Flood This Town

Flood This Town

***-- (Rated by 5 people, viewed by 155 people)

This is a personal blog/portfolio/graphic resource site.

Added by floodtt in Personal

Flood This Town has 5 Reviews

Below are the reviews left by other members on Flood This Town. Jump to review form?

  1. [img: avatar]
    Emileh gave it ***-- on 6th Mar 2009 and said:

    Hello, I'm Emily, and I'll be reviewing your site in Firefox, on Windows XP.

    I like your layout, it's really sweet, and nice and simple. The smiley bucket is dead cute, though. The colours you've used match really well, and the CSS you have is really simple, so I think you could add some other colours, to make the CSS a bit more exciting. The name of your site is also really nice, it's very original.

    Pages:

    Visitor;
    Icons- You have some really nice icons, though, celebrity images. Big no no right now. I think you should make more of the 'doodles' variety with images etc that you've created yourself, instead of using images that are not your own, and adding effects to them.
    Stocks- I really like these, they're really nice, and they're of a really good quality. It'd be even better if you could add more, though!

    Portfolio;
    I like your vexels, I am however, confused as to why they are labelled as 'stocks and scans'. They're of a really nice quality and are very well made, they must have taken you a lot of time and effort! As there are only two images here I can't really comment on much more.. Aha.

    Site;
    About- It's very nice, though very short, I like how you've written about how the site has changed and progressed over the years, which is an idea I haven't seen before and very original!
    Owner- It's very short, yet quite informative. I see that you're going to be writing more soon so I shall let you off for having not very much there as yet (;

    And... That's it x)
    You don't really have a lot of content for me to comment on as yet, but I think that this site has a lot of potential if you work really hard!

    Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

  2. [img: avatar]
    Shadow gave it ***-- on 3rd Mar 2009 and said:

    First Impression

    This is freaking cute! Oh, sorry. But yeah, this is cute. Much better than the last one. I'm not a huge fan of the font that you used for your site name (I was thinking of a more playful and comical font), but the clouds and the bucket are cute. It's not overpowering either.

    The navigation is easy to see, but it's also boring. Make it bigger and put in some effects as well.

    Blog and sidebar

    Your sidebar is tiny. By far the tiniest sidebar I've seen ever. You need to up the size of that. Widen the container if you must (and you should), but sidebars should be at least 200px wide. You need more padding on the sides and the titles as well.

    As for the main entries, the font is tiny. It can be raised to 12px (but look into em measurements as well) to be read comfortably, along with some line height. Also, bump the padding up for the entry titles. As Jem said, Cutenews is "more holey than the Bible". Of course, I'd say it's holey-er than holy water. But you get the point. Fanupdate does a great job at converting old Cutenews entries to Fanupdate.

    The other pages

    Myspace: You only have one up here (and link-only splash pages annoy me to no end), and the screenshots aren't good either. At least you do have them, but they should be bigger to really show how they look.

    Resources: Like I said, I hate link-only splash pages. If you had an introduction piece, along with some descriptions to each link, It'd look much better. As it is, they look lonely. Now with that piece being said.

    -All of your icons (but the two in misc) are infringing on copyright. They should be removed unless you don't mind cease and desist letters (unlikely, but not completely impossible). The two that don't infringe on icons are boring. There are plenty of free stock photos. Stock Exchange is my favorite one.

    -Only one PSD. Get rid of it. Not many people use PSD's anymore, and you'll run into the same problem as with the icons.

    -The vector is okay (meaning that you did a better job than I ever will, but I've seen better ones), but once again, read above. Yes, there are human models on free stock sites.

    -Your brushes page pops up as a 404.

    Tutorials: Once again, only one. At least you don't have a page that says "coming soon", but this is just as bad. If you have only one item on a page, just don't put it on the main site until you get more up. Now, this isn't much of a tutorial either. Teach something that not many know about.

    Site: There is very little about Harrison here. I know very little after reading this. It's clear that it's more along the lines of a graphics/Myspace site, but a couple of paragraphs would suffice. You can put your favorite stuff in paragraphs.

    Same thing with your site info. Throw some info about your objective of the site. What should visitors look forward to? Why should they stay around here?

    Coding

    Doesn't validate; you have 81 errors. So yes, you do have a lot of work to do in the coding. I can help with a few things.

    -In XHTML, everything is lowercase. there should be no capital letters anywhere.

    -Ampersands (&) should be & amp; anywhere that it's entered in. For example, you have a couple of ampersands in some of your links. & amp; will still make the link work, but will make the coding valid. Makes sense?

    -<br>, <hr> and <img> tags must have an end tag. Instead of <br>, it would be <br />. It's the same premise for the other two I mentioned.

    -Alt attributes on images are necessary, even if the alt attribute is empty.

    -As with ampersands, You should use & lt; for the < and & gt; for >.

    Now if you did each and every thing that I mentioned here, you will knock off most of your errors if not all. Here are other things you should consider.

    -Look into coding your navigation semantically. It works this way, but it would be a lot easier if you used lists. this tutorial is where you should start. This will work on your affiliate links as well. And for your main navigation, try this tutorial.

    -<b> should be <strong>. Same thing with <i> (that should be <em> and <s> should be <del>. Don't bother with <u> because it's deprecated in XHTML.

    -Never use absolute positioning. Use floats, margins, and padding and you'll get the same effect.

    All in all...

    In comparison to your other layout, which I purposely held off on reviewing after you said you were going to change it. I like this one better. The sidebar is ridiculously small; make that bigger.

    Your coding definitely needs some cleaning up. For your CSS, look into CSS shorthand to unbulk your CSS file. And your 81 errors are so easy to fix.

    You just started this site, I assume. So I contribute the lack of visitor content, which is what you're offering, to that fact. Before you put all of that in, make sure that you have more than one item up, and make sure that you can use them as well. All of your icons are nicely colored, but they're infringing on copyright.

    You have a lot of potential in this site. So I wish you lots of luck!

    Using Opera on Windows | Report This?

    floodtt's Response:

    Thank you, this is by far the most helpful review ive read!

  3. [img: avatar]
    Peta gave it ****- on 3rd Mar 2009 and said:

    Hi there! My name's Peta and today I'll be reviewing your website. I'm using FF3, Windows and what I think is an odd resolution of 1600x900.

    First Impressions
    - I think your current layout is really cute, and a big step up from the overly dark layout you had up previously. I think the bucket illustration is really cute, but I can’t help thinking it could be even cuter (and go with your name a little better) if you could see some water sloshing about in it :P
    - You’re repeating background doesn’t work very well though, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Why not remove the white box form your background so you just have a cloudy repeating background, and add the white box in using a container div? It would look so much better.
    - Your font is a little on the small side for my preference, however I do think you’ve got the padding and line-height (for this font size) spot on…except for maybe your headers. They could do while a whole lot of padding.
    - Your sidebar looks kind of like you forgot about it, then suddenly realised and squished it in with your content area. Maybe you could make your content area smaller by say 20px, and add that to the sidebar? Better yet, if you go with my previous idea of using a div for your white box, you can make it even larger without affecting your content.

    Coding
    Excellent work! Your CSS validates *gives you a cookie* Alas, your HTML does not quite live up to your CSS standards: 7 errors and 3 warnings. Still better than most however :) As far as I can tell your errors come solely from the Javascript you’re using. Seeing as I know nothing about Javascript, I can’t suggest a way to fix it. But maybe you can figure it out?

    While your CSS validates, it’s also very bloated. Have you heard of CSS shorthand? It’s excellent, using it you can remove about half the code and still have it display as it should. For example:

    background-image: url(BG.png);
    background-attachment: scroll;
    background-color: #8AD4F2;
    background-repeat: repeat;
    background-position: center top;

    Could be shortened to:

    background: url(BG.png) #8AD4F2 repeat center top scroll;

    Now isn’t that better, smaller and cleaner? I use this guide whenever I want to check my shorthand (haven’t yet memorised it all :P): http://www.dustindiaz.com/css-shorthand/. Again, great work on your coding.

    I’m not a fan of MySpace, so I won’t be reviewing your work there. I wouldn’t know what it was for anyway. So that means we move onto…

    Resources
    And I’m already sure I’m not going to like what I see, just from the word PSD.

    Your avatars look very nice (in fact I love the South Par ones), but then there is the issue of copyright. You didn’t take those photos so you don’t have permission to use them. The same goes for your PSD’s. I’m not sure if copyright goes so far as to disallow you using the image of Scarlett Johansen for your vector base, but let’s pretend it does (mainly because I don’t like her). Incidentally, your vector is quite nice, although a little lacking in detail.

    The Misc. avatars you have, were they made by you? I’m curious about the sketchy dude one. Also, your brushes page is a broken link.

    Tutorials
    Ah, my favourites! Oh, it’s for MySpace. Oh well, I’m sure it’s useful to some people. Moving on.

    Site
    I would suggest moving the Owner page to it’s separate section, and I use the age old argument that this is your website and people want to know about you. Looking at your Owner page, I wish there was a little more information about you, featuring, oh, I don’t know, your name maybe? I haven’t been able to find it so far and that feels kind of weird. When it wasn’t listed on your page I figured it would be as part of your sig for blog posts, but no dice. If you’re uncomfortable posting your name online I understand that (I used to be that way), but having a photo of yourself there kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it? Also snaps for the unhealthy obsession with Britney.

    Going to your history page I suddenly realise that your text is all centered. Ick, You should fix this, it really is a pain to read. Are you by any chance using text-align: center; to center your layout? If you use a div to house everything (besides your background) you can use margin-left: auto; and margin-right: auto, (or even margin: 0 auto 0 auto; for shorthand) to center it instead. And then you won’t have centered text.

    Anyway, where was I? Attempting read the history page, that’s it. It’s pretty short and sweet, but I guess there’s not much more you need in a site history page is there. Kudos to you for having an actual contact form in your site section :)

    Conclusion
    Overall I think you have a nice little website. It’s a little lacking in content at the moment, but things like that are easy to change. My main issues are with the celebrity images in the content that you do have. But considering your main visitor market is for MySpace users, I guess you’ll keep the content live as that’s something they will want.

    I don’t really have much else to say, so good work on your website so far, and good luck on making it the best it can be.

    Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

  4. [img: avatar]
    Greykitty gave it **--- on 1st Mar 2009 and said:

    Layout

    If this layout weren't so dark I would say it looks pretty nice, but I can barely tell what's in it. I see a city but the sky background is way too dark so it all just kind of blends together. My suggestion would be add a lighter gradient there. Brighten your blue and maybe add in a bit of a deep purple. Your font is too small, I would suggest upping it to at least 12pt, and I would also suggest making your links stand out more.

    I have seen a lot of layouts similar to this one before so it's not too unique in the respect that there are quite a few nighttime in the city type free layouts around. I would suggest trying something else that really stands out. Even a forest or something at night. Or galaxies... that would look really neat. Find some good images or brushes of stars and galaxies. You could have a nice dark theme with deep blues and purples for that.

    Then again you do have the name 'flood this town' so you could also go with a kind of vector look and have a bright layout. It might be cool to have like an old western type town, and make your content column go up the road and have the old style buildings on the sides. You could even have the store signs be your navigation.

    Anyways, I think you could be really creative with this site and make it stand out a lot. Make it stand out from all the other graphic sites out there.

    Your side bar is VERY cluttered and really takes away from the rest of the site in my opinion. I would drop it and just move all those stats and links to another page or the bottom of your page.

    Ads are not appealing in the slightest, at least these are just text ones though. Again I would always keep things like that to the bottom of the page, but that's just me. I hate having ads in the way or having to look at them while browsing the main content of a site.

    Looking at your code there's so many div layers, egad! I can't keep them all straight. I would really suggest you go through and try to clean up your coding some. Try out the W3C Validator. I come up with almost 100 errors and warnings on your page. If you are going to be using external style sheets be sure to pull ALL the styling out of your layout. Don't leave anything style related in it.

    Ok I think I tore the layout apart enough...there are a few other things, but since I already mentioned some ideas for a new one I won't go into the small things about this one.

    Content

    Site page, I would suggest moving this in your nav to be after your content since it's really not that important and there's barely anything on that page. I would make it a general about page and put some info about yourself and then a blip about the site, and write out a paragraph or two. Make the page worth clicking on.

    Myspace, two layouts. It would be nice to see an actual preview of these styles. That small thumbnail means nothing.

    Resources, icons are ok, all copyrighted images save for the misc, so be sure to have your copyrights somewhere on a credits page or something. PSDs, only one and it's just a celeb. Vector looks ok, and brushes are a 404. I would really suggest putting up some non celeb content. Balance things out, it's not bad to have celebs on there, BUT make sure you always have copyrights listed or you could get into trouble for it. You should try to have things that will attract other people too, unless you just consider this a celeb graphics site.

    I can't say much on the quality of the graphics since I didn't get that much of a sample. They look ok but none of it stood out to me.

    Tutorials, well it's ok I guess. Though it's not a very hard thing to figure out when you are on myspace. I think it's even in their FAQ. Oh well, nothing else to say about this section.

    Overall

    It's ok, a bit of a copy of most every other graphics site I see on the net. I can't judge the quality that much since you don't have much up yet, though it's better than most myspace sites. The layout does not stand out much so as I said above try to make it stand out from all the other sites out there, clean up your coding and brighten things up a bit. Your content well just keep adding to it and try to get a lot of variety in it. This will also help to make your site stand out more. Try to get some really good unique content on there.

    Your site has potential to really stand out, I think you have the skills for it you just need to make some unique downloads and graphics.

    Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

    floodtt's Response:

    Thank you for your suggestions, I will work on them now!

  5. [img: avatar]
    Nadine gave it ****- on 1st Mar 2009 and said:

    Frontpage/first impression: I really like it! The stars are really nice and they look like real stars. The purple color is really nice too. But there could be more space between the content and the navigation etc.. Also I think you’re sitename should stand more out :)

    Me: You don’t have a page about you. It would be nice to know who you are and what your interests are.

    Site: You don’t have so much, maybe write a little more?

    Resources: I’m not going to say anything about the myspace layouts, because I don’t have myspace x) You have lots of icons, that’s good. But I think you should work more on them. I really like lily1 and scarlett1 thow. The PSD you have is really nice cutted out. And the vectors and brushes pages don’t work. If you don’t have content on them there is no need to link them.

    Tutorials: You have one and it’s nice that you have it since it’s needed in the use of your content.

    Over-all: The first post was on the 25, so you’re site is pretty new. Add more content and write more! Just keep it up! :)

    Using MSIE on Windows | Report This?

    floodtt's Response:

    Thank you :)

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