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Not Quite Petite has 4 Reviews

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1. 

   Cindy gave it on 7th Mar 2009 and said:

   Hey, I'm Cindy and I'll be reviewing your site. I use Firefox with a 1280x800 resolution on Vista. :)
   -------------------------
   LAYOUT: It's very blue. And it's very clean. The latter I definitely appreciate, but you may want to reconsider the former. Monochrome can certainly be done right, but the difficulty with using a color scheme based on one color is that it's hard to have a good contrast between background and text.

   The main black text is readable against the medium blue background (of the #content div), but take a look at the text under the tags. I can barely read it because of the similarity in colors. One suggestion that I have is to use the Juicy Studio Luminosity Colour Contrast Ratio Analyser to assess how "readable" the text is in terms of contrast. Your h1, a:link, and em colors failed the luminosity contrast ratio, so I'd suggest selecting a lighter background color for the #content or a darker text color. Furthermore, I encourage you to try out other colors (besides blue) in the layout. Colour Lovers is a great site that offers a wide range of color schemes; perhaps you can find some inspiration there. Basically, monochrome layouts can be somewhat stifling in terms of design, so adding one or two colors into the layout might give it the "punch" it needs.

   There should be padding between Thoughts, insights and other randomly generated blips from the greymatter. and the bottom margin. The fact that the text is so close to the margin doesn't really make sense; your layout is nicely spaced for the most part but then in certain areas, the text is way too close. Other examples of this include the side margins of your content div. Also, you can afford to increase the width of that content div by 10-20 px, I think. Doing that can give you some more wiggle room for padding but retain the original width of your content.

   No complaints about the sidebar layout; I'm really liking the setup. However, the way you've included every single page on the sidebar is a bit bothersome. I have to scroll a loooong way down to even see the footer. You can definitely afford to have the sidebar simply display links to the categories, such as Basics, Quilting Bee, The Sims 2, Artsy, etc. It's a bit overwhelming for the reader to see a complete listing of all your writings, especially since you've got a lot of them.

   I'm not a huge fan of the footer. Again, watch the margins/padding because the text is literally touching the top margin. Also, I'm not sure why you have a bunch of space underneath the text.

   CONTENT: Your front page content seems very bare, especially when your sidebar listing overtakes your content in terms of quantity. Limiting sidebar content to the category links would make the front page a little less bare. However, you can definitely afford to talk a little more about your site on the front page. The paragraph

   Here you will find my ambitions. Things that my mind has conjured up, enjoyed or simply felt the need to express and share. It will be sparadicly updated, but that is another one of my ambitions.

   I made this site using Dreamweaver MX, Adobe Photoshop 7.0 and Firefox. There is some JavaScript in use as well.

   should read something along the lines of

   Here you will find my ambitions and things that my mind has conjured up, enjoyed or simply felt the need to share. It will be sporadically updated, but that is another one of my ambitions. (I'm not sure what "it" is referring to -- is your ambition to update often? If so, you should probably rephrase that last sentence.)

   I made this site using Dreamweaver MX, Adobe Photoshop 7.0 and Firefox. There is some JavaScript in use as well. (I'm not sure why this part has to be italicized. Also, did you use Firefox to code/make the graphics or is it just a browser? If the latter, I don't think it's really necessary to say that. You could say that you used Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and JavaScript though. After all, some JavaScript still equals JavaScript!)

   To make your front page seem less empty, tell us a little bit about yourself without going into an autobiography. Who are you? What is your name? (See, I wouldn't have known your name from your front page unless I scrolled all the way down to the footer.) Exactly what kinds of things go through your mind? People are interested in the person behind the site too! :) Give people an impression about you that they can take right off the bat.

   I don't really understand the placement of LibraryThing in your frontpage. This page is not necessarily about your library of books, so you don't want to leave that as your first impression to your viewers. I'd stick that on an individual page.

   While perusing your content pages, I noticed that you need to also watch the margins/padding around your images! Make sure the text isn't wrapped around too closely to them.

   On "About Me", it's hard for a viewer to tell what your name is without having to scroll to the footer. Also on that page, the text that is wrapped around the tattoo and piercings photos is a bit odd because the text gets cut off in weird line breaks. As far as your actual write-up goes, I quite like it; it's insightful and allows me to get a better glimpse of who you are as a person. Just be sure to watch out for slight grammar errors not just in this page but also the rest of your content pages.

   Shouldn't the "About Site" button be "About the Site" and "Books to buy" be "Books to Buy"? It's good to keep the site names consistent in terms of capitalization and wording.

   On the "Books to Buy" page, you should italicize or underline the book titles so one can easily distinguish those from the authors.

   I'm not a huge fan of the red arrows next to the external links, especially how they're displayed on the "Contact Me" page. The red clashes (it's best to have a color that complements but doesn't compete) with the blue and the arrow is way too close to the text.

   On the "Quotes" page, you don't necessarily have to say These are quotes that I like, and actually know where they came from!, because we already know that you like the Silvertongue quote because it's on the quotes page and we already know that you know where this quote came from, because you already attributed the quote to Silvertongue "Inkspell." I don't necessarily see why you have to separate that quote from the rest for those reasons.

   Your Blog Archives site seems like a disorganized listing of entries. First, you've got this good list of entries organized by date, then you've got a categorical listing without a title (i.e. Listing by Category), and then another list of your other blogs. It's easier to stick with one type of listing; multiple listings create unnecessary clutter.

   I don't quite understand why you need to have an "About Me" under the Basics section and then another "About Me" page under the Quilting Bee section. Personally, I think the content you've got under the Basics "About Me" page is fine enough.

   The "My Creations" page should be better organized. You've got four small images in one row, then a banner in another row that's right underneath, and then a quilt right underneath. Space the images out evenly, whether you have to use multiple line breaks or more padding or whatever.

   I'm not sure why "QBee Archives" has to fall under its own category as opposed to falling directly under the "Quilting Bee" category (see sidebar).

   Under the "Butterfly Contest" Page, the names of the Sets are not correctly placed in relation to your images. Notice how the Firefly Set has the title, and on the following line, it has the images. The rest of the Sets do not follow this pattern. Instead, it's confusing because you have "The Princess Set" title on the same line as your images.

   For your writing, some articles indicate the date written (like "October Morning"), while others do not ("Jealousy"). It's best to keep things consistent and put dates for every article.

   CODING:
   HTML:
   Don't place a DIV tag between a tag; that's basically placing your entire content within a paragraph, which really doesn't make sense. Just delete the tags, you don't need them there. (line 40 of your code; open it up in Dreamweaver or see http://validator.w3.org and check the "Show Source" option to see which line I'm talking about)

   line: 140-3, check the unordered list where you have "Home". Remember that this unordered is still under a parent unordered list (ul). Even if you are placing a list within a list, that contained list needs to be enclosed in a tag, because every element in an unordered list needs to be contained in tags.

   Remember to close your tag with tag on line 160!

   CSS:
   I'm not sure why you have 5 improperly defined hexadecimal values for colors. You can only use 3 or 6 characters to define colors, but run your code through the CSS validator at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/. #3f87ab600 and #2a7898333 are NOT color values. This might be a typo but either way, this needs to be fixed.

   I'm not sure why you have this under the #content:
   background:#81C3E0;
background-color:#81C3E0;

   background:#81C3E0; needs to be deleted.

   If you look at your sidebar, the visited links are in a different font than your regular links. That is because you have a font family defined for the a:link but not a:visited and a:hover. To fix this, define a font family for a:visited and a:hover so you maintain a stylistic consistency.

   CONCLUSION: Visually, you need to find a way to make your layout stand out. Right now, it's clean but it's not standing out. Think about going beyond a monochrome color scheme. Play around with color to find something eye-catching but not something that hurts your eyes. Go for colors that complement each other to provide contrast. Layout-wise, the site is organized, but content-wise, you can afford to do some restructuring. Think about limiting the number of pages you have, and allow some more padding for your content. Also, watch your pages for grammar/spelling mistakes. Those types of things can turn a reader away, and of course, we wouldn't want that. The content ideas that you have are great, but you need to find a way to organize that so you give the reader a good impression when they enter and leave the site.

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   Distant_Star's Response:

   Wow Cindy, that's quite the review. I've read it over and agree with you on just about everything. I'll print this out and use it as a 'to-do' list once my break between semesters comes up.

   Thank you for taking the time to write just an insightful and detailed review!

2. 

   DarthCena gave it on 20th Dec 2008 and said:

   Upon seeing the screenshot I thought I was going to be visiting a wedding site. The header text seemed rather small and overcrowded by the glow effect. Perhaps bigger text and maybe something explaining the image? It felt kinda out of place.

   Checking out your blog, you talked about getting your coding errors down. As of right now you're at 23 errors, most of them having to do with coding being out of order. If you use Firefox, I strongly suggest you use the HTML Validator Plug-in as it shows your errors and how to fix them.

   Overall I think you are off to a great start so far. I think the big things you need to work on are the coding errors and playing around with CSS and such to make your site pop more. There's so much text customizing you can do to make your site really stand out. :)

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   Distant_Star's Response:

   Thank you for reviewing my site. I couldn't decide on an image for the site that I both liked and wouldn't take away from the content of it. I could put a little caption on it, and there is space in the image for the name to make it bigger, so I can do that as well.

   I do agree that I need to play around with CSS some more, I even took a book out of the library for it but life seems to always get in the way and I haven't been able to even look through it yet. I do use Firefox, and so I will look for the plug-in you suggested.

   My to-fix list seems quite long! :) Thank you for taking the time to write a constructive review!

3. 

   charliegirl gave it on 13th Dec 2008 and said:

   I think the drop shadows is a bit too strong and a bit too much. I would lighten it up some, more specifically the 'Personal thoughts, insights" part.
   Since this is a personal website I would love to see more pictures of you and your husband to add an even more personal tough.
   I am guessing the blog part is not the main thing, more of a personal site. If that is the case then the blog page is fine the way it is. But if it's a little more important then I would think of using some sort of blogging system (or maybe you are and I am overlooking it, to be honest I am not quite sure). There are some decently light-weight versions out there.
   The links to parts of your website colors blend in with the background too much. I would make them stand out more by choosing a lighter or more contrasting shade.
   Your coding is not the greatest in terms of validating and what not but I am personally not anal about that in other peoples websites. I would however suggest closing your container div (should go after the closing footer tag). Could cause viewing problems in some browsers.
   I would think about re-ordering . I think Contact Me should be one of the last ones and welcome page definitely needs to be the first thing.

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   Distant_Star's Response:

   Thank you for taking time to review my site. You're right that the blog part isn't a huge part of the site. I intend to use it more for updates, and for rambling (which usually get mixed together anyways). I can change my link colors to be easier to view.
   I think that what's stopping my validation the most is my use of includes and doctypes. I'm going to play with that tonight and see if it helps any. I will close my container div too, I hadn't realized that I didn't do that. I can change the drop shadows on my image too, since I wanted to make it not have a hanging piece of word at the end of it anyway.

   My navigation defiantly does need some restructuring, and I can attempt to straighten that out tonight too. The welcome page was at the bottom, because it's basically a "clear" button. But it works at the top too, and I can see where you're coming from for that.

   Thank you again.

4. jessica_p gave it on 13th Dec 2008 and said:

   First off Amanda I must say HI!!

   Like I said over at the Q*Bee you need to make your headers not so heavy. Esp with your site name they seem so out of place. This is a way you could style it (it is what I generally use)
   
h1 {
font: 1.3em/1.7em;
color:#616161;
font-weight: 600;
}
   According to the CSS Validator it is valid. If you want just plain looking font change the weight to 400. 600 makes it bold/strong. And from what I understand the difference in the font size is what it can range from the smallest to the largest. I hope that made sense.

   You should also change your navigation a bit. Jem has a really great tut here.

   Your random books look a bit out of place. I think they would look great in the footer area right above your info you have there in your footer.

   There are quite a few things I would take out of your navigation & make into a sub navigation. If you are not using Wordpress (which I do not think you are) it should be really easy to make the sub navigation end up on the side bar. I cannot think off the top of my head on how to do it, but it would only take a few hours for me to figure it out. For instance the 101 Things I love, My Playlist, Interests, etc should be sub naved under 'About Me'. Maybe you can also put updates under about the site or merge it with your blog.

   You are coming right along! Do not hesitate to ask for help over at the Qbee or anywhere else. As long as your willing to learn & put what you learn into action I doubt anyone would have a problem helping you. I cannot wait to see what you do in the future! Also make sure you keep a tut site on bookmark when you are messing around with your site. I think I visited tutorialtastic more times then any other site for awhile there.

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   Distant_Star's Response:

   Hi Jessica.

   First off, thank you so much for such a speedy review! I wasn't sure what you meant by 'heavy' when you commented before, and I was hoping that by reading through the CSS book I took out from the library today, it would clear things up. But that book is huge, and I haven't started it yet. :)

   I did follow Jem's tutorial, and I used that way for my quilt, but I changed it around when I changed my layout on my main site pages. I think I need to restructure some categories to make it not so many options, do the sub-navigation thing like you suggest, but I'm not sure exactly what to put where. Having it like in her tutorial (which I do like) doesn't look the same with a lot of options. And the updates have been integrated into the blog (now that it's working I will use it for that) so I think I'll move this page into the archives page to avoid confusion (mostly for myself).

   I never thought of putting my random books in the footer. That's a good idea.

   Tutorialtastic is awesome! I followed a codegrll tutorial to get the blog up and running and have had that page open all the time for a couple days. But Tutorialtasic is where I learned what divs were and how to make a successful css page, and what to put in there. It's invaluable.

   Thank you again for your review. I have implemented all of your suggestions so far, as I've written this response. I do not know how to do the sub navigation thing though, that part has me stumped, but I'm glad to know my css is valid (I didn't think to check it), that's a plus.

   This review thing wasn't as bad as I thought I'd do, (or maybe I'm just lucky for having gotten a fellow bee to look at it first. lol).

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