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Ishiwong has 8 Reviews

Below are the reviews left by other members on Ishiwong. Jump to review form?

fitha_fitha gave it on 8th Apr 2009 and said:
Heii. Well, firstly, i'm not really a great reviewer and not a smart girl about this sites thing, but from my glasses i can tell that your great.

did you make the girl wearing kimono yourself? if it's so, cool!!!
about the fonts... it's kinda small.

i like the color, the green is so cute, and the ivy and dots make it more beautiful.
just that, i think.
i don't really know how to review, though :p

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adriana gave it on 7th Apr 2009 and said:
From a first glance your layout mesmerizes me. The use of light greens with coral pinks creates a color harmony. As for the content area, it is clean cut and simple. Overall the site layout is very good but what I really like is that the layout isn't too empty for large wide screen resolutions. Good job! Another plus, is that your site quickly loads in matter of a second.

I'm assuming the rest of your site is very clean cut? Yup, I was right about that when I went to the design section. The first layout caught my eye but the one beneath it is a bit too monotone. One cool thing is that they work in firefox! I have seen a good number of layouts that only work in Internet Explorer. Back to the red and blue layout, first off all the color scheme is gorgeous! The one downside is that since its left aligned, there is a large empty space on the right side of it. Perhaps a textured background or gradient would fill in the void? Either way I still think the layout is pretty.

You have a every consistent style, especially in your avatars. Even though there are roughly twenty, all of them are high quality. Pixels are cute, especially those penguins. =] Nice variety of wallpapers, the range from cute to abstract. Out of all them the streaking flares, panda and Mugen wallpaper and the first one are a personal fave. You are good at utilizing color. I wish you had more wallpapers because they seem to be a stronghold for you.

I briefly looked through your pngs, they are large and have smooth edges. This is a good thing. Ha, the stick figure doodle brushes are awesome! Some of brushes are bit to overdone (as in cliched) but they are good. The only one that isn't that great is the Oceanside brushes, the edges look too pixelated. Perhaps vectorizing them would be better. Same thing with the doodles, they are cute but the edges are pixelated.

You have a talent for pixel art, I am in awe over the little clocks you did in the "mini time tellers". By the way, the birthday cards are an excellent idea.

As for coding, I really do not care if it is validate or not, as long as it works with other browsers and devices it is fine. Your site works on my iphone so that is a plus! Even when I switched over to Internet Explorer is still works.

Lastly, originality is the main thing you possess. Even though your site is an anime graphic site, there is a still a good amount of content that isn't anime. I have not seen that many sites with pixel art like yours, clocks like yours, doodles like yours, and wallpapers like yours. Yup I was bit redundant on "like yours" but what I'm saying is your site is very original.

I enjoyed reviewing your site and it has a lot of eye candies!!!

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Swetlana gave it on 5th Apr 2009 and said:
Layout
I really like the way you set your layout up. The colors used are fresh and really match the current season. I also like how you repeat those dots on your layout image at the end of your site, as a fixed background.

Font
The font you chosed is easy to read, but I would suggest to make it bigger. I would suggest using a font-size between 10-12px.

Navigation
Everything is organized really well and it's also easy to navigate through your site. All the links in your navigation work just perfect!

Content
While I was looking through your links I found some really interesting things, for example your second coded layout. It jumped right into my face! It looks really good, great choice of colors!
Your Avatars where really good too, and so where your Wallpapers! It seems like you put really a lot of effort into your content and I really like that!
Though, maybe you could add some more tutorials, because there was only one so far. And those Tofu-Smilies are so cute! I think I will use them the next time I look for new custom smilies!

Overall
Overall I really liked your site. It's really well organized and shows that you put effort into your site! Keep that up.

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ladyziev gave it on 3rd Apr 2009 and said:
Reviewed in Firefox using 1024 and 1280

Lovely!!, the color is very nice. actually I would prefer a centered layout more than a left sided one, your site looks fine in 1024, but when I open on my laptop (1280) it looks very small :/ but anyway, I like your layout, ;)

I really enjoy browsing your site, I love your CSS, the navigation is very neat and everything is organized. But maybe you could make a different page for yourself and your site, I really like all of the graphic, and pixels that you made, it's very cute! You're really good at it! I think you should write tutorial about it

Anyway, you have a very cute site, i'm impressed. I will definitely come back ;)

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tcaesar gave it on 2nd Apr 2009 and said:
i like the overall estitic of the site but think that you could improve on the justicication of your trpe setting - mainly how the titles have right justification. also, the sites width is very narrow. i am using a resolution of about 1280 width and there is a ton of space to the right. you might consider using a three column format to put some more real estate to the right.

other than that i think your site is very good. maybe you could add a better tagline that will give your visitors and users a better idea of what the site is

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marie718 gave it on 1st Apr 2009 and said:
First impression was it looks like a calm colored design site. :) I absolutely love the site design and everything. Although the copyrighted image might get you in the trouble.. it's still cute. You're not the only one who's done that. Look at everyone who uses celebrity images and etc.. Everything is "copyrighted" >.< LOL. but ya, the site is nice, I like the content on the blog part. Very nice...kudos! I love the favicon you have. I was thinking, maybe the tag board would look nice on the empty space in the right side? Cause some people don't like to scroll down to read - they just go straight to the content haha. You should add a style to one of the font classes so some text is white. I think that would be a nice add to the site. Also maybe the request section of the site should be up higher so people can see it easier. overall I give the site a 4 stars I hope you can review my site in exchange ;) Keep the good work up and don't get into trouble with the copyrighted stuff haha. :] Oh btw, there might be a little too much line-spacing in some of the bold text that irritated my eyes for some reason maybe lower it..? or change the font weight to normal/none and then maybe it'll be fine.. hehe

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wildx22 gave it on 1st Apr 2009 and said:
On first impression, it's a nice and sweet design with a nice colour scheme. But here the BOOOO comes: copyrighted anime/CG artwork in the header, apparently obtained from Digik Gallery. Well no, that doesn't mean you can freely use the image in your own designs, because without the knowledge and consent of the artist/licensor of the image, it is copyrighted and you're violating copyright laws. This applies to all your designs and graphics that use copyrighted artwork such as anime. It's particularly ironic when I glance over your Terms of Usage and you clearly specify that your graphics are not to be stolen, edited or redistributed.

Design
Text: Too small. On my screen it looks scaled to around 9 or 10pt. Definitely not too easy for me to read.
Slightly too many fonts; just on the main page I count 3: Times New Roman, Arial, Georgia. That is just on the edge of maximum, but where you stepped over the line is how you're mixing fonts in the same type of text. i.e. In plain body paragraphs, you'd have serif font for italicised text and sans-serif otherwise. It's untidy, and the fact you styled the italics in a completely different way makes them look like links. You've also made italic font straight? I don't understand your reasoning for this but at the moment you're over-emphasising them. Same goes with the navigation links in the sidebar.
The soft pinkish text with the hex code of #EDB786 does not contrast enough with the background colour, making it hard to read.
I would say the main problem I have with your text is the over-emphasis by adding a whole load of unnecessary styling and capitalisation to text that could have sufficient emphasis with just your traditional <strong> and <em>.
Navigation: In general, it's a rule of thumb that you do not move text or lines on any link hover. If it's in the navigation, I believe a few pixels is fine; however your 20-or-so pixels shift is overkill. To me it significantly displaces the original neatness of the list and I have to shift my eyes to read the links on hover.
Alignment: small, left-aligned layouts pretty much belong to the old days. The more accepted trend nowadays is to align layouts to the centre of the screen for easier reading, particularly with our incredibly various range of screen resolutions. Do you think someone with a 1600 pixel screen would like to have to stick their eyes to the left of the screen the whole time? Although it's arguable that a lot of users of large screens don't actually maximise their windows, I can easily name and handful of friends with such screen sizes that always maximise their windows for some reason. The width of the layout is also rather narrow, giving a huge empty look to the right of the screen.

Coding
Unfortunately non-validated HTML. Would love to see these errors fixed.

Other Issues
target="_blank": Not good at all. You're forcing me to open new tabs/windows when I'm the one who should have control over how I browse sites on the Internet. If I do wish to click a link and leave your site, I want to be able to do so immediately. If I still want to stay, I can easily open the external link in a new tab.

Unfortunately, I have to run for bed. :P So there are lots of points (particularly relating to Content and more about Design/Coding) I wanted to cover but have no time. I give a 3.5 rating for the actually quite pretty and neat overall layout.

UPDATED 01 Apr 09:
Yes I think the navigation links are much better now. :)

But one other big thing I kept wanting to bring up but forgot to is about your cursor. I used to be a great fan of crosshair on my designs myself, but by now I've realised that the default pointer and hand is what everyone is most accustomed to. It makes it much easier for people to know what exactly is clickable, what is not, and makes it easy for highlighting text. On the other hand, crosshair does not serve these purposes of pointing at things, indicating links, or selecting text. It may not be an accessibility issue per se, but like adding target="_blank" to links, it forces your custom cursor on the user somewhat uncomfortably. You would also find that none of the big, professional sites would change the default cursors unnecessarily because it just doesn't make for a nice browsing experience at all.

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ishiwong's Response:
Thanks for the review.~ ^^ I know it's not right, but I'll deal with the consequences when they come. >w<

I changed the links. They no longer have the 20px shift to the right. :3

I also changed the css so that the italicized words are actually.. italic, and the soft pink color is no longer soft pink.. hopefully it'll be easier to read, now?

I think I fixed the HTML (so that it should be validated). There are only warnings, but it's from cutenews (xhtml) and I don't know how to fix those, so blah. ><

Mm, I'm sorry for my target="_blank"s. Usually people don't really think and just click links, and if I could, I'd rather them stay on my site a little while longer :3 (that's what happens to me XD)

It's unfortunate you couldn't go over some of the other stuff that you wanted to go over, because I think your review is very helpful. Thank you very much! Hopefully the changes I have decided to make according to your review make my site just a little bit more bearable for you.~

Once again, thanks. ^^
Luscious gave it on 31st Mar 2009 and said:
Hi, I'm Jenny and I'll be reviewing your site in Internet Explorer! :D If I don't like anything, I'll try not to be that harsh! ^^

The first impressions: Very cute layout! Totally anime-ish! Everything is nice and organized!

Layout: Again, very cute and organized. I tried validating your layout but it doesn't work apparently. I'll look at the CSS and validate it. Your CSS is all validated so that's good! :) About the "Welcome to Ishiwong" though, I personally think it's too big so maybe you can shorten that or put it in the sidebar. The colors are nice, very simple and plain but that's good. I think you should update more though becanse "once a month" is not good enough for me, maybe once a week or even once every two weeks, I'd think that's okay.

The Other stuff: The pixels are sooo cute! You are soo good at them! The emoticons too! :D I totally love it! THe designs are nice and simple so that's really good. THe second one though is very thin in the width. You should make your next ones a bit bigger. You have very good tutorials, but you only have one. You shoud totally make more! :D THe silloete came out really nice. Your vexels are really cute too! You should make more of those too, they could get really popular! Aww the birthday card print able is very cute as well! Did you make that?? :P

Overview: I don't really have any problem with your website 'cept for the HTML validating bit. :) You really sound really good at everything and I hope you can validate your site soon! YOu should totally put the validated CSS button up right now! :) Hope you continue to do very well on your site! I'll give you a 92/100! :) THanks!

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ishiwong's Response:
Thanks for the review!

My site wouldn't validate because a commenter commented in Japanese. I removed the comment, so it should be O.K to validate now. ^^ Thanks for the heads up.

Yes, I did make the birthday card print. >w<

I'll try to keep in mind about making bigger layouts :p

Again, thanks for the helpful review!