Archived Review

Hi there, I see you don't have any reviews so far, so I suppose I could give it a shot. Though I'm not really a fan of design sites, sometimes I do browse through some for inspiration.

= First Impression =
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I'm rather disappointed: such a style should have been outdated a good few years ago. Left-aligned, huge banner, minuscule navigation and a celebrity blend on top of it. Seen it, done it, moved on to more original (and legal) things.

= Presentation =
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The Asian guy is rather cute (mostly since I'm a sucker for androgynous men), buuuut... that's about it. The blend, is... alright quality-wise, but could have been better. For example, on the left of the large picture, the stray hair looks odd. Around his nose, and bottom of the ear there are some dark dots which look like... some dirt? When I flick back and forth between Notepad++ and your site, the dots don't show up in Notepad++, so that's you. Where they suppose to be freckles? If so they should have been more reddish in color, and only on the actor/singer's skin. Not floating above him.

When I look at the background of the main navigation, the horizontal stripe of differing color, I see that it's misaligned near the trousers of the smaller picture. Or... well it looks misaligned at any rate, by 1-2px. Not too sure what might have gone wrong there, as the larger image looks OK. Maybe it's the way you cut out the smaller image?

Next comes the main navigation... or so most people would assume, and wonder why it is so tiny. Hovering over the links, I see that they lead to other sites; affiliates I presume. Now tell me: why do you want to send away your visitors so soon? I get it that affiliation involves mutual back scratching... but it shouldn't come at the expense of your own visitor count. Furthermore, there is nothing indicating that these sites would not belong to 666-style. It's highly improbable that visitors will check the URLs and compare them to yours. Heck, some people might not even KNOW what affiliates are. So do move them lower on the sidebar, and give them a suitable heading (i.e. Affiliates, Sites of Interest, etc etc)

Moving on, the rest of the site seems decently organized, on the homepage at any rate. But the font size seems rather tiny to me. How about you choose a relative font-size? Most common is:

font: 75%/1.6em arial, sans-serif

Which basically means, that the line-height is 1.6em, and the text will take up 75% of said line height. Also, text on the web should not be justified. Unnecessary spaces are inserted, so that lines can be of equal length. Just stick with left aligned text.

On the left side, your main navigation links are rather hard to read. The letters spacing is way too much between them, which somehow makes us unconsciously attempt to read the letters separately. In style.css, line 11, in the declaration for a, get rid of "letter-spacing: 2px".

By looking at the code, to experiment with various font-sizes, I noticed that you center quite a lot of things (and then you justify text where no centering is needed). Why not just center the text in the parent element (in your case #navi)? After all you don't really need centering anywhere else.

The footer is much too large, and downright ugly. I'd get rid of the blurred share, or lower its opacity/fill so that it will be barely visible. Perhaps try showing less of it by putting more of it behind the sharpened image? That shade of yellow really clashes there. Doesn't really match with anything. Maybe with the top links' colors, but those are very small, and way up at the top.

All in all, your design leaves much to be desired, both style-wise as well as far as color choice goes. While the following are not really modern designs, they do however have much better color choice and content coordination:
http://aethereality.net/site/themes/ (it has more themes/designs you can looks at them all).
http://graphics.twilight-realm.com/
http://www.aunexamor.net/
http://neosiz.net/index.php

And please don't use Cutenews: it's a highly unsafe script, furthermore it's not even updated anymore. There are a lot of alternatives for it, if you only care to look.

= Content =
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So let's see what the content itself offers.

Your introductions made me smile a bit, only 'cause I'm such a snob.

Please have fun while browsing!

Seems a rather odd way to phrase things. How about "I hope you have fun browsing" instead?
Whoa whoa whoa! What happened to the list text? Why is it white? I can't read it that way. Also why did you repeat your icon you many times in your latest update? Once should be enough. I'd also suggest wrapping the text around the image (apply "float: left" for said img tag)

Graphics - seen this style way more times than I can count. They look exactly the same as other similar sites would offer. Furthermore, they're rather monotonous. To make a parallel, imagine you're at a fashion show. When you come here, you sort of expect seeing various models wearing various clothes. But all you get to see are various models wearing more or less the same clothing (maybe different colors). Do try to make more types of headers, icons signatures... experiment, or something.

Designs: Initially I thought you only had 2 designs, until I happened to see something yellowish (and highly annoying at the bottom)... if I squint just so, I can almost make out what it says. Really, don't you look at your own design when you make it? Or do you perhaps have a really old and darker monitor? A lot of text is virtually illegible on this site. Clicking on the pagination, I notice that the rest of the pages have more designs on them. You should display the same amount of designs on your first page, and only have less on the last page. Visitors are extremely lazy people, they will be more likely to just look at the first page and not go very far if they don't like what they see. Therefore, offer them as many examples of your work, as possible.

Quality-wise, I have mixed feelings about your designs. Some are decent, while some are subpar. All in all though, just the same as with graphics, there's nothing that would characterize it as your own. On the contrary, they seem like hundreds of others I've seen before.

Resources - I really like your textures, but rest is once again oh-so-over-used-stuff. Regarding the textures though, you're once again using stuff you're not supposed to. Stock photos found in books, magazines, etc are also copyrighted to their rightful owner (artist/photographer etc). As such, you are not allowed to scan them and redistribute them for use, without the permission of the author. No, not even if it isn't for profit.
Your tutorials are all Photoshop related, so I just chose one at random... mostly cause I had trouble finding the links: Render.
I see the end result... but if I were a complete n00b, I would have no idea what you're talking about. You don't even explain what rendering means. And you don't really show any screenshots of partially done work. How are people supposed to know what you want them to do. Or if they do, they already know how to extract objects from a picture. Here's a tutorial for the same thing on Aethereality: http://aethereality.net/tutorials/preview/7/ Take it as an example on how to explain things, so that everyone will understand.

Sitely - I'm going to assume you don't actually want people to read your bolded right? After all, why would you expect your visitors to torture their own eyes? Same goes for the headings.
Even the Team descriptions are so clichéd... "age: old enough". Really, if you don't want to say, then don't include it in the list. It's not like people will immediately assume you're not old enough. Heck, they're more likely to assume that if you say it outright.

= Coding =
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So you say it's valid, eh? Well could be but I'll check nonetheless. Especially since you're not linking to the validation site. I randomly chose the team page, to validate.
16 HTML validation errors
3 CSS errors
... not so valid after all.

Being a professional web developer, my approach to coding (and subsequently validation) is somewhat different from what you might be used to from generic "website reviewing sites". Sure validating your code is important, the same way that spelling correctly is important. If you misspell your words, the message you're communicating can be misinterpreted. Same way, with coding, if you don't follow the correct coding standards, the browse might not show things properly.

However, same as when you write a message, ultimately it's not the spelling that counts, but rather, the way you choose to send the content of said message. This is why, there are certain coding conventions in layout designs. These make communication (with the browser) more efficient. They, of course won't show up as errors, when you validate your site. Same way, a spell checker, won't pick up your grammar or logical mistakes.

To give an actual example: you chose to position your various design elements absolutely. This is not necessarily incorrect, however, given the type of design, using padding and margins would have been more appropriate. Use absolute positioning, when you wish to override the default positioning, that would otherwise be applied to a tag.

Next, you use an external stylesheet. Good for you. But are you aware that external stylesheets were invented so that style and content could be better separated? In other words, HTML and CSS should not be mixed. HTML is used to send the generic skeleton of a web page to the browser, while CSS is basically "the make-up and fancy clothes" the website is wearing. The basic message of a web page should remain the same, even if the webpage should decide to wear a different attire.
In other words, if you use an external CSS file, don't add style attributes to HTML tags. Use ids and classes.

Also don't use tables to display a list. You have 3 types of lists: unordered (ul -> li), ordered (ol -> li) and definition lists (dl -> dt, dd). Take a look at w3schools.com if you're not familiar with them.

Here are some articles I recommend you read, to bring your coding techniques up to date:
http://www.tutorialtastic.co.uk/tutorial/create_a_tableless_layout
http://www.tutorialtastic.co.uk/tutorial/create_a_tableless_layout
http://www.tutorialtastic.co.uk/tutorial/classes_and_ids_whats_the_difference
http://www.tutorialtastic.co.uk/tutorial/semantic_css_block_navigation
http://www.tutorialtastic.co.uk/tutorial/horizontal_css_block_navigation

Score: 1.5/5

As far as sites go, I've seen much worse than yours. What really annoyed me though, was the complete and utter lack of originality. I've seen this style of design a lot, especially some 3-4 years ago (when it was "trendy").
Find something that represents you, and do that your way. Getting inspiration is fine, we all do it. But just plain copying a style and using it ad nauseam, will get repetitive pretty soon.

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