Callistea

Callistea

**--- (Rated by 6 people, viewed by 173 people)

Run by 15 year old little me, Sarah. Its my personal blog/resource center area on the web. You'll find tutorials, icons, PSDs, downloads, resources, and more. If you want something alittle out of the ordinary, check it out :)
Ofcourse my site isnt perfect, and im working on it daily. Constructive criticism is appreciated!
xox

Added by callistea in Other

Callistea has 6 Reviews

Below are the reviews left by other members on Callistea. Jump to review form?

  1. elateddesign gave it ***** on 23rd Nov 2008 and said:

    First off, I just want to say how creative your site always is. It gives me soo many tips!
    Layout: It is simple, but effective. However, I think the picture of the Twilight cast is a little small. I personally love large layouts, but thats just me.
    For You: I love all of your textures and such. They are really helpful. Your icons are amazing!
    Past Layouts: This is random, but I love looking at past layouts of sites. I love your transformation, but you haven't seemed to have updated any recent ones.
    Overall: Great job and keep up the good work!

    Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

    callistea's Response:

    thanks so much for the review :) your positivity made me rethink a lot.
    hahah i will get on that past layouts section!! thanks again.

  2. Kari gave it **--- on 23rd Nov 2008 and said:

    First impressions: Well you used celebrity images, and that's a definite nono. Also your layouts okay, but i don't really liek the rounded borders around the content and sidebar. and the sidebar is pretty far away, you could move it closer so that there's not a huge gap. In addition, I think that the loved affiliates links at the top is messy and a little crammed. You might want to put that in your sidebar.

    Coding/Layout: Your coding/css is okay, but i think the css is a little bland and could be spiced up a lot. Your site has 49 errors with validation and 17 css errors? Css validation is an easy fix, though. Also, the colors aren't that great - green brown and orange, i mean. I think you could also space out the content part in terms of line height -- its a little smushed. But the font size is large and easy to read! Finally, your headers "Latest Updates" -- the text is very smushed together. If you could space that out, it'd be much easier to read.

    Grammar: You have a few grammar issues throughout the main page -- "part your personal resource center," should be part of your personal resource center. Also on your sidebar I think you have some unnecessary text like "For all credits visit credits." Couldn't you just have a link to credits there? Also, you write "By the way, this site was originally named Masique.net (1.13.07-10.13.07)" below the link for care to know more. To me, it's not that really important but if you want to include it, include this in the paragraph above. Maybe something like welcome to callistea.com, originally named masique.net, etc.

    Blog: To be honest your blog posts are okay, but nothing interesting. And the "SOsoSosOoSOosoSOoSO im blogging today because today is a very important day in history. Cannnn" is kind of bordering on chatspeak. If you could just work on getting rid of those grammatical issues your blog would be much more interesting! But, this is just my opinion and I don't know if you wanted a blog as a main part of your site.

    Content: Ahh, and now I am onto the content part of the site. I am glad you're getting rid of celebrity images. That's a good sign :) To be honest, your psp tutorials are ordinary. You can find them on any site. The same goes for your icon tutorials, but I think the icon tutorial list is helpful, even though it wasn't really your idea in the first place. Some tutorials are kind of confusing, as well. In general your tutorials are pretty average. Try putting up something new! I'm not going to comment on each thing from your content, but in general they're ordinary and you can find them anywhere. Also it doesn't seem like you put a lot of effort into your brushes. I do like your emoticons though, they are very cute. And your gradients page, that doesn't even work. You have a TON of content, but most of it's repetitive and boring and some even bad quality. Focus on quality, vs. quantity.

    Site: I think maybe you should put all the site info on one page. It's annoying going through different links to get where you want. Also, I don't know if you put the image credits somewhere else, but you haven't credited any of the images for psds or anything like that. On your Information page, I think you can get rid of the whole dazzling sparkle-masique-callistea, because you state it in the next paragraph. Also, that paragraph is HUGE and it made me want to just skip through it. Try spacing it out with every new idea and cutting down some of the info.

    Us: Your us page is the same as the information page. but maybe, you could have an autobiography page about YOU, not your site - since that's alrready in the site section.

    Overall, your site's okay but it needs more quality content and i'm glad you're getting rid of celebrity images. Also you need to work on the coding/css to better your site - this will also speed up the processing of each page.

    Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

    callistea's Response:

    thanks so much for your review Kari :) a lot of what you said can and will be used when revamping my site!

  3. [img: avatar]
    Theresa gave it **--- on 23rd Nov 2008 and said:

    Firefox 3 | Windows XP | 1280x1024

    Aesthetics:
    There's a whole lot of empty space with this layout. You header, while interesting to a degree, is not only (most likely) violating copyright laws but there's just something missing. It's not busy enough considering the size, there's a bunch of empty, white space in it.

    Your sidebar, why is there such a HUGE gap between your sidebar and your content? You should have made your sidebar a bit lower and placed it closer to your content.

    I got curious and looked at the header image with my handy dandy right click, your title, menu and the top of your content areas are all in that one image, that means that it may take some with a slow internet connection to load. It's 144 KB all in itself. I figured it might take someone as long as 8 seconds for that image to load. Now, it doesn't sound like a long time but stop everything you're doing, look at the clock and watch 8 seconds pass, it really does take a long time in terms of waiting.

    With it being one image, that means you most likely used an image map, outdated as heck, maybe you should experiment with horizontal lists.

    There's no footer, it makes the page look like it SHOULD continue but doesn't, kind of leaves me with an empty feeling inside. You should fix that to avoid breaking hearts.

    I can't see your emphasized font in your posts, I have to highlight it to see it.

    Content:
    Us: Your "Loved" section that's supposed to be at the top is now in your content area running over all of the content and I can't read the header and the top 2 lines of your text. Your sidebar text is way out of line with it's boundaries. Basically this page looks a complete mess!

    I couldn't really read that first paragraph because of what I mentioned above and the heading for your second paragraph is not only too small but, again, the color almost blends in with the tan background color.

    This page seems pretty informative. You included a pretty good history. Your whole page is offset though and I am guessing it has something to do with that "Loved" section not being closed or something.

    This issue made me look at your coding.. OMFG! You have 4 doctypes in your "Us" section, WHY?! There's only a need for one, I promise.

    Site: You could most likely do away with most of those links, shove them onto one page and only links to SOME of them (like the FAQ). Your credits should probably be more descriptive, letting people know exactly which brushes you used and from where. There's no need to list EVERY resource you've EVER used, just list the ones you're currently using and explain where and how you used them. By the way, still haveing the alignments and "loved" problem with this page as I was with the "Us" page.

    You:
    - Tutorials: Your tutorials, even the ones I thought were going to be good, turned out BAD. They are all of three to five steps long, nothing that people can't figure out by themselves.

    - Brushes/Download Buttons: Some of your brushes are pretty cute but the majority of these brushes are really not great. They're nothing that someone couldn't duplicate with the pencil or pen tool. Your download buttons text is way too small. It says at the top that "Some buttons are not made by Callistea", you should say which backgrounds and link to the source at least.

    Emoticons/Fonts/Gradients: The emoticons are cute, I may just use them in my next design. ;) Good going there, I love minis! Did you create the fonts? If you did then you have the right to distribute them, if you did not you should probably take that section down. You'd be surprised and how mad that can make some people. Your gradient previews are broken, can't see them can't judge them.

    Grudge/Icon/Light Textures: I can't see your "grudge textures" and is that right? GRUDGE? or is it supposed to be GRUNGE? Your icon textures are decent, and I love your light textures.

    You've got WAY too much content. I can't go through it ALL, there's dozens of pages and I don't have the patience. It honestly looks like you lacked on quality to make sure you had the quantity, which is not good for anyone. Not for you visitors and not for you.

    I gave your site 1.5 stars because it's not only a coding mess, a dial-up users nightmare but there's also a whole lot of nothing on this site. When I say I "whole lot of nothing" I mean a whole lot of things that are almost useless to most. They take up space and they waste time.

    Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

    callistea's Response:

    thank you so much for your step by step evaluation :) its very efficient and yes haha im kind of laughing at my "grudge vs grunge" mistake because its a complete idiot move of mine. im glad to see you do like some aspects of the site - its good to know :) thanks again!

  4. [img: avatar]
    Muse gave it **--- on 23rd Nov 2008 and said:

    The first thing I noticed is justified text (while your images were loading), so I'll address that first off. Justified text is quite popular with newspapers, and for obvious reason—they make nice neat columns of text, so the newspaper content is laid out in a organized and efficient manner. However, it only works well for narrow columns, because when you have wider blocks you get these huge spaces in between your words, which makes it harder to read. I'd prefer you not use justified text in the sidebar, but since it's fairly narrow it's not a huge issue. I would advise you, however, to use normal left-aligned text for your blog posts. It'll be much easier to read.

    Your font size is large enough to be readable, so I have no complaints there. Cheers. ;D

    You've got this rather odd indentation thing going with your blog posts: the heading for each one and the 'Leave a Comment?' and 'Written at...by...' part aren't aligned on their left edges. I'm not sure if I'm explaining this properly...but essentially, it seems quite disjointed to have different indentations on the side. Either have it lined up perfectly, or use a larger indentation for your content & header so it's clear you intend it to be that way.

    (Oh yeah, and I agree. Taylor Swift's album is lovely. The songs cheer me right up. ^^)

    To be honest, I'm not particularly fond of your rounded corners. The main reason: your headings, like the 'Welcome' before your little blurb on the sidebar, have a brown background, and the sharp edges of that rectangle clash with the very rounded corners of the sidebar as a whole. It looks rather odd.

    Also, something I've noticed: in the main content area, it looks like it isn't properly spaced in its little tan bubble—your blog posts are too close to the right edge. And your 'Previous Entries' link at the bottom could be given more padding at the bottom.

    I'm sure tons of other people are going to remark on your celeb-image usage. I just have to say—if you must use a celeb image, at least make it larger. Right now it's quite small, hardly fits in with the rest of your website (it's black and white; everything else is browns and greens and oranges), and it looks rather unbalanced to have this tiny little image. I'm guessing it may be so that you wouldn't have your list of 'Loved' people overlapping the image, but it really doesn't look too good right now.

    I'm very fond of COLOURlovers (where you got your colour scheme) but not so much of what you chose from there. It looks tired and kind of 80's with the green and browns.

    I'm going to move on and inspect more of your content and text. Your site has a clever name, by the way—but in the title you've neglected an apostrophe, so it reads "my thoughts you cant decode", instead of "my thoughts you can't decode". (In your post, 'The Things We Make', you've also written "Ive" and not "I've".) Even if you don't feel the need to type with perfect capitalization and spelling in your blog posts, you should at least put the apostrophes. I'm a bit of a grammar Nazi, so this irritates me unduly.

    In the 'Us' section: your headers for the sections (like 'The Story Behind it All') are so tiny and pale green that I nearly skipped over them. Make them larger, or use a colour that's easier to read, or both. Don't compromise on readability.

    Speaking of which—you've got that absolutely huge paragraph there. I'm rather fond of reading histories of sites and how the webmaster/webmistress got to this point, but please break up the text into smaller, more digestible blocks. It's difficult to read, and that's a pity, because your story of how you found the name is quite interesting. Greek. I love Greek. <3

    Down there you have one of your promo banners being larger than the content area, so it sticks out and looks rather unprofessional like that. You may want to remedy that...

    Affiliates page: 'atleast' is two words, not one.

    I notice you have a breadcrumb trail, though, which clearly says exactly what page the site visitor is on, as well as links to the sections before (so: Home » Site » Affiliates). However, you've neglected to include this on your Credits, FAQ, Information, Link Back Buttons (why isn't this with the 'Advertise Callistea' section on the information page?) pages. Keep it consistent and do it everywhere, or not at all.

    Also: why is it that the site information is both in one of the main sections (in the navigation, it's 'Us') and at the same time is one of the subsections in the 'Site' section? It doesn't quite make sense hierarchy-wise.

    In the 'You' section, aside from that problem with the different headers being light green and far too invisible—in the rule box, you've changed the font size for some of the emphasized words. Don't. It looks messy and messes up your line-height. You've also made reference to 'us' and 'we', although in your site info page you say it's only you running the site, which is mildly confusing.

    I really don't want to go through all of your resources, but from looking at a few of them:

    Your link to Christina Aguilera PSDs—broken. Having the PSDs in .zips would make download time faster. I hate to bring up the issue of copyright, since you'll hear it dozens of times, but—what you're essentially doing is redistributing the work of others. I'd actually like to know where you're getting your source images. You're not a professional photographer, so—if it's Google, you should know that just because it's out on the internet doesn't mean you can use it, and when in doubt—don't. You're clearly against others redistributing your work...

    To my mind there are far too many subpages in your resources section. I think the Scribbles can all be merged into one page with several sections; Blank Buttons + Blank Banners = Blank Buttons & Banners. And it's grunge textures, not 'grudge' textures. A grudge is a feeling of ill-will and animosity towards someone (e.g. "Muse has a grudge towards overly long resources pages").

    It's rather redundant, however, to put '100x100' in front of every single link to your icons. Much better would be to add some text before that saying, "All of these are 100x100 pixels" and be done with it.

    I have to say, for this type of resources site, some of your things are comparatively nice. Your light textures are actually quite nice. The 'Funky Circles', however, I can't quite imagine anyone using. They're pixelated, and your little credit text means they'll be hard to use for layouts or that sort of thing. Some of your resources, to be honest, seem like 'filler' stuff. How much of it will actually be used by someone, somewhere out there on the internet?

    I completely skipped over the tutorials link for a while, because I couldn't even see the header that said 'Learn'. Please make your headers more visible; I know I've said it before, but it's worth repeating. And I really think the tutorials deserve a section of their own.

    Try giving your icon coloring tutorials more description as to what they actually do. I have to say, I'm not particularly impressed by many of them. Adding borders, scanlines, installing WordPress, etc, seem to be fairly par for the course for these kinds of sites. Your documentation of these doesn't set itself apart. And speaking of which, in your tutorials, you really should space out each of the steps. Put a line break in between them; don't keep them crammed together in one block.

    My final impressions: a fairly typical resource/blog site that doesn't differentiate itself by design or content. Many of your problems are the same issues I have with many resource sites, so if you really feel it doesn't matter if your resources page is hugely long and you want to continue to offer celebrity PSDs, I can't really stop you. But please consider, at least, fixing the headings so they're not that minuscule pale green.

    Using Firefox on Mac | Report This?

    callistea's Response:

    thank you so much for your review. It helps me a lot when people point out the little details like fixing the headings and grammar errors (x.X)
    i do agree with you on the "filler" part, because it is partly true. I'm going to go through with a revamp and tidy everything up. Thanks again for your review - it really did help :)

  5. [img: avatar]
    Sarah gave it **--- on 23rd Nov 2008 and said:

    First Impressions
    Your website took quite a while to load. Upon loading I saw a load of links at the top. I thought they were ad links at first, until I saw they were other websites you have linked to. I don't think they look very good being right at the top of the page. I recommend that you display them in the sidebar as a list. I was disappointed to see that you're using a copyrighted Twilight image in your header graphic. To me the image looks out of place, the graphic would have been better without it.

    Graphics
    I'm not keen on the top graphic due to the reason above. The colours used are okay, though. The navigation buttons of the image would be much better with a lighter orange and no lines. The font used is fine.

    Coding
    Your website does not validate in HTML or CSS. Your coding and stylesheet contain many errors, which may result in your website not displaying correctly in various browsers. Your content column is too far on the right. I would recommend placing it more to the left, then increase the width. Your text and links display alright considering your coding efforts. I highly recommend that you read up on how to use valid, tidy coding.

    Content
    Your content mostly consists of you offering graphics to users, but you are using copyrighted images to create such graphics. Your site content is unoriginal, too. I feel like you are offering content that every other graphic-orientated site seems to offer.

    Overall
    Your site seems like just another graphics site. Your coding is somewhat poor, your graphics are mediocre. There is nothing that "grabs" me, to make me want to visit your website again and again. I recommend you improve on your HTML knowledge by learning how to write valid, semantic coding and get rid of the celebrity images.

    Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

    callistea's Response:

    Thanks for the review. Your criticism helped me to understand alot and ive taken down my celebrity images for the most part. I thought wrong i suppose.. thanks again :)

  6. paperheart gave it ***-- on 23rd Nov 2008 and said:

    I admit i'm a big twilight fan; but using celebrity images are illeagal. So i suggest next time you make a layout try and be more creative and not rely so much on celeb images.

    I like the colours on your sidebar. But you have too many colours going on the layout. You should try to stick to 3 colours max. If you have many more than that it will look a bit tacky.
    The sidebar is also a bit to far away from the blog and it looks a bit odd.

    Lets take a look at your pages now :]
    us:
    The details bit is a bit messy and should be in bullet points. And unless someone is so dumb, think everyone knows ho to add site to their favourites.If they don't they have serious problems.
    The story behind it all is a bit too long and im sure you could shorten it down a bit.
    Callistea!?! is a very clever bit to include so people know how you got the name.
    I see your link me button and banner have celeb images. *tut tut*

    Site:
    Instead of making a new page you could of suck it on thesame page as us. Its exactly the same because its all to do with the site. You could maybe change the "us" to a page about you instead.

    you:
    The rules section, maybe use blockquote. It looks neater. The code is:

    rules here!!

    Instead of making the page extra long with all the links, make a icons page then put all those icon links there. The links look very messy and the colour doesent go with the layout. Where did you get that orange from? It doesent go with anything.

    Overall very good visitor content but the colour schees just dont go. Thats why ive gave you 2and a half stars. Sorry, i was just being honest.

    Using MSIE on Windows | Report This?

    callistea's Response:

    thanks for your review :) your advice helped and i guess now that you mention it the orange does look alittle out there. celebrity images celebrity images dsfkjhskdfh thanks after reading this i took down all my celebrity images (that i found) aside from my layout - but i am working on a new one. I thought the whole issue was set aside but i suppose not. Im going to take your opinions and maybe collaborate "site" and "us" together and ill clean up a bit.
    thanks again :)

Write Your Own Review

Leave your feedback for Callistea below, and remember - the longer your review, the more points you receive. Don't forget to look at things like style/design, content, coding and originality as they will all help to improve the quality of your review.

You have to be logged in to write a review.