Archived Review
- Reviewer: Dee
- Review date: 7th Nov 2008
OS X // Firefox 3.0.3 & Safari 3.1.2 // 1440x900
CONCEPT:
I have to admit I've never been a big fan of "resource" sites, mostly because they have a tendency to offer up the same tired, talentless pap over and over again. Can Memorylast do better? Let's see...
AESTHETIC:
I'm almost astounded in the fact that I think this is the first site I've been to in the last ten thousand years that DOESN'T work properly in Firefox. So I booted up Safari and was pleasantly surprised to find a working site. Short of walking to the next room to check out IE (which would involve getting out of bed, so... no), I'm a bit baffled by this as a design choice, since WebKit is still a bit of a fringe rendering engine (well, at least until Chrome takes off). I'm sure a lot of people are going to get stuck into you over this, running under the assumption that Firefox is the "it" browser when it comes to standards, but... if I recall my Acid Test correctly, WebKit actually beats out Gecko. But whatever, that's not the point of this section.
The POINT is that I like your layout... mostly. There are some nice, clean elements here but there's something about the way they're assembled that feels like it's lacking in polish a little. Like the background colour on the text in your "Updates" box. There's something here that feels like a mish-mash of hip, modern design concepts -- the clean, bold colours, the rounded corners -- and that other genre of sites involving lots of tiny fonts with no line-height and glittery sparkles everywhere. To be honest, I'm not convinced one is "better" than the other per se (I'm an artist, not a designer, and art is subjective), but the blend here I think doesn't work.
Other things I'm going to bitch about are the Google Ads (boo, hiss) and the massive block of whitespace hanging around the bottom of the page for no apparent reason. What's up with that?
TECHNICAL:
Once upon a time I wrote a blog post called "The Furious Sleep", in which I banged on about validity versus semantics.
Here's the deal; I don't know if your site validates, though the fact that it breaks the validator (there's a bad character in your JavaScript comment header) kinda hints to me that it doesn't. Yet your doctype is trying to pass off your site as XHTML Transitional. I figure you have a choice to make here. Either you ditch the doctype, accept that your site is non-semantic tag soup and move on with your life, or you dig up some references on valid X/HTML and the principles behind semantics then apply them. Your choice; neither is wrong, per se, but -- like with your layout -- you're clashing two cultures here and it comes off worse than if you'd just picked a theme and stuck to it.
From a validity perspective, your code fails on even a cursory glance (you're not using correctly closed BRs for your doctype), but more important than that, the code isn't semantic. Because here's the deal; HTML tags describe what elements on the page ARE, not what they look like. You've got lists made by BRs and you're using Bs where you should be working out some system of Hs. Honestly, the validity stuff doesn't matter much (browsers were designed to accept invalid HTML, and unless you're serving XHTML correctly -- which you're not -- having a validation error isn't the end of the world), but the semantics... the semantics is what HTML is. Learn it, embrace it, be better for it.
NAVIGATION:
I'm not massivley keen on the giant "buttons" at the top of the page here; I'd recommend moving them down into a list in one of the sidebars (you'd have plenty of room, if only you'd ditch those dreadful Google Ads), while leaving a thin strip of black up the top for balance. Those big button lists always kinda scream, "Free WordPress Layout!" to me, and I think they're a bit of a cheap layout choice.
CONTENT:
You write. Passionately and at length, and you know what? I love that. That's good; that's the reason I VISIT sites like yours, to find out more about the individuals who make them. Hell, I really like your domain name and you seem like an interesting person which -- believe me -- is pretty damn rare.
Which is why it huts to can you in this section. See, this is why I don't like "resource" sites. I click on "About Me" or "Domain" and I get a vivacious, articulate young lady (and you're 13... Jesus!). I hit "Content", "Tutorials" and "MySpace" and I get the same dull, unimaginative, incorrect, recycled (I'm being nice here, incidentally; there are people out there who'd use much harsher language) pap as every other "resource" site out there. And yes, hell, I used to have a site like this too. Fortunately that was so long ago that not even the Wayback Machine retains a copy, but still. I know how it is.
You want my advice? (Well, probably not, but... you're gonna get it anyway!) Ditch it. Ditch it all. Get rid of the notion that you have to provide something for your visitors other than just yourself. Because you're great, I like you, I want to read more about you. You're your own strength -- you're what sets you apart -- so focus on that, and forget the rest of it.
Or not. It's up to you.
OVERALL:
An interesting personality hiding behind a not-so-interesting set of "resources". Ditch some of the chaff, pare down your focus to what you're best at, and this site can shine.
Three stars.