first thing you want to do really directing your visitors to other websites? Either move it to the bottom or remove it all together. Put a simple "Friends and affiliates"-link in your sidebar, if you must.
Your layout's pushed to the left. Double no-no. Center it! For people with big screen resolutions, like me, there's a whole chunk of empty space to the right. Use your resources - make the overall size of your layout bigger and center it. It'll look a whole lot inviting and not as newbie-ish.
Your colourscheme is calm and neutral, but I wish it was darker. The lime green is horrible next to the white, and the light grey you've used for your text would be better if it was a shade darker, such as the colour of your navigation.
Your footer needs padding. It's too close to the bottom of the screen. On short pages it is the sidebar that is stuck to the bottom.
Coding
You have a lot of errors and warnings. One major issue I spot is that you're using internal CSS. Save all your CSS in a separate file named stylesheet.css or something similar. This'll make your page load faster.
Read up on XHTML basics if you're going to use XHTML. Use <strong> instead of <b>, close all your images etc. Just to mention: All images must have an alt="" attribute, even if it's empty. This is so that even people who have disabled images can view your website properly.
The few issues your CSS had was that your #text's background and border-top colour were the same.
Overall
I enjoyed my visit to A Love War. I like your emoticons, though I wish you would include more information about each set, eg. the number of emoticons, short description, what file extension they are etc.
Remember to capitalise the first letters of the description under "Resources", "Tutorials" and "Articles".
With a little bit more work your website will be a joy for all to view.