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The Green Beat has 8 Reviews

Below are the reviews left by other members on The Green Beat. Jump to review form?

1. 

   flashglam gave it on 24th Dec 2008 and said:

   Layout / Coding
   Wow this made me smile, it's cute, and right for the season, but there are people with different religions out there so next time you make a seasonal layout, keep that in mind. Other than that, I'm really attracted to this layout.
   Moving onto coding. I can't really say much, I'm not a coding guru myself. I can say that I'm glad you're using containers, and that you use a somewhat reliable blogging script, unlike CuteNews. I did notice a little glitch, however. Your layout is a bit off tune with your content area. Here's a screen capture: http://i40.tinypic.com/2uihvvd.jpg . I've also noticed another little problem similar to the previous. http://i43.tinypic.com/dw3uqb.jpg . Move your layout a bit to the right, or your content to the left. It seems that's what's causing the problem. I see no other problems, so good on you. I like how your text is actually readable and your content width is a good amount. I've noticed you like Georgia Italics, but why not change things up, It seems like just too much Georgia Italic.

   Resources
   Wow, I'm really impressed. I found all your resources pretty useful. You didn't use any copyrighted material, so brownie points for you! On the resources page, there's also a link to your credits page, which leads me to a page with a few buttons then the rest text links. Choose one, it was a bit confusing at first. Your h3 is a tad light, I had to highlight the text to read it. Your links are a bit small, you could make them a size or two bigger.

   Site
   Well, I first came across a spelling mistake here. "Thegreenbeat.net was created on July 17th, 2008 and taken from an old freeweb" The website name is Freewebs, so even though it was YOUR Freewebs, the name is still Freewebs.
   When I clicked on "Ask Me" I was lead to another page, there's no problem with this but I just thought I should mention that the background actually didn't show up until after. If you wanted an alternative, you can put your ask me in your actual content area, but this is personal preference of course.

   Tutorials
   You have a good amount, but most of them you've used copyrighted images as examples, as you probably know, it's illegal. It's not as hard as you think, go outside and snap a photo, or you can ask one of your fellow web designers with photography sections if you can use some of their images. Your images load slowly, and some of your tutorials are on separate pages. Just let your visitors click a link that leads them TO the image, it ensures that your tutorial will fit into your content area.

   The Green Post
   This is a great idea, showcasing others' work. I hope you did get their permission though. Everything looks just fine here :)

   In conclusion, I really enjoyed your website. It had no major problems, and I hope I helped, and even if I didn't, at least you've got another opinion!

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2. yazinator94 gave it on 3rd Dec 2008 and said:

   Nice but the layout maybe a little too simple.
   I also think that your layout should be a little..more easy ti navagate through.

   I see alot of nice stuff on your website and I think it has reall great poteniaonl.

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3. 

   jasmin gave it on 2nd Dec 2008 and said:

   I love your unusual positioning of your whole blog, layout affices and advertismet, I really like it when people are different with the positioning of their content and layout, ect. some people say it dosen't look right but I think it's unique, so I like that factor. I also have to mention that your site name is really quite cool, it's stuck in my head right now and is very catchy. Your layout, again is unusual, plain and although I am not a fan of just websites names as a layout, you have made this work, probably because of the unusual text type, it all looks like a newspaper. It has a really great effect, I thought I wouldn't like that sort of thing but from looking at your website, well it's very different I like it! Ok, lets look at your resources, oh no..the whole page content has moved to be centred and the affice list is over lapping the layout, you really could do with sorting that out, Iv'e had that problem in the past unfortunetley I can't remember how I got rid of it. your brushes are awsome, I like the first set and the hand written set, great job on these. The smilies are reeally nice! I love your textures aswell they are really effective looking and useful for making layouts. Your tutorials are very helpful and easy to follow, and I like how you have presented your icon tutorials.
   Your site section is quite detailed and there is alot of information here for the visitor to find out about you and your site etc.

   Overall, I think that you have a nice site although there is still room for improvements, I would like to see you add some more graphics and resources for your visitors and maybe you could sort that whole moving content thing. Good luck for the future!

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4. 

   Muse gave it on 29th Nov 2008 and said:

   I don't exactly want to call it 'plain', because it isn't. It's clean and simple. I'm such a huge fan of large italicized Georgia, in any case, and I think the header is lovely <3 but a bit unbalanced. More padding to the left and perhaps (it might work, it might not) move the text down a little more.

   As far as execution of the layout goes, I really have no complaints—there aren't any parts that stick out to me and seem like they're begging for attention, so good job. ^^ I rather think there needs more padding to the left of your blog posts, though.

   The navigation links, too, might do well to have a blue background behind them? As it is, when I decided to go take a look at the other pages of your site, my eyes immediately went to your affiliate links (the area where I usually expect to see navigation links). I know your main links are quite large, but I automatically & mentally categorized them as part of the header and forgot about them when I went to find the content.

   But. I'm oriented now. Onwards!

   At first, I had no idea what the Green Post was.

   The Green Post has one site featured in four different categories (graphics, photography, tangible merchandise, and paint/sketch).

   Yes, but what is it? That just says what it does. I clicked there and felt lost for a moment, so you may want to write a sentence for users to orient themselves. The featured sites, however, are lovely and well worth linking too.

   (Oddly, it took ages for the background to load for me. At first I didn't even realize there was one.)

   Again, more padding on the left of your content may be nice here, and I feel the 'know a site?' link at the bottom is floating in the middle of nowhere; there's several lines of white space above it, and it appears you've been using several br / tags there. Please. Don't. If you want space between the 'know a site?' link and the rest of your content, make it a little less space than you currently have (which makes your link look displaced) and do it in a slightly cleaner way coding-wise.

   Another thing you lack—a link back to your main site from the Green Post page. x.x

   I move on to the site section, and whoa hey I think our birthdays fall at around the same time! -cough- Sorry.

   So, Safari is better than IE, to my mind, but it's still not okay on your about page to state "Best with Safari at a 1024x768 resolution." As a general rule, I hate these notices, because they seem to imply that the user ought to be using that browser if they want to see the site properly. Obviously there will be some browsers that render your site better than others, but don't put these notices up.

   Besides, 1650x1260 or whatever my resolution is displays it fine, trust me. ^^

   I've noticed something odd, namely: on your 'advertise' page you have tons of space under your content box. =/ Check it out and have a look? It isn't there on your other pages.

   Affiliates page—your bullet points are falling out of your content box and overlapping with the grey border around it.

   Ask page—I asked a question. ;D

   Credits page—I rather like your borders around the images (or, rather, outlines). But your last sentence, which says "Do so here—well, the 'here' is on its own lonely little line, and at first I had thought you'd just left your sentence hanging like that. Turns out the word has been displaced one line down.

   Right around your linkback and past layout pages, I've begun to notice your particular design aesthetic. It's not overcomplicated, and it doesn't rely on overdone graphics to look pretty. I'm actually very fond of the third of your past layouts. ^^

   Your tutorials aren't bad—I can't complain that they're unoriginal and seem like carbon copies of many other sites, because they're relatively different, and I do get the impression you put thought and effort into them (especially with all the screenshots!). But why do they all link to a different page with your site layout stripped? It's not cohesive. And I'd really prefer the text of the tutorial be actual HTML text, and not written on the images. While I wait for tutorial images to load, I usually like to scroll down and get a general picture of what I'm supposed to do.

   I do like how, for several tutorials, you've provided a link to downloadable resources that are the end result of the tutorial. It's a very nice touch, and cleverly pushes visitors to click further. ^^ But links to those resources would be even better.

   Resources section—are you planning on learning how to create fonts, then? Or you've already figured out and you're just working on them? Very cool. ^^ Your brushes aren't too bad, and I especially like the Brush Strokes and Grunge ones. Icon gradients—I was wincing as I clicked on them, expecting to see a simple and dreary two-tone kind of thing going vertically from top to bottom. But I can actually see myself downloading these, and they look quite pretty.

   One thing I want to note is that it'd be better if, when inserting an image with the img tag in your site, you also specify the height and width attributes for it. This basically blocks out the area the image requires, so the length of the page won't change and extend as pictures start loading themselves, but will already kind of have that space reserved.

   Icon textures are nice. ^^ And—whoa—your smileys are amazing. (And the preview images.) They're cute, and adorable, and very nicely done. I love them. And that leaves your textures—which do not seem to be loading fully for me, because I'm only seeing the first few. Very nice; I get the feeling you're fond of light textures. ^^

   So unless you have any other pages hidden somewhere, that concludes my review. I quite liked many of your resources provided, and the tutorials are quite good for this kind of site (a personal/tutorial/resources one). Hope this review helped. ;D

   UPDATED 29 Nov 08:
   I like the new layout you've put up. ^^ Particularly how you've formatted your blog posts; there's a very clear visual hierarchy now.

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   Maison's Response:

   Yeah that helped a ton, thanks a lot for taking the time out to write it ^_^
   I've already started fixing some of that stuff

5. 

   Adier gave it on 27th Nov 2008 and said:

   Okie dokie. I'm going to make this review somewhat short and sweet. I'm only going to review certain things because I'm a douche.

   At first glance, your layout looks very plain. Not much color going on. It feels extremely off as well, because of your left-aligned header and navigation. Centering those two things would make this design a lot neater and feel more open.
   Please don't tell me "The Green Beat" is an image. You can easily do the same thing with some CSS, sweetie. Which downs the loading time.
   I'm curious as to why you have <style type="text/css"> tags in your CSS file. You don't use <style> tags unless you're directly embedding CSS into your code. Remove those.
   Speaking of your CSS, you really need to read up on Shorthand CSS, or CSS to begin with. Things like:
   body
{background-image: url(http://i499.photobucket.com/albums/rr352/generationblood/photoshop/layouts/gray.png);
background-repeat: repeat-x;
background-color: #f5f5f5;
background-position: top;
color:#000000;
font-size: 15px;
font-family: arial;
letter-spacing: 0px;
line-height:14px;
text-decoration: none;
font-weight: none;
}
   can be reduced to:
   body {
background: #f5f5f5 ("http://i499.photobucket.com/albums/rr352/generationblood/photoshop/layouts/gray.png") repeat-x;
color: #000;
font: 15px/18px Arial, Tahoma, sans-serif; }
   Much better. I also increased you line-height, because a 15px font with 14px line-height is simply ridiculous. I suggest reading up on a bunch of CSS tutorials.
   You should also read Jem's tutorial on Basic Image/Ad Rotation Script with PHP. Javascript is slow and buggy. On the note of the Ad Rotation you have going; wouldn't it be better to have, say, 3 or 2 ads going at once? You know, on top of each other? It would make a better use of that space.
   Add a header saying "affiliates" above, well, you're affiliates. While you're at it, make the links in that box as big as your normal text. Why feel the need to size them down?
   I'm not even going to talk about the tables and the Ask and Answer script you have going there.

   On to the links..
   The Green Post is an entirely different website so I won't say anything about that. Just.. Why is it the first link in your navigation if it leads outside of the website?
   Site: Er. I guess you forgot to close a tag somewhere? All the text on here is in Georgia. While I was scoping through you're code to find the missing end tag I found that you are linking to 2 style sheets in the middle of your page... Do I really need to comment on that?
   Photoshop Tutorials: Just about all of them are a bit too basic. But they will help beginners, I will give you that. I might just find them too easy because I'm a total beast at Photoshop. B) How about making those Icon Tutorials into "regular sized image tutorials" Because that's basically what they are, only sized down into a 100x100px box.
   Resources: I find it strange that you don't want people to give you credit where it is due. I can understand with the textures and and gradients. But what about the Smilies and Brushes? If you don't want people giving you credit it's A-OK with me. I'm just confused as to why? :S Oh, I like you're smileys. Sexy, sexy.

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6. Victimizes gave it on 27th Nov 2008 and said:

   Your layout is really simple. I'm not all that sure on it. Maybe it will grow on me.

   Site:
   The first thing I see on your 'site' page is a section about you! I suggest you move this little section to its own page. If you don't want it on your homepage why don't you switch the paragraph for the paragraph on the 'about' page and then rename the 'about' page to 'about me'. I hope that makes sense!

   The rest seems to look alright.

   Tutorials:
   Some of the tutorials you have are hardly tutorials, but I really like your icon tutorials. I think you should try and focus a lot more on them then on the basics that every other website out there has.

   Resources:
   Your brushes seem like the usual, really. Don't get me wrong, they are nice. I like the bar code idea though.

   I like how you have done your icon gradients. They are not like the usual icon gradients, they are unique. But most of them, if not all I would class as textures. And I really like your larger textures too.

   I think I may have just sat and downloaded all of your icon textures! These are so pretty! But people might mistake them for large textures from looking at the preview. On the preview, they don't look icon sized.

   When your smilies page loaded up I grinned, end of.

   Overall:
   I personally think that your layout lets your whole site down. I really think you are talented in the respect of textures and icons, use this to your advantage!

   And your website took forever to load for me. And my laptop is fairly new!

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7. Celery gave it on 27th Nov 2008 and said:

   Design/Layout
   The design is a little plain, and the blue is too bright for my eyes. I agree that there's a lack of balance in the layout. The content area could be at least 200 pixels wider. It's especially small on my widescreen monitor.

   At first glance, the navigation links just look like text. There should be more space between them. Also, why are all your other links so much smaller than the rest of your text? The text in many of your tutorials are also too small.

   Your favicon is cute. :3

   Content
   I don't like that your layout disappears when I click on your tutorials. If would be nice if I had access to other parts of your site without having to click the back button. Speaking of which, the back buttons at the bottom of every tutorial page aren't necessary, seeing as browsers already have one.

   The content link in the navigation should be "resources" or something instead. Technically, everything in your site is content. Your resources are very nice. I especially like your textures and smilies. :)

   You shouldn't link to your art page if it isn't up. I'm lazy and don't want to have to click more than I need to.

   Coding
   You're missing something very important! A doctype. Your CSS (which would be better if you included it in your external stylesheet) should go between your head tags. The head tag should close before all of that stuff, after your title tag. The only stuff that are allowed to be in there are: , , , , , and .

   On your affiliates page, you're using li, but what kind of list is it? These items should be inside ol or ul tags.

   Instead of using center tags (which are deprecated, by the way) you could use text-align: center in your CSS.

   Overall, I like what you have to offer but your design could use some oomph.

   UPDATED 27 Nov 08:
   Oops, this page tells you what's allowed in head tags.

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   Maison's Response:

   Thanks for the review.
   Yeah I'm thinking about using the Post layout for my next layout.
   Thanks for the tips, I'll work on it this weekend.

8. KaylaMae gave it on 26th Nov 2008 and said:

   Layout
   The layout seems unbalanced. All the other elements are nice, but you could center the header, and make it smaller to balance the content section, or make the content section bigger.

   You could also change up the navigation a bit. Make it more interesting and whatnot. I actually thought it was a subtitle at first. I waited for the navigation to load, because I thought it was going to load on the side or somewhere more obvious.

   I'm also having a bit of trouble reading the text. The think the serif font looks nice, but it needs to be spaced out more to pull it off. Curvy texts tend to clutter easily.

   I do like the layout for The Green Post much better. :)

   Content
   Green Post - A great idea, you should add more!

   Site - The site section seems like it should be split into an about/about me section and a site section, rather than just bunched into one. I wasn't expecting your information when going under the site tab.

   Art - doesn't work. You could remove the border around the 'coming soon' sign.

   Photoshop Tutorials - very nice, just keep adding more! You could make this section more basic and do more of a variety of tutorials. A lot of people can't afford photoshop, so we need to find different tutorials. :(

   Content - I think of content as more text, I think this section title could be altered. Graphics, freebies, or whatever. You could also add a lot more to this section, and a lot more variety.

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   Maison's Response:

   Thanks, that does help a lot.
   Now I know what not to do in my next layout.

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