Smuffle has 9 Reviews
Below are the reviews left by other members on Smuffle. Jump to review form?
![[img: avatar]](/avatars/Vera.jpg)
Vera gave it
on 21st Apr 2009 and said:Hey Clairessa, you reviewed my site (eons ago) and it occurred to me, that it would be high time I returned the favor :P Sorry for the lateness.
= First Impression =
----------------------------------
Oh it's different from the screenshot: much more to my liking. If I weren't here to review you though, I'd exit right away though. Things are much too bright and faded for me to comfortably browse it.= Presentation =
----------------------------------
I have a problem with viewing bright colors, so this layout is rather difficult for me to look at. But putting that aside, there's nothing really that stands out to me. Generally I expect some sort of focal point, to start taking things in, from. Here, everything seems to be so intent into fading out. I have to make a conscious effort to stay focused.Once I get past my brightness dislike and focus on the layout, I find the color combination nice. It's a pity though, that you use such faded out tones. Use stringer shades, so as put put a bit more contrast between different areas of your layout.
Looking at the text, I get very reluctant to dive in, especially as most of my reviews focus on a site's content. Everything looks so cramped and eager to take up as little space as possible. Why? It's not like there isn't enough of it to go around. Your sidebar is especially tiresome to read. Put more distance between the various paragraphs, and avoid justifying the text. Though this may look good on paper, it's not to be used on websites.
Read these two articles (they're very short) on why it's best to avoid justified text on websites:
http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/publicwebsite/public_textjustify.hcsp
http://astheria.com/design/choosing-type-alignments-forthewebNext, I notice that each edge of the layout "box" seems to have a different border (even going so far as NOT to have one). As an idea, I guess it has some merit, however your implementation of it just doesn't cut it. The general impression I get is that someone just rolled out of bed and blindly threw on whatever clothes they could reach. I'd suggest to try out having at least two identical borders: for example left and top respective right and bottom. This way you can create a three dimensional effect if you want, by playing a bit with lightning effects.
On the whole, I'm undecided whether on how much I like (or dislike your layout). Once I start looking at it, I get used to it, but I can't say I come to like it.
= Content =
--------------------------------
- Blog -
It's alright, nothing too bad. You might want to use commas more often though. Otherwise those sentences can be quite a mouthful.
On your sidebar, don't have the introductory message on every page. Why not try to implement a dynamic sidebar? Here are some tutorials to help you do it:
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2007/11/how-to-create-multiple-dynamic-sidebars-for-wordpress-widgets/
http://www.guitarangel.net/geeky/the-dynamic-sidebar/ (Melissa's in the process of moving to http://melly.me, if this link doesn't work, check it out there).
http://internetducttape.com/2007/04/09/howto-design-a-variable-sidebar-wordpress-theme-with-widgets/
http://www.zeroonea.com/?p=3My personal choice, is that presented by Melissa (2nd link), but that's just because I'm a coder and prefer writing out stuff myself, rather than relying on widgets. But either way is fine.
In the paragraph denoting the extra stuff, I notice that you link to your Wordpress' admin panel. I'm sure the link is not hard to memorize, or you can always bookmark it. But there's no reason for visitors to see this. Aside this, it's never a good idea to display a visible link to a backend feature that others are not meant to make use of. That's just an invitation for trouble.
I see you have the banner for valid CSS, but not one for valid (X)HTML. Having the latter valid is much more important. The CSS, is ultimately just a superficial layer that should be easily replaceable. The (X)HTML is the foundation of any layout. Oh well, personally I don't care if someone's coding is valid or not, as long as it's correct and well-written. A few slip-ups here and there can happen to anyone.
Out of curiosity though, I clicked on the CSS validation link. The result: invalid. More on this, in the coding section.- The awesome -
... the awesome what? You're missing a noun there.
Hm...you're one of those people who thinks he/she can fit in a list. Well, at least you have some pictures. Please specify a left margin for the unordered list (ul tag). The bullet are glued to the pictures.
From what I can read, you certainly TRY to come off as funny/witty, but it's not really working. Well at least not for me. For the most part, your writing style seems rather chopped up. Sure, given that you decided to present yourself in a list, this is to be expected, but you should at least stay focused within one list item. By the way, list item tags (li) require either an ul or an ol (unordered or ordered list) tag, as parent tag.I tend to like reading self description, autobiography pages, but yours just makes me want to get over it. I suppose that might have been what you thought when you wrote this page: "let's get it over with". Pity, you do seem to have the potential to write well.
Your cat's page would be more interesting if you had provided some explanation for the photos. Yeah, I like cats, but I don't know you/your cat. Try to make me (the visitor) understand why I should like the cat as well.
- smuffle -
Odd way to display a sublinks' page. I'd expect this to be the style for a sidebar navigation. As a rule, don't center text unless it's a title.Why are credits more important than your site's description? You should try to keep visitors here as much as possible, so links to others should be put last. Don't use such large letter spacing. It makes reading the text more difficult.
I was expecting more from the site description. For starters what is smuffle, and why is it the name of this site. All you talk about is how you hopped from host to host because of a bit of downtime (yes one week is not much, especially when you're staying for free).
Instead of "advertisees" wouldn't it be better to use "advertised"? Most especially since the former is not actually a word.
- art -
Your icons are incredibly run of the mill. I've seen the same style countless times, try something different.
The sketchbook pieces are interesting, but you should work on your coloring. Lighting and shadows can enhance picture in an amazing manner.
I love the two abstract designs in your portfolio. However it makes me wonder if it's your own work. They seem to employ an very different style than the rest of your work.Now I notice that you use the JavaScript back link: don't. Not everyone accesses these pages from within your site. They might get here via search engines. If that's the case, these back links will take them straight back to the search results pages. Aside this, every modern browser has at least 3 methods to send the user to a previously viewed page. There's really no need for you to provide your visitors with yet ANOTHER one. Just type out the actual link to the page you intend them to go back to.
The barber shop is quite interesting. Why not tell visitors a bit more about it. I like the songs. You guys have talent. If you have more videos, you should consider using some sort of video gallery plug-in, to better organize and display them. See http://mashable.com/2007/07/27/50-wordpress-plugins-for-multimedia/, more specifically "Video Tools".
- resources -
Oh a reviewing guide... seems all the hype these days.Your personal opinion is not needed
Personal opinion is inevitably going to find its way inside a review. After all, different people may be affected by the same things differently. If you want an impersonal review, then I suggest you use a script which analyzes your site merely based on a the number of images, file size and JavaScript used. Sure that's useful for optimizing loading time, but at the end of the day if humans are bored by your content, you can have the fastest loading website and it'd still be useless.
The reason I put this is because you must realize that in most cases, your reviewees won't really care about your opinion not to mention that it's not really helpful at all.
If they don't care about my opinion why would they submit their sites for a review? After all asking for one, means they want to know what I think of it. What's more, if you don't think anyone cares about your opinions, why do you waste your time reviewing them?
The scripts you mean are CSS respectively HTML validators, not checkers. I'm not entirely certain about your stance on valid coding. On the one hand you tell us that it's so important that it's the first you look for. On the other hand, you tell us not to make a big deal of it. So which is it?
Furthermore, you also said before:
Don't go into a review looking for mistakes. Go into a review with the mindset of a regular visitor.
Validating a the site's code as the first thing, means you think there are mistakes.
When you browse the net as a "regular visitor", do you immediately open a website's source and look at its coding? Don't you first read what the author has to say?On the whole, you DO have some good points that you want to discuss. Nevertheless, you didn't properly think this article through; you contradict yourself quite a lot.
http://lianko.com/reviewer.php - it's a similar article, I wrote two years ago. Try to structure your ideas better, and re-read your article before publishing it. Make sure that your point stays the same throughout the entire article.
I notice that you tend to spell a lot as one word, correct this. "Allot" and "a lot" have very different meanings.
Your tutorials are well explained and exemplified. They're a bit too basic for me, but for beginners they're very good. Your way of implemention an image map tutorial, is not a very good one. Said code, is not comforming to the usability and accesibility web stabdards.
Read the two articles below, for better alternatives:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/imagemap
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssmapsWhen it comes to writing coding articles, you should always make sure that you're updated with the most recent tendencies. This area of website building is constantly evolving.
Nice brushes: I'm quite pleasantly surprised to see these original styles.
Your quotes are interesting: but make sure you use the proper punctuation. Some of them look awkward.
- Tagboard -
An entire page just for this? Why don't you put this on the sidebar? This way it'll be more accessible. Alternately, you could also use a guest book plug-in. Or an easier solution: define a page as guestbook and use the comment pagination plug-in (so as not to have all entries on one page). That way you can also avoid spam comments easier.= Coding =
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Your title tag should be found inside the head section.
If you use an external stylesheet, don't put inline style within your HTML tags. Make use of classes and ids: http://www.tutorialtastic.co.uk/tutorial/classes_and_ids_whats_the_difference
You seem to be using full stops (or periods, if you prefer) as headings. I don't quite get the logic behind that. Why would one single period be a heading? Instead of using h2 tags, perhaps a paragraph or a span tag would be better suited.
Your body tag is not closed.
Center tags are deprecated. Use CSS to center align your text/images (text-align: center or margin: 0 auto).Also, try to keep your coding style consistent: don't write most tags in lowercase and some in uppercase. The current tendency is to write everything in lower case, though HTML support also uppercase. In your CSS file, your spacing doesn't seem to be consistent. Some tag/id declarations are separated by 2 blank lines, some seem to flow into another.
Having a more organized code, will make maintenance easier.
I don't validate coding, because you're perfectly capable of running your own site through a validator. To me, the logic behind the way you make your coding is much more important. Same way that a few spelling mistakes don't cause me much headache, if your article is well written.
You seem to have most of the coding basics down, but I did notice a few odd choices here and there.
Score: 3/5
When I started the review, I expected to be met by yet another teenie-bopper layout. I'm pleasantly surprised that this is not the case. Nevertheless I'm also disappointed that you're rather eager to make use of a lot of standard content.
You have a lot of potential, but you need to spend more time on your content pages. For the most part, I got the feeling that you just wanted to finish things as fast as possible. So, inevitably, I also merely skimmed through quite a few sections. After all, if you can't be bothered... you can hardly expect me (a stranger) to do so.
I can't say I'll be back often, but I might pop in sometimes: hoping to hear a new song, see a new original art. Just like you said in the article about blogging "you should always be unique". Don't try to fit into the swimchick fan club so badly. You have potential for much more.
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![[img: avatar]](/avatars/agpolarbear.png)
agpolarbear gave it
on 5th Jan 2009 and said:Hey! It's Alex from Exhilaration, and I'm reviewing you! lol
Here it goes:First Impression:
The first thought I had was - clean. It is definitely different, and I'm not sure if you were just being lazy or really going for a look like that. Personally, I like the effect of how you wrote Smuffle v.30 at the top, although more color would be nice, and I don't me the splash as the sidebar. I see at the bottom it says CSS validated! Woot!You don't really need a back button on the bottom of the layout, because most browsers (if not all) have one too. Just an opinion.
Me:
I read you have a cat. How cute in its hat! The pictures take a while to load, though. Nice amount of words on this page, not too much, not too little. Like the sections of different facts and stuff you like. Perhaps bold the categories, so it is easier to tell apart.Smuffle:
I saw at the top of your me page was a read line. I figured that would go through the whole site, changing colors with the different links on the sidebar. I guess I was wrong, but perhaps think about adding that, it would be easier to tell apart the sections.Great amount of credits! Add what you are crediting them for as well, to be more respectful. Basic site info page, tho perhaps include small pics of old layouts, since you seem to have had 29 before the one up now; I'd like to see! If you are scared of stealers, put a watermark on them. Neat advertising idea, not sure how many free advertisings I've seen before. I'm confused with your buttons page. I thought they would be buttons to link you, but it looks like an unupdated advertising page. Maybe fix the link?
Reads:
You don't have many pages of reads, so this section looks rather empty. Either add more or combine multiple sections. As for the quotes, I love a good quote page, except none of them say who said them. There's no credit, not even Anonymous. If you are able to, give each quote credit.Art:
Love the icons! Very nice! I like the different designs on them. These are celeb icons tho, just reminding you, even tho you said you don't care xD Nice stuff in the portfolio, tho if you don't want anyone taking anything, you should probably put a sentence up on your portfolio page explaining that. I'm not sure what those videos are doing in an art section, so perhaps move them, unless you were trying to go with the whole, "music is an art" thing. Which is true, but it just seems odd where they are placed to me.Tutorials:
Very nice image mapping tutorial! Athough, the link said "without a program" and it ended up that you need a graphic program to use the tutorial. Just thought I'd let you know. Other than that, you have a lot of cutenews tutorials. Very nice. I wish I'd seen these when I used cutenews. I like how you break everything up into steps.Resources:
Very nice drawings! Glad you put the "credit is a must" part above them. As for your icon stock, they look more like normal icons with me. Perhaps combine the two somehow. Or credit where you got these icon stock photos? Good textures as well, tho they take a while to load.Tagboard:
Basic cboxBlog:
Brings me back to the homepage. May want to write "home" instead of "blog" for confused people, but it's completely not necessary.Final Overview:
So, your site is very nice, and I can see your personality in it. The links on the sidebar are kind of misleading, though. You had so many different sections, when lots could have been combined into one visitor section, with different categories. It would be easier to update that too, lol.Also, add an affiliate page, instead of just linking to your affiliates (i think that is what they were) at the bottom of your site. It would be more polite to your affies, and you could link to the "apply for affiliates" page from there or your smuffle page as well. And, when I went to that page, the coding was off. Just a heads up.
From the looks of what you have, I can see you have talent. Just work it more! haha
Good luck with your site :)
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sassa12489's Response:
Thanks so much. I didn't know about the affiliates page so thanks for that. I decided to just link them on the index because I said in my rules that's what they were required to do so I was gonna do the same.
And I didn't know the image mapping tut was misleading. I'll change the title. Thanks
rockcandy gave it
on 25th Dec 2008 and said:First Impression/Layout:
I thought that your layout was neat. I liked your top header though. However, I think that you should make your site name more visible on it. It's supposed to be one of the main & first things that a visitor notices on the layout.
Second, your navigation is way too busy. There's way too many links. You can probably put reads/tutorials/resources under one simple 'visitor' category; that'll clean things up a lot. Moreover, I think you should put the more important links on the top; the ones your visitors are more likely to click. That way, they don't have to spend time searching through your huge link clump to find some content.
Also, for your links, don't space out the words. It's annoying and looks unorganized.Blog:
MAKE THE COMMENT LINK MORE VISIBLE!! I can't stress this enough. I was looking at your blog, and I couldn't find the comment link. A visible comment link is very important.
Also, make your blog title header bigger. It'll look better, and it balances it out.Content:
Like I said before, I think you should have all your visitor content in one subcategory on your nav bar, since you have so many links.
Since you don't have that many links under each category, I would suggest using pictures & descriptions. It'll look nice & organized.
You should also sort your tutorials into categories, such as image effects, gimp tutorials, etc. It looks kind of sloppy right now with all the images and different types of tutorials all over the place.About Me:
I think it's a tad bit too long. I think a few brief paragraphs, and some basic information (music interests, movies, likes/dislikes, etc) is fine for an about me. Also, the pattern thing "Clairessa _____; Clairessa also ____" just annoys me for some reason. I also think talking in first person for an about me sounds better.Overall, your site is okay. It's not that great to be honest, but your graphic skills aren't bad. Have lots of interesting & different content. There has to be something special about your site that'll make people want to come back.
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![[img: avatar]](/avatars/Mimi.jpg)
Mimi gave it
on 23rd Dec 2008 and said:Reviewed with:
Mozilla Firefox 3.0.4 | 1440 x 900 Resolution| Windows Vista
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------First Impression:
Well I kind of skimmed other reviews and I guess people have been telling you it looked a little cramped? I hate to follow the masses but I must agree. I love the concept and the header at a glance but I think it just needs to be grabbed by the sides and stretchedddd out a little bit! :D
Dunno if someone has said this or not but just in case... DITCH CUTENEWS! They are horrible! It's easy as pie to hack your site if you are using Cutenews plus the spam is like, a total bummer. :P If you are scared of Wordpress (a lot of people are but I just don't know why! It's easy!) there are other things that are more simple like Fanupdate or Textpattern.
Ok let's go!
Coding:
Every time I do a review I start out by seeing if it validates via the W3C Validators. After this I will go into detail about CSS because I am a total CSS fanatic and then onto the rest. So I shall start with validation first.
Okie doke, your CSS passed for validation but there are 7 warnings if you care to address those. They are all dealing with the repeating of certain colors in certain areas. If you visit the validator it will tell you exactly which lines are repeated. :)
Your CSS looks pretty good but might I suggest you use shorthand for all of it? I see that you use it for your borders (IE- border: 1px solid #000; instead of border-width: 1px; border-sty.. etc) but on things like font-family, font-size, etc.. you can also use it. For example your #main section would go from this:
#main {
margin : 0;
float : left;
width : 100%;
padding : 0.5px;
background : #f4f2f2;
color : #202020;
font-family : verdana;
font-size : 10px;
line-height : 14px;
}.. to this:
#main {
margin : 0;
float : left;
width : 100%;
padding : 0.5px;
background : #f4f2f2;
color : #202020;
font: 10px/14px verdana;
}You can combine a few things with font and I am actually writing a short guide to it but for now I will just link this guide and it kind of shows you how you can shorten stuff in your CSS.
Another thing I noticed is that you are using px for your font size and line height. I would advise that you convert all font sizes and line heights to either pt, em or %s. Reason being when you set your font with a px amount, if someone were having trouble reading your site they could not increase the text. They might get frustrated and leave. While it might not seem like a major issue more people do it than you might think. I actually do it sometimes and I am in my "prime". LOL Anyway, same with line height. If you changed your font to pt, em or %s and the person increased the size, if the line height didn't increase with the font size then the words would get smooshed! So if you are interested in doing this it is very simple, just use this conversion chart. So for example in your #main section, you use a font size of 10px. This would convert to 7.5pt, 0.625em or 62.5%. Although I really think that is a bit too small for standards these days, it's up to you. ;)
Moving on to validation of the rest of your coding we seem to have some major errors going on here. :S It looks like you have declared a DOCTYPE for HTML 4.01 but there are 60 errors and 50 warnings..!! The first problem I immediately saw was that your code looks like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<html>
<head>You can't have a meta tag on top of the HTML or the head tag. So you need to move it underneath. Also for some odd reason you don't have an ending tag for your head and there is also no start tag for your body! So if we movethe meta tag and add the missing tags, the top of your coding should look like this before you get into the divs:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>smuffle version 28</title>
<link href="style-landscape-header.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body>That is guaranteed to put a stop to some of those errors right then and there. Always remember not to put anything over the html and head tags except a DOCTYPE and don't forget to close tags when you are done with them. :)
Concerning a few minor errors I noticed, let me just list them for ya:
- When you use something like <div id="sidebar"> , you can only use it ONCE on your page because it is an ID. If you are going to use your #sidebar section more than once the fix for this is simple! In your CSS file, change #sidebar to .sidebar . In the rest of your coding instead of saying <div id="sidebar"> , use <div class="sidebar"> . You can use a div class as many times as you want but remember that you can only use id once!
- Another thing is that your images are missing the alt tag. When I first started doing this web stuff I thought if you had an alt in an image that you HAD to put a description in it. Well, it's very helpful to people browsing without images but it is not required. Try to get yourself into the habit of adding alt="" to your images. For example instead of <img src="blahblah.gif"> , use <img src="blahblah.gif alt=""> .
- The marquee that you are using to show your advertisements is causing a butt-load of errors, too. Personally I hate those anyway because it's hard to see everyone's button that way. Instead why not use an image rotation script? It won't cause a bunch of errors and it will show a different button every time someone loads one of your pages. When I used ads (I only got rid of them like 2 weeks ago) I used a very easy little script that Jem (the owner of this site!) wrote a tutorial on! See Jem's Basic Image/Ad Rotation Script. She always breaks things down so they are super easy to follow!
- You have two valid CSS logos when really I think you only need one.. Anyway, the code for those are giving you some errors. The thing is that when you declared your DOCTYPE as HTML 4.01, you were telling the world that you are going to follow the coding rules for HTML 4.01 specifically. In XHTML 1.0 Strict or Transitional you have to end certain tags with a slash because they don't have special tags to close for them. Let me give you an example because that probably made NO sense. The tag you write for a link looks like this:
<a href="blah.html">Stuff</a>So you see that when you start a link, you use <a href=" , end that tag with "> . After you type your URL or the image you want to make a link, you close the link tag with </a> . So the link tag has a special little helper tag to close it! Now when you want to display an image, you would use something like this:
<img src="blahblah.gif" alt="">.. in HTML that's ok and that is as far as you have to go. However, I don't know if you have noticed but there is no such thing as </img> , right? You don't have to add that to the image tag to close it. In XHTML you HAVE to close the image tag, but what are you supposed to do if there is no </img> ? Well, that's why sometimes you might see something like this:
<img src="blahblah.gif" alt="" />Notice the space and the slash on the end? That is telling the image tag to close itself since there is no special closing tag. So anywayyyy, when you are linking the valid CSS images, they gave you a code that was XHTML valid, so it has that slash on the end of it. It looks like this, right?:
<a href="http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/"><img style="border:0;width:88px;height:31px" src="http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/images/vcss-blue"
alt="Valid CSS!" />To make it valid for you, because you are using HTML instead of XHTML, you need to remove that space and the slash on the end of that image tag. Here is what will validate for your site:
<a href="http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/"><img style="border:0;width:88px;height:31px" src="http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/images/vcss-blue"
alt="Valid CSS!">Your extreme tracker is also causing the same error because there is a space and a slash on the end of it, you should remove it as well.
- Why on God's green earth do you have another piece of header and CSS in the BOTTOM of your coding!? This.. this needs to be removed! All of it!
<html>
<head>
<title>landscape</title><style type="text/css">
body {
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
text-align: center;
}a:link,a:visited,a:active
{
font-family: arial;
font-weight: normal;
font-size:10.5px;
letter-spacing:3px;
text-decoration:none;
text-transform: lowercase;
word-spacing:3px;
line-height:12px;
cursor: crosshair;
}a:hover
{
color: #FE180D;
cursor: crosshair;
}h2 {
font-family: arial;
font-weight: normal;
font-size:1px;
color: #ffffff;
background: url(http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m111/kisstheraingirl12489/layouts/bar_landscape.png);
text-align:center;
text-transform: lowercase;
letter-spacing:1px;
line-height: 5px;
margin:0px;
}h1 {
margin-bottom: 0px;
background:#202020;
margin-top: 0px;
line-height:10px;
font-size:9px;
font-family: verdana;
text-transform: uppercase;
font-weight: normal;
color: #f4f2f2;
text-align: center;
letter-spacing:-1px;
border-bottom: #438891 .5px dotted ;
}
h3{
background: #f4f2f2;
font-size:1px;
line-height:4px;
border-bottom: 1px dotted #f4f2f2;
}h4{
margin-bottom:0px;
margin-top:0px;
line-height: 9.5px;
font-family:arial;
font-weight:normal;
background: #9DC7BC;
font-size: 9.5px;
color: #f4f2f2;
text-align: right;
border-bottom: #202020 .5px dotted ;
}a:link,a:visited,a:active
{
color: #438891;
font-weight: normal;
font-size:10px;
text-transform: none;
text-decoration:none;
}a:hover
{
color: #202020;
}a.auto, a.auto:active, a.auto:link, a.auto:visited {
display:block;
width:132px;
font-family: arial;
font-size: 10.5px;
font-weight: normal;
letter-spacing:1px;
text-decoration:none;
text-transform: lowercase;
text-align: center;
padding: 0px 6px 0px 6px;
overflow: hidden;
}
a.auto:hover {
background: #f4f2f2;
border-right:6px solid #202020;}
</style>
.. That is so weird..! Anyway, if you are needing that CSS that is down there, just add it to your external CSS file. O.o This is probably causing half of those errors. Your poor page is confusing itself! :(
If you just do all those things I listed you will probably only have 5 or less errors to deal with.. MUCH better! Make sure you take care of those errors, though, you don't want to mess up someone's browser or something and lose visitors! :o
Design:
I simply ADORE the header but I will make a very tiny suggestion for it.. I think it would look much better if the font that says "smuffle v.28" was bold because I love the way it changes from black to white, but it's still a bit hard to see. I think making it bold would make that problem disappear.
I think that the headers with the black background that have your post titles and stuff on them need to be WAYYYY bigger than that, I literally have to squint just to read your post titles. I do like the thing you have going on there with the header underneath it. :D
I think overall it just needs more padding. I usually do 10px of padding on the sides or even more sometimes. I just don't like the look of text bumping into the sides like that, or being really close to it.
I read in another review that someone mentioned your list is over in your navigation and I know of an easy fix to make all of your lists stay put instead of doing that. I got this from Jem's tutorial site once again, it's like heaven over there. Anyway, add this to your CSS:
ul {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
margin-left: 35px;
}When you tell it margin 0 and padding 0, it is telling the list basically to start all over again in all browsers. Then when you add the margin-left 35px (or you can change it to more or less, of course) it tells it to position itself EXACTLY where you tell it to no matter what browser it is in. :D Nifty, huh? Just make sure you are using the <ul> before you start using your <li> tags, ok?
I think your navigation looks good when someone hovers over it but kind of boring before that. It just looks like a list of links.. Maybe change the background color?
I probably said this but.. Larger font size!! LOL It's SO SMALL! I'm an old lady, you can't be going around and being cruel to old ladies!! ;P
The friends section looks really messy.. Why not make them side by side or something? That way they aren't all just THERE, you know what I mean?
I suppose that's it for design suggestions! Just make things bigger overall. :D I think it's affective the way you have it.
Content:
Ok, I'm fairly positive you have heard it but celebrity images are illegal. I used them until fairly recently when I started talking to others about it. Truth of the matter is that people think it might be illegal but everyone else does so obviously no one cares. Not true. People often do receive letters or e-mails instructing them to remove the copyrighted images or start paying a licensing fee. It's kind of like downloading music, you know? That's extremely illegal (unless you are paying on that iTunes site or whatever) and people do it all the time. More recently they have been making a bigger deal to show that people ARE getting arrested and fined for it. That is the exact same concept.
I have one suggestion for your credits section, perhaps explain what you got from each person? Long lists are kind of pointless in a way, it's like people aren't getting the recognition they deserve. I noticed on this page (probably others as well) that there is a link at the bottom that says 'Go Back' and then one right underneath that which says 'BACK'? Probably only need one, but really you don't need that link at all. I mean, there are back buttons on browsers. :P Again, it's your site so it's your choice.
Erm..
Copyright laws on images don't phase me a bit so reviewers, leave me alone :D.
So it's all good and fun until you get caught, right? Don't take this the wrong way but I almost hope people that say things like this DO get caught, people just don't think laws apply to them. Bummer, I was thinking about how quirky and cool you seemed until I read that. :(
On your quotes page the introduction is bold as well, I don't know if this was intentional but I thought I would point that out. Also when you are quoting someone, you generally say whom it is that you are quoting... That's like leaving half of the coolness of quotes out! I would suggest that you do that for curious minds.
The Misc. icons are cute but you know what I feel about copyright infringement. As a matter of fact, I am going to comment on that blog entry about stealing code when I am done here.
The content is all pretty typical and generic so I am going to just kind of skip it. I think you have potential but you need to push the envelope more, rather than just doing what everyone else is doing. It's basically your ordinary celebrity stuff that almost everyone uses on their sites and I don't even bother looking at that stuff anymore because it's been done overly much for the longest time now.
Also I noticed that you use PNGs for most of your image files. These are really large files and make loading times horridly slow, you should consider using other file extensions like GIFs or JPGs even.
Final Thoughts:
I think that your site is pretty good over all but after I saw the content I was kind of put out. I saw your sketches, those are FANTASTIC! Why not do more original art and stuff like that?? I don't see that very often, letting people use hand-drawn images. I also think the Barbershop Quartet thing was awesome. :P
The CSS is nice, just needs some tweaks. The coding was a little shoddy but it just needs some advice, which I gave. I was kind of curious as to why everyone was giving you lower ratings because from first glance I thought the site looked rather nice. I think I understand now because of the content and outright refusal to dare to be different that was on your site page. I think you can do better, I really do. Also you know, stock images aren't a bad option at all and you can still make your icons and such.
I am really excited to see a new layout, I saw you saying something about that I believe. I hope it's wider for my old eyes! :P
UPDATED 23 Dec 08:
In your source code that whole section was in it. I just clicked view source on the main page and your page started off ok and then in the middle of it was another html, head and css thing.Anything more about the review itself rather than just the copyright thing? :(
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sassa12489's Response:
It's not that laws don't apply to me and I feel specially privileged in a way, it's just I don't care. I figure if they really wanted to crack down on it, sites like sweet and talented would be gone. And its not like I'm selling anything with those images so it's for personal use. Besides, if they wanted to sell the pictures, then it wouldn't be all over artists' websites that are free for all.
I'm a bit confused about the middle part of the review: why on god's green earth... about the css. where is that because that is not supposed to be there.
![[img: avatar]](/avatars/Muse.jpg)
Muse gave it
on 21st Dec 2008 and said:Tennis. Writing. Graphics. Design. Perfect. ;D Hullo, I'm Cel, I'm going to be reviewing your site tonight, et cetera. Review is split up into four sections: initial reaction, design/aesthetics, content, summary (and where I reiterate my most important points—the stuff I can remember after ten minutes).
Initial Reaction:
Header image. Pretty. Slightly over-textured. Pretty versus slightly over-textured…pretty wins. Layout. Small. Skinny. Cramped. Text looks squished. Cramped. Black. Overwhelming. Sinking into the depths of the darkness in my soul—
Design/Aesthetics:
Well, that was fantastically unhelpful. Okay, let me elaborate. At first the header image looked a bit over-textured, and then I realised it had this lovely photograph-y 1950's nostalgic-summer-holiday feel, so on second thought I really do like it.
However, the text is hard to read. I'm fond of dash fonts, but in this context it's rather unreadable. It'll need to be thicker if you want people to read it, but I would advise switching to a nice font that fits with an old-timey, vintage theme that your header image has already established.
And your layout is honestly too thin. The text in your sidebar feels cramped. The text in your content feels cramped. Your site would be so much better if you would put 100 pixels more space in for the content area, and perhaps 50 pixels more for the sidebar.
And more padding, all over the place. Sidebar and content: the text inside needs more padding on the top and to either side.
Your text is a bit small too, and I'd really prefer it to be a little larger, but if you work on making the layout more spacious this won't be so much of an issue.
Your comment box is far too small. I like being able to read what I'm trying to say as I type, and it's so tiny I can only see about twenty words at one time.
Also, in your posts, it was hard to figure out where the comments link was, and it's kind of unclear and unreadable, the "with 19 smuffles" text. In your actual posts, the comments and the actual post you wrote ought to be more clearly separate.
You have this habit, too, of using larger letter-spacing for several places (such as in your 'Friends' links in the sidebar). It's quite hard to read. Letter-spacing can be done tastefully, but it should be done a little smaller—and it looks better in words that are all-caps. It's really hard to read words that have extra letter-spacing after a while, too, and so your credits page is a bit hard to go through.
And in your 'Moi' page, the image of you is a bit too close to the text. It needs more padding on the right and bottom.
Content:
I think the trend of Speaking. In. Short and Clipped. Sentences. Kind of Died Out. Years and Years Ago.
Or, at least, it became annoying years and years ago. If you could rewrite the 'Me' section in your sidebar that would be lovely.
Oh yeah, and I don't really know where to put this, but why in the world is Cutenews telling me my comment is too long? It's frustrating. x.x 282 words is too long? You might at least say where my limit is.
Anyways. On your site.php page, where you tell the history of your site, you ought to write "Copyright laws on images don't faze me a bit".
Pursuant to your admirable goal of cross-browser compatibility, I quickly took a look at your site in Opera and Safari, and it looks just the same as in Firefox. Although your header image is taking an insanely long time to load. Remember, it's probably faster for you, because you've already loaded and cached the image in your browser, but a first-time visitor will have to wait ages for it to display properly.
Your icons aren't too bad, and there's this lovely heart-shaped cookie one that has a bit out of it, which I particularly like. ^^
On your tutorials page, I'd advise putting the link to miscellaneous ones under the graphics tutorials.
The Cutenews tutorials I imagine must be quite helpful for your visitors, although I personally don't use Cutenews myself (and by the way, Cutenews isn't really a very good blogging script to begin with). You might like to elaborate that the 'divide by zero' tutorial is actually a guide on what to do with this particular error message. Title it 'Cutenews Error: division by zero' or something.
Great icon tutorials. ^^
Onward to resources…some of them aren't too bad. The 'sketch book' ones could be titled better, because I originally though this was a page that was supposed to be in 'Art', until I read your terms of use.
Your brushes are fairly typical, and aren't particularly interesting. Same goes for blends, although I've never really liked blends (so it could be more personal taste).
One slight issue I have with your icon bases is that you often have multiple bases cropped from the same image. Instead of including three or so different croppings, just choose the best one. The slightly off-center ones look the best—perfectly centred icons are often bland.
Your textures page takes forever to load. You've apparently just resized the full texture, so to view the page my computer has to download every single one of your textures to display. The loading time is horrendous and it's very user-unfriendly. Have thumbnails of your textures instead that link to the full-size image. I honestly didn't bother sticking around until they finished loading.
I quite like your icon textures, however. The paint-splattery ones seem to have all the same paint splatters, though; more variety would be nice.
Summary:
As it is, I see so many sites that are far too cramped for my liking. Yours is sadly one of them, and it's a pity, because it's not a bad site when everything else is considered. So please make your sidebar and content area wider, pad your elements more generously, and—
DON'T USE CUTENEWS. Please. FanUpdate is less prone to hacking and works pretty much the same way. You can import your archives into FanUpdate from Cutenews, too, so you won't lose any of your old posts. ;D
I hope this review helped. ^^
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sassa12489's Response:
Thanks. This was very helpful. Everyone has been telling me everything is too cramped and I agree. That is what I'm going to work on with my next site version. i didnt know you could do that with fanupdate so i will most definately switch.
![[img: avatar]](/avatars/omgitzvicky.png)
omgitzvicky gave it
on 19th Dec 2008 and said:First impression is good, the header is lovely and I like the way you've very faintly placed the news print over it. How ever I would change the Smuffle V28 to a nother font, it distracts from the header and makes it look cheap. I would also make it a bit thicker, it makes every thing look super lengthy (eg the moi page) and tiresom to read. Other than that, it looks great.
I ran your site through W3C validator.. dun dun duun 55 errors, eina. I know my site isn't perfect, it has something like 15 errors but I would try fix some of those errors.
Moi Page: I like the 3rd person narration but I wouldn't start every paragraph with your name. It gets annoying after a while. You've described yourself at length and I find that great. I also like the way it's seperated into paragraphs and looks neat.
The site: I like that you have a credit page, but there are so many! Wow, maybe divide them up under headers as to how they helped your site.
Read: The Quotes are cool :) I like most of them. I love the Juno quotes :P
Art: The baber shop quartert is cute! Maybe instead of having its own link place it under the "Moi" page.. I'm not a fan of loads of links on the side bar.
Tutorials: It's sooo great that you have previews of what the graphics tutorials do instead of clicking "Icon tutorial" and hoping you like the effect! WELL DONE! I didn't read the Cutenews tutorials as I feel they're over done and you can find them anywhere. The zipping a file under misc. was really helpful and well explained BUUUUUT there is something MAJORLY wrong with that page. Your layout loads twice, once as per normal and then a second time inside the the white area under the tutorial. Also you might just wanna add screen shots for people who are slow.
Rescources: for the brushes, it's quite confusing because some of them (with more than one page thing) have numbers under them and then some have none. I was quite blonde and looked for numbers, I didn't immediatly assume to click on the image, so just to be user friendly you might wanna add numbers to all of them or make two previews in which we'd click on the image. In the Sky pack I don't see the point of the coloured rainbows, brushes don't come out in colour so they're pointless. Your textures are okay, I wouldn't personally use them. You might want to neaten up how the large ones are displayed as it looks very messy right now with all the different sizes. I'm not such a fan of the blends as they're quite boring, just pictures with coloured effects, and some like the Paramore blend looks far too over powered by the blue overlay. Very basic. Another thing on the Textures main page, it's sooo irratating but something happened with your layout and now the main place and the side bar touch, but the main place is like 2px above the sidebar. Look into that
Tagboard: Random. I'm not a fan of this (on any site) as people could just comment the blog. But whatever floats your boat
Overall, it's a good site with a reems of potential. Just one thing, on different pages it sometimes says "go Back" and then on others it says "BACK", kinda irratating so you might wanna change it to one or the other.
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sassa12489's Response:
I just ran them through the w3 validator and it says it's perfectly fine.
UPDATED 20 Dec 08:
The blends were made to be as plain as possible so people could edit them freely. I wasn't making layouts. Just simple blends.![[img: avatar]](/avatars/OMGalarm.jpg)
OMGalarm gave it
on 18th Dec 2008 and said:First impression; I really like the header picture. I'm a sucker for those selective colorings and scratch textures ;D I feel it should be a little wider, everything is very tight now. You should have used another font, the one you have isn't very readable. Also, I don't think the black background fits very well. It's too dark, you should try with a lighter color or pattern.
Layout; everything looks.. stuffed, in a way. There's too little space in your sidebar and content, and in between them. Also, there should be space above your header. I think the background color of the contents fits well, and it would be really great if you put in some more space, or did what you got a little nicer. builtbyrobots.org got just as narrow space to write, but you don't notice it so well because of how it's done. Look at learn! I like the little banners you put under the header! Your CSS is very pretty and nice to look at. I'm not a particular fan of the font you've used though, neither the font and the size of the headers.
Pages; these are easy to navigate though, and are nicely organized. I don't like how everything is centered, though. The way you got centered simple links on every page is really boring. Maybe you can put in some words, some nifty way to put up the links? You should try to put the main text in boxes like these; http://www.black-stripes.net/blockquote.php, it looks much more professional.
Moi; There's a lot here, and one can really get to know you and what you think. However, I don't think most people bother to read though so much mass text. Maybe ligthen it up a little with facs, profile, anything.
Site; it's good that you've credited so many sites. It seems like you got everyone you needed. About the site is nice and simple :) So are the rest of the pages here.
Art; yout icons are nice. And I love how things pop forth in your portfolio!
Tutorials; a lot of useful stuff here. You should put cutenews tutorials, html and css in their own separate category. There's not many tutorials, but the ones you got are good.Overall; your site is good :) I might come back. Especially for that lightbox tutorial!
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![[img: avatar]](/avatars/Roxy.jpg)
Roxy gave it
on 18th Dec 2008 and said:I knew your site sounded familiar! I used to host you on my old domain Simply-Torn! Nice to see that you still have your site up and alive. =)
Layout/Design:
I'm not too fond of the narrow layout width, but it doesn't look too unpleasing to the eye. I love the image used in your header, did you take it yourself? The title unfortunately gets lost in the photo as it isn't very prominent. While this isn't a major issue, it's a matter of whether or not you should have it on the image or not. Since I didn't notice it at first, I can safely say you can take it out or at least make it more visible to the eye.Other then that, I think your design/layout is organized and aesthetically pleasing. I also love the color scheme you have going on.
Pages:
Moi: Lengthy! I like it, my only problem would be how you change from first-person to third-person narrative sometimes. Please stick to one, for not it looks like the third-person wins! I would change all of those "I's" into "she's".
Site: I'm not a huge fan of the center aligned navigation for pages. It's understandable that to the left, it makes the page look plain and empty, but this way doesn't help the cause much either. I would highly suggest maybe adding bullet points, images, and/or descriptions to each page. It helps make the page look less empty and more organized.
Reads: I almost clicked on the back button thinking it was the only link there! This really obviously isn't a good thing and stems back to what I said above about adding some "elements" to your pages.
For the quotes, it would be nice to see them in between quote marks and also a credit back to those they are made by.
Art: I feel that you can put the icon's link under Resources rather then Art, as you are distributing them to visitors and technically are resources.
Under the Portfolio page, for some reason the text in your side bar gets larger and squished in the small width it is in. Also you're thumbnails take a while to load, which really shouldn't be, but I see they are just shrunken PNG files of the larger image. I would highly suggest in taking the time to make these into real thumbnails.
The Barbershop videos are very interesting!
Tutorials: Not sure if you know this or not, but CuteNews has a few hidden bugs that make it easy to hack and so is highly being declared as unsafe. I would suggest not publicizing it more with tutorials.
Under the Misc. page, I think the lightbox tutorial is a waste as not only do you get the instructions within the ZIP folder, but the page you direct them to, to download the file pretty much says the same thing.
The zipping tutorial page is messed up, as your layout's header and side bar are repeating underneath the tutorial. Might want to take a look into this. =(
Under the graphic tutorials, I would recommend just making these into action scripts and giving them away that way! less pages and text for you and much easier for the visitor.
Resources: Under the Sketch Book page, this line "You may use these as resources. Credit is a must. If you don't, I will kill you because this is parts of my soul. Mmkay, are we clear? ;D" rather odd, but who am I to judge? Your art is unique and different, I would rather see them under the Art page rather being distributed as a resource instead.
Coding/HTML/CSS
While it's nice seeing that you are using DIV coding rather then TABLES. I see a few mistakes that should be mentioned and fixed immediately.First one being that your
<head>isn't closed, where it should be.YOUR CODING:
<head>
<title>smuffle version 28</title>
<link href="style-landscape-header.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"><div id="container">
HOW IT SHOULD LOOK:
<head>
<title>smuffle version 28</title>
<link href="style-landscape-header.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
</head>
<body>
<div id="container">then right after that closing head tag, there should be an open body tag to follow...THEN you can start the coding for your content. Looks like you jumped the gun on that one.
As I'm scrolling down, I see that after your side bar coding you have the missing closing head and open body tags in the wrong place and are also repeating the open HTML tag. I would highly suggest removing this and fixing it. Also you have an external stylesheet, so why do I see inline styles here? Get rid of it and stick them in your external sheet instead!
Lastly, I've noticed a lot of these headers tags
<h3>.</h3>with just periods, what's that about? I doubt the period needs to be in a header. I'd be sure to look into this ASAP and delete the ones you have littered at the end of your coding.
Overall: Your site has a lot of potential to grow and for now just needs a lot of improvements and fixes. Good luck!
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sassa12489's Response:
thanks for the html review :D
![[img: avatar]](/avatars/Greykitty.gif)
Greykitty gave it
on 18th Dec 2008 and said:1280 x 1024 resolution
First impression is good, the font you have is a bit small but then again you have a smaller layout so it works. I usually don't like small layouts but you made this one well and it doesn't look cramped. One thing, watch out on your bullets, they overlap into your navigation on every page that you have them. I would add just a little more padding to your text since its really close to the edges of your layout, but it's not necessary.
Your content is great. I love your kitty. ^^ I would suggest using thumbnails or something though for the page because it takes a while to load the images. Your about section is good, interesting to read. Site section is standard but gives all info that is needed.
Your tutorials are nice, nothing that I haven't seen before but they are neat and organised, and easy to follow. Watch out how some of the images break out of your layout.
Your resources are nice, you have some lovely blends and icons. I would say watch out for copyrighted images as some people can get very anal about them being altered and reposted, but since most of your stuff is not I won't get onto that much.
The reads section has promise, get some more writings posted!! lol Your quotes were nice though.
Overall I really like browsing your site. You have interesting blogs, good content, and a nice layout. Keep up the good work!
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