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Falsetto has 6 Reviews

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1. 

   flashglam gave it on 20th Dec 2008 and said:

   Hey Kaytlyn :)

   ~ First Impressions ~
   This layout is so adorable. He he he. I just love it.
   One thing I hope is not on every page - because it's already making me want to poke my eyes out - is the italic text. Italic text should only be used for emphasis and quotes or thoughts. Not just standard text.
   The pink in the CSS looks a little out of place since Rudolph's nose - I'm guessing that is where you got the pink from - is famous for being red and not pink.
   And the noise backgrounf is too hard on the eyes. I think a solid colour would look good with this since there's already a lot going on with the layout.

   ~ Graphics ~
   Before I do any of these, I'm going to let other people slam you for the celebrity images. I'm going to look at the actual content.

   Affiliate Images
   Besides the fact that I think they're 2006, some are a little sloppy (particularly the scribble ones). Take the time to actually make some cute little shapes. Quality over quantity.
   Borders on the celeb ones would be cool.

   Button Bases
   I love, love, LOVE the holiday ones. So cute. He he he.

   Coded Layouts
   CODED LAYOUT 1: I love the actual layout. The coding is cool, but the background is VERY noticeable. You should just put the brushes on a transparent document and put it on the background.
   CODED LAYOUT 2: Love it. Really nice.
   You have your old site name on these though. You should always save every graphic you make twice: one as a .png/.gif/.jpg and one as a Photoshop/Paint Shop Pro image. This way you can go in and edit whatever you need to.

   Colour Palettes
   Very bland, if you know what I mean. Different shades of the same colour. No variation what-so-ever. Add some more with different colours.

   Gradients
   I've never seen the actual POINT of these since I can open up Paint Shop Pro and make one of these in about 15 seconds, give or take. Ditch them and make things that are more useful to the visitor.

   Little Icons
   Did you actually make all of these? They're very good. :)

   Mini Layout Bases
   I would never use them, but they are cute.

   "My" Layouts
   Some of these are texture overkill, but other than that, they are good.

   Textures
   Very good and unique. I like them, a lot. :)

   Tutorials
   Every single one of these tutorials can be found on a gazillion other sites. You should only make tutorials on cool effects you've actually made. That way people don't say "One of those sites again. . . " they'll be saying "OH EM GEEEE, IT'S FALSETTO. So cooooool! :)"
   So, I won't review them.

   Articles
   Cool beans. They're really good. Learnt a couple new things.

   ~ Falsetto ~
   History
   Cool stuff.

   About Me
   Cool, again.

   Advertising
   It bothers me when people offer advertising for only a link-back. You should have 10 spots open and whoever wants can be advertised for 1 month.
   Other than that, it's a link exchange.

   Affiliates
   I have a few bones to pick with your rules.
   "1. Your site must be a Domain, Sub-Domain or Freewebs. No Piczo unless I offer, sorry
   2. Your site must be content related
   3. You must keep in contact, either through comments in blogs or though MSN. If you don't, you will be removed
   4. Your site cannot contain Adult content, hate or racism
   5. Please don't be discouraged if you're not accepted
   6. Write "Purple Clouds" in other so I know you've read the rules"
   Rule 1: "domain" and "sub-domain" don't need to be capitalised. What makes me mad though is when people actually say "No Piczo." Because when you were Piczo, you wished you could be affiliates with sub-domains and domains but weren't allowed.
   If you still don't want Piczo, just don't pick them when they apply, you don't have to say so.

   Rule 2: ---
   Rule 3: Isn't that the whole point of affiliation?
   Rule 4: ---
   Rule 5: ---
   Rule 6: I despise the write chicken pox if you've read the rules.
   I think it's dumb to even have rules to be an affiliate - if the sists have content you're against, don't accept the,. Simple as that.

   Link Me
   Cute buttons.

   Past Layouts
   Cool beans.

   Thank You
   Very general. You should state specifically what the site did for you. Give them the full respect they deserve.

   Last
   Really good site Kaytlyn! Keep up the good work. Just a few things that I think can be changed, but other than that: AMAZING!!! :)

   -- Britney

   UPDATED 20 Dec 08:
   The entire sidebar was italic when I viewed your site, that's where it came from.
   Okay to the colour; perhaps there is a difference in the brightness and/or contrast in our screens.

   I know it's hard to edit after you've made them, which is why I said

   You should always save every graphic you make twice: one as a .png/.gif/.jpg and one as a Photoshop/Paint Shop Pro image. This way you can go in and edit whatever you need to.

   And as for the affiliate images: black is the universal colour for borders, I find. A good percentage of people (probably around the fiftieth percentile) have a white background. . .

   Using MSIE on Windows | Report This?

   falsetto's Response:

   nothing on my site is italic so i dont knwo where youre getting that from. but oh well...
   and i got the colour from his nose, but since im on my laptop I cant really tell the true colour, but thanks for letting me know.

   I can't change the coded layouts that easily. I get my text from a different place not on paintshop, so yeah.. and I don't have the images anymore since there on the old computer not my laptop.

   anyway, thanks for the helpful tips

   UPDATED 03 Dec 08:
   Also, about the affiliate things, there are inactive ones through my website and msn, so apparetly the point of being affiliates isn't really there for some people.

   and there are borders around the affiliate images.. there just white, so it might be hard to see with the colour of background that I have

2. 

   Ben gave it on 28th Nov 2008 and said:

   First Impressions: I got to say, seeing your site for the first doesn't really make me love it too much. I find it looks a little.. boring. Your header image isn't too bad, but I think your css could use some more work which would make it look more interesting.

   Pages: Wow, you have a lot of content! It's fairly good too. I really love those little icons, did you really make them? They're very nice. Some of your button bases are good too, but I don't really like the first ones too much. I find that these mini layout bases aren't very good quality. I like that you have a good selection but I think that the image quality isn't very good. Not sure if you're already doing this but when you save your pictures in photo shop or paint shop you have to remember to save with the quality setting at the highest. The layouts are pretty good, I can tell that you've improved from some of your first ones which is definitely good, but I think you should get rid of some of your layouts which you think aren't as good as you can do now. Because if they aren't good and people look at them, it makes your site look bad.

   Why is the resource page called resources when it has tutorials. Tutorials are resources, by the definition but just saying tutorials instead would be much simpler. I'm not going to go through all of them but I will quickly look over them. The ad remover tutorial cannot be found. The rest of the tutorials look alright, I personally think that a lot of them aren't very useful but maybe it's simply because I've learned those things long ago.

   The Domain page is well set up. I like what you put on there, you really go into your history with site making a lot but you didn't put much on 'the name' section. I think it would be nicer if you at least said who that song was by, maybe why you like it. Maybe you can even give a link to the video for this song.

   Layout: I quite like this layout image, it's very nice and simple, good job! And it's nice that you've managed a good layout without the use of celebrity images. But I find that your css isn't very exciting. For one thing I think that your blog header and possibly the sidebar header should be a bit bigger. It's only a size bigger than the normal h2 text which makes the header seem less significant than it really is. I also think it might be nicer to have your text a different font family, century gothic isn't too bad but I think something else like arial or tahoma would be better.
   It would also be really nice if you had some effects on your links when you hover over them, besides the rollover cursor. Maybe a background color or make the text move to the right or left, or make the text change color. The space between the content area and the sidebar is a little too big which distracts the visitor from everything else. Reduce it by about 10 or 20 pixels to make it look better.

   Overall: All in all I think your site is pretty good. I think you're doing very well. Try and use those tips and keep doing what you're doing :)

   Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

   falsetto's Response:

   thanks. their worse quality because i didnt have paint shop at the time, but thanks for the tip, i will do that for sure

   i just changed it to resources today since many people were compling about it. i did have it as tutorials, i guess i should of just kept it like that. I'm glad you agree, therefore, im changing it back lol.

   i agree with you on the links, im aware of that but i just havent had time. im so busy with school atm and i need to do really good this semester. But once i get the time I'll for sure change those things.

   thanks for the useful tips, its much appreciated!

3. kkickball gave it on 28th Nov 2008 and said:

   The layout is nice! Very simple but very clean. My only complaint, would be that "falsetto.org" be moved over to the right a little on the header. The white of the F and the white of the background of the header are very close to each other and therefore just make it hard to see the F. That's my only complaint about that.

   The graphics are great! You are very talented and I really enjoy the amount of graphics you have chosen to share with your visitors. A lot of people just throw three or four onto a page without categorizing them or even caring to really share a lot. You have that down pat! Well categorized and great graphics as well! I love it

   Looking at your tutorials, I love that too! I'll come there for some tutorials from now on, that's for sure! You really have a lot of tutorials and I'm very happy to see that! A lot of personal sites just have a few tutorials and don't care to really do too much for the people visiting their site. But you have more than enough for your visitors to want to stay and come back!

   Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

   falsetto's Response:

   thank you :D I'm glad you liked it, and I agree about the site name, it is pretty hard to see. sorry! lol

4. 

   Shadow gave it on 26th Nov 2008 and said:

   First Impression

   This layout is very much easy on the eyes. The only small thing is the white "f" almost on the lightest part of the header. It's still seeable, but it's touch-and-go. Someone might say they can see it fine, and others would say that they can't. Lowering the opacity on that part would help. I think you might have screwed up the coding somewhere in the sidebar. That comes later though. I also notice no change on hover for your links. It's a preference of my own, but a hover color could work here.

   Blog and Sidebar

   You definitely need more padding on the sidebar and the blog. It's smushed on the sides. Some line height helps here as well. You're using 8pt for the text, which is much better than 7pt, but it may still be too small on some resolutions. It's recommended to size your text using ems. But since it is pretty complicated, I'll say to make the transformation whenever you're ready. There is a cool em calculator that cuts down the guesswork a bit once you're ready.

   The blog entry titles kinda get lost. They're not big enough. It can stand to be bumped up one or two sizes larger.

   Your navigation should be up a little higher. Perhaps switch the advertising box with it. It's all about priorizing your sidebar.

   The other pages

   Graphics: Anything that has a celebrity on it, trash it. I won't give you the whole song and dance about it, but I'll say this much: copyrighted.

   I like your color palettes. Finally I see some that don't clash!

   You have some good stuff here, but you really need to drop the celebrity images.

   Tutorials: When you're giving away code, it's best to use <code> rather than using a textarea, especially textareas as tiny as the ones you're using now.

   A lot of the CSS/HTML tutorials contain code that shouldn't be used in a layout anyway. For example, in your CSS tutorials, you teach your visitors how to do a horizontal navigation bar by using tables. Not a good idea. Pop-ups is a serious nuisance to anyone visiting any site. Don't promote its use.

   Articles: You need more of these. They're written well.

   Falsetto: I noticed that you said that the site name is a song. I don't know if you're aware, but it's also the high-pitched singing voice of a male (although he doesn't necessarily have to be singing to be forced into falsetto). So you can throw that in somewhere as well. I'm glad that you have that information on this page rather on another one so that this page is completely devoid of anything but links. That's a great thing.

   Wait a second...other than that blurb on the sidebar, there isn't much about you. More! You're worth more than a few sentences! Believe it or not, some people enjoy reading about other people's pets and why they're special to them. Talk about your dog some. When did you get her? How has she made your life special? Talk about yourself. Go ahead, be conceited. If your friends can describe you, what would be their answer? What are your dreams? What are your strengths and weaknesses? Those are some starter questions that some people might enjoy your answers to!

   Coding

   Now I'm going to look into your coding, because like I said, something isn't right with your sidebar. It first starts out as Arial, then it switches over suddenly into Georgia. If this is intentional, please forgive me.

   A-ha! Case in point:

   <h1>Navigation

   You forgot to close the <h1> tag!

   Now that mystery's solved, you have made more fatal mistakes in your coding.

   Fatal Mistake #1: <h1>, <h2>, <h3>...etc tags are used for headers and not large blocks of text. You use <p> for large blocks of text if you don't want to encase them in <div> tags.

   Fatal Mistake #2: No DOCTYPE. If someone were to put this through an XHTML validator, the validator would, if it had eyes and a mouth, give you a look and say "you're kidding, right?" DOCTYPES are important little things. Make sure you use the right one though. w3schools talk about it over here.

   Fatal Mistake #3: You're using tables for your affiliate list. Tables are not for website layouts. You can use <div> tags and some CSS to get the same effect.

   Fatal Mistake #4: You call up your style.css twice--at the beginning and in the middle, right before the main content begins. You only need one, and it should be between <head> tags. You did it right the first time.

   Not-So-Fatal, But Pretty Bad Mistake #1: <center> tags are deprecated. You can use this in your CSS:

   .center {
text-align: center; }

   That will center your text.

   Not-So-Fatal-But-Pretty-Bad Mistake #2: <b> tags and <i> tags are discouraged. You can use <strong> and <em> for the same effect. It's only a few letters more.

   You need some help in the coding. Scratch that, you need loads of help, but all isn't lost! w3schools helps everyone!

   PS: Your site works in all browsers other than IE. Your "this site is best viewed in IE" remark is moot because of that. :)

   All in all...

   On the surface, your site doesn't look too bad. Other than the strange change-over in your sidebar and the lack of padding, you have a decent layout. It was once I delved into the coding where I saw the mistakes. A lot of those are very fixable. It just takes a lot of patience to fix them.

   You need to fully step away from celebrity images. I think you're strong enough in graphical prowess to do something that is all yours. You proved it in your layout. While not perfect, it's not atrocious either. The colors match! I think you need to school yourself a little more in coding before you give out coding tutorials.

   I would love to see a page about you. I gave you a few questions that some people ask. You're worth more than a blurb on the sidebar. It's your time to shine! Do it! Good luck!

   Using Opera on Windows | Report This?

   falsetto's Response:

   Thank you!
   I agree with you on much of the things. I'm slowly working on changing things but I'm sure a great deal of it won't be done before the end of January early February as school is insane for me right now.

   I will change these things, and thanks for pointing them out :)

5. 

   Muse gave it on 26th Nov 2008 and said:

   I was quite pleasantly surprised with your site. The header's really cute, first of all, and relatively different from what I usually see. Also, it's such a nice name, Falsetto. ^^

   Okay, so now I start criticizing. =P I'm not particularly fond of the background, which seems to be essentially black with a noise filter added. You can clearly see where the background tiles. I think a solid colour would do nicely there, or failing that, you could always fall back on some subdued, elegant thin stripes.

   To my mind you need more padding inside the content box, because the text is too close to the right and left sides. (Some more space between the header and your content would be nice, too.)

   In your sidebar, it's actually very easy to skip past the links to your graphics, tutorials, etc. I went from advertising to welcome to owner and then down to affiliates. I believe this is because your actual navigation is such a tiny section compared to the rest, so find some way to draw attention to these links. Perhaps a different background behind the links?

   Your welcome message has a few grammar/spelling/punctuation errors which I've corrected below:

   This is a personal site run by yours truly, and hosted by Desiree. Here you will find my personal blog as well as content for you all to use, such as HTML, tutorials and graphics. Everything on this site was made by me and coded by me, unless stated otherwise. All photos used belong to their rightful owners. Comments are appreciated =]. Best viewed in IE.

   These are not technically corrections, but still things I feel are wrong in here:

   HTML—doesn't really qualify as content in my book. I think the word 'content' here is misused, because content just implies stuff on your site, which technically includes your blog posts—however entertaining they are, they're not probably what you're offering for visitors to use. Perhaps you mean resources?

   "All photos belong to their rightful owners"—this sentence, when I usually encounter it, implies that whoever maintains the site didn't bother to see the usage restrictions of the photos they used—if they can only be used noncommercially, if they require attribution and a link back to the photographer/creator, if they can even be used at all. Please reassure me this is not the case, and every single photo you've used is, under the licensing and terms of use for it, perfectly legal for you to do so.

   "Best viewed in IE"—I will never view this site in IE, only in Firefox, Opera, or Safari. And it looks fine in all (I checked), so I award you my seal of approval in this regard. In this day and age it's bad netiquette to tell users which browser you'd ideally want them to use. They'll use whatever you like, and your job is to either deal with it and make sure your site doesn't break, or ignore the Firefox users and face any possible consequences (such as a rather snippy comment from a reviewer comme moi. I'd rather this sentence be left out (it's not needed, anyway).

   In the 'Owner' section of the sidebar: it seems you ought to have a comma or a period after your name. 'aswell' is two words, not one. You've gone with the overtrendy, erm, trend of listing your likes and hates, and you've abused semicolons terribly. Semicolons are not colons; semicolons connect two semi-related clauses into a sentence. So instead of writing "Hates; creepy crawly things", write "Hates: creepy crawly things".

   And in the Layout paragraph, you've repeated a word with the sentence "Text used is from from Picnik."

   (Please put more padding at the bottom of your content box so it isn't right up next to the bottom of the browser screen.)

   I move on to individual section dissection. In your graphics section, your little alertbox on rules of use has some odd capitalization. In "Do Not redistribute", 'Not' shouldn't be capitalized; "Do not Direct Link", 'Direct Link' shouldn't be capitalized. Perhaps it's just me, but I feel there's a lack of periods (after each of your list items, and at the end of those little sentences on what each resource can be used for.

   A quick note on coding, although I'm not going to be evaluating it: for your rules, you've used a blockquote (which is to be used for quoting long passages, such as two paragraphs of Pride and Prejudice). You've also made use of line breaks and asterisks instead of properly coding your list of rules as an actual HTML list. If you have any HTML tutorials on this site (I haven't checked yet, but I believe you do), this mistake rather ruins your credibility. Even if the only people who will be checking this sort of thing are reviewers. =P Use the proper ul tag here.

   +1 for including the count of how many graphics you have in each category, which I personally feel more sites need.

   The sentence under Affiliate Images makes no sense: "small graphics you can use that symbolize as your affiliates"? Perhaps you mean "Small graphics you can use for your affiliate buttons" or something.

   Your graphics are cute but not particularly special. Some of the button bases, especially, are nothing more than simple gradients—one would think the time to download these and open them in an image editing program is more work than just simply making the gradient.

   Your colour palettes seem to be credited to KCMS; if this is one of your old sites, you may want to note that. It's confusing. Your gradients I can't quite imagine what the use is for an average site visitor, but I love your icons. But please display them so they're not all in one line, because it's hard to view them. I'd prefer you made a skinnier box to display them in, so instead of having one long line of icons you have three or so shorter lines.

   I notice a rather predominant reliance on celeb images in your resources, and—going back to the whole "photos belonging to their rightful creators" thing—are you sure that you're allowed to use those images in that manner? In general these types of graphics are usually infringing on copyright (of the photographer).

   In your layouts section, it's rather annoying how there's always text overlaid over the model's face, and not in a subtle way, so the text is always blocking my view. Textures should enhance the image, not block it.

   For the textures you've provided, by the way, I think larger preview images would help visitors get a sense of what exactly they look like. Some of them don't seem particularly useful, and more like rather blurry single-coloured things than something that would add interest to an image. The paint-splattery one, however, is quite nice, though a bit blurry.

   Tutorials. Personally I think the extra text that gives a bit more information about the tutorials in that category shouldn't be italicized, which makes them harder to read. Kudos for the little thumbnail pictures to the side, though. Oh yes, and there are a few capitalization/grammar errors in the rules: "Do Not redistribute", and I think "Photography used belongs to their rightful owners"—aside from my previously stated dislike for it—ought to read something like "Images used belong to their rightful owners." (I'll have to dwell on this point again—rightful owners? Are you sure you have the right to use all those images? If you do, than please stop saying this. Every image you use should always be yours or used with permission and within the creator's TOU—in which case you would of course attribute if required, and not use if you're not allowed to. Clearly.)

   CSS tutorials—CSS does a lot more than just colours and font changing. Your button rotation thing is actually JavaScript, not CSS, and it doesn't actually teach anything—it just provides some code to copy and paste. It isn't even your code, anyway, so this tutorial should be struck out. I don't really intend to go through all the tutorials and itemize the problems (that would be rather painful, wouldn't it? For me to write and you to read?) but suffice to say that JavaScript tutorials (with code from another site) hardly belong here. 'alot' is two words; your textareas need to be larger so we can actually read the code; tutorials teach, they don't have you just copy and paste. You might as well relabel this section as 'CSS/Code Snippets', it'll make much more sense.

   Oh, and there are so many problems with this sentence:

   Blockquotes is something you can use on your sites, instead of having things just underlined, slashed out, bold or italic, you can have a background on it.

   The implication here is that tags are to be used solely to achieve a certain look. Make something pretty. Overemphasize your text to distraction. Please take some time to read about the concepts of semantics, semantic HTML, and the separation of style and content.

   Your tutorials can't really be classified as tutorials at all. Your Basic CSS one, for example, which starts off saying "CSS is what alot of freewebs site use as well as domains/sub-domains. It may be confusing to those of you who never used it before," proceeds to do nothing but confuse the reader more by giving this huge chunk of code to modify. By changing the colours of H1, H2, et cetera. How are these CSS newbies supposed to figure out how to do that? Go to another site that explains how to modify it? That rather defeats the purpose of your site and your tutorials.

   Articles seem remarkably off-topic for a personal/resource site. Of course you're free to put whatever you like on it, but this probably won't interest many of your visitors and it doesn't quite catch my fancy either. Moving on. (By the by, I am amused how you note that they can't be redistributed, and credit isn't needed. I hope credit isn't needed; considering the articles are about makeup application, I doubt many people would like to scratch your URL on their faces...snarkiness aside, I feel the line about crediting is quite unnecessary. If they can't redistribute, there's no opportunity to require credit anyway.

   About Falsetto—on the main page, you've got quite a few errors. "its not the greatest" ought to be "it's not the greatest", 'alot' is again two words, there are quite a few run-on sentences, and you've neglected to capitalize the letter i several times (as in the pronoun). Proofread this?

   In some of the subpages there, you've also capitalized words where there's no need (they're not at the beginning of a sentence, and they're not proper nouns), so you may want to go back over those pages.

   Aaannddd...that concludes my review. Despite the mostly endless list of the flaws I perceived, it's really not a bad site (especially since you've just started up!). I hope you consider some of my suggestions on grammar & improving your tutorials. ^^

   Using Firefox on Mac | Report This?

   falsetto's Response:

   Thanks for the review lol. I appreciate your honesty and helpful criticizing. I'm aware that a lot of the graphics have KCMS on them, and that is a previous site that I just moved from. I'm in the process of changing that for the easier things to change, such as the colour pallets and paint shop tutorials.
   I'm aware of things needed to be changed, and thanks for mentioning some I never realized before.

   I'm going to be changing some things, but it may take some time since I'm pretty busy until the end of January to early February.
   once again, this is much appreciated :)

6. 

   Becca gave it on 25th Nov 2008 and said:

   Well, I'm only going to briefly comment on your layout, because I'm in a hurry but I like the look of your site :)
   so,
   I love your layout, it contains no celebrity images which is always a plus, but also, it is just really cool. I can't even explain why I like it, I just really really do :)
   Well, uh, on the minus, your coding seems to have 62 errors and 26 warnings :/ you can view them here ):
   Overall (I said it would be quick - sorry!) I really like your homepage and you've brought the colours from the image into the coding so I can't complain there, I really like your homepage and with the correction to the coding (and a full-length review at another time) I can expect to give you a very high score (:

   Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

   falsetto's Response:

   I'm glad you liked my site :D and glad to hear all the positive things. I'm working on fixing the coding but i really have no time right now to finish. once again, thanks :D

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