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Sophia has 5 Reviews

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

1. 

   Gin gave it on 17th Aug 2009 and said:

   Wow um, Okay? You should remember to remove your sites once you've gone on hiatus, or at least leave a message here.
   But, I'm just seriously wondering why you didn't leave your content up as well?

   Using Safari on Windows | Report This?

   ditalento's Response:

   It was on maintenance, yes sorry i didn't say anything here

2. 

   officiallyts gave it on 17th Aug 2009 and said:

   Uh dno if it's just me but i can't see anything when i go to your site?
   It's like a white background with blue & black text all over it so i don't really want to review your site without seeing the full layout soo i'll be leaving it for now and reviewing it later on when it works.

   Maybe it's because i use firefox?
   Check it out
   Thankyou,x

   Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

   ditalento's Response:

   It was on maintenance, yes sorry i didn't say anything here

3. 

   Vera gave it on 12th Aug 2009 and said:

   Since you were so nice as to review me straight away, I should try to return the favor as well.

   = First Impression =
   ------------------------------------
   Lovely vector art, but the background is a bit distracting, try to lower the contrast a bit.

   = Presentation =
   ------------------------------------
   I'm very impressed by the vector girl on the right. It's incredibly well done. I was going to ask if you had made it, but then I checked it out myself. Now I'm a little disappointed, you didn't make it. Still, you've integrated it nicely.

   The swirly brushed, while not bad looking, are somewhat out of style these days. Also, your layout doesn't really look frilly, so the swirls there look a bit odd. The site title's font style, matches the swirls, but it's somewhat hard to read. Too many decoration on it. IMO, such font styles shouldn't really be used for writing words/slogans like you did. Rather, you could use them for drop-caps, like in old fairy tale books.

   Your current color choice is not bad, although some might argue that it's a bit dull. Personally, I'm fine with whatever you choose as long as my eyes don't hurt. That means, I'm pretty much tolerant as far as these things go. Still, the oblique stripes attract way too much attention. After the girl's face in the header, I'm immediately drawn to the background image. I'm assuming that you'd want visitors to go and read your content after having had their fill of gazing at your layout.

   I see you use the same stripes as heading backgrounds on the sidebar. Seeing as your background takes up quite a large part of the browser (my resolution is 1280 x 1024px), this is rather too much. Aside that, the background is much too stark compared to the text that you're displaying on top of it. If one is not paying particular attention, it's quite easy to miss said text there. I'd suggest you use a "watered-down" version of the stripes there, so that the text will get more attention. For example, to make things a bit more different, you could gradually fade the stripes into the beige background (using the Photoshop feather, for example).

   Your main content area, looks somewhat cramped to me. This is probably because of the lack of adequate padding amount on the left side. Have at least 10-15px of it, as opposed to the 5 you have now.

   Next, I like the idea of your footer, but I believe it would look better if there was no space between the bottom of the container div and the bottom of the browser window. You can do this by specifying margin: 0 and padding: 0 for the body tag in your CSS file. Also, to make things more appealing, I'd have made the second um... "wave" a bit larger, not just a tiny dot on the right. It's fine to make it smaller than the left one, but I'd have chosen to make it more visible.

   The previous, respectively next entries (the link text I mean) look a bit odd one under the other. Either float them on the left, respective right edges of the content area, or use the pagination plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pagenavi/.

   Your sidebar, as per usual, is not rightly used. The information displayed on it, is not something that the visitor needs every step of the way, while visiting your site. Well, I suppose the Ask a question form, might be... but you don't really strike me as the person a regular visitor would always want to ask something. You should code a dynamic sidebar, which changes according to the section you're currently in. Melissa of melly.me had a very good tutorial for this, unfortunately her site seems to be down... Right now, the following is the best I seem to find in a hurry: http://www.techzilo.com/blogging/conditional-tags-dynamic-wordpress-sidebars/. The general idea is, that you have to check what page you're viewing and display different content according to that. Sure, not necessarily the entire sidebar needs to be changing, but at least some of it, would be nice.
   From an aesthetic point of view, I'd leave a bit more spacing (padding) between the two columns of the affiliates. There's too much unused space on the right of that box.

   And last, but not least, I come to your main navigation. I'm one of those people who have an extremely small attention span. So if you talk too much, it's likely I'll forget what the initial point was. As such, I prefer to see fewer main links, with subcategories in each section. Ideally, I'd suggest up to 5-6 main categories.

   Looking at your links, I'd definitely put Visitors, Reviews and Tutorials under the same category, after all it's quite clear that these things are done for the visitor (I doubt you'd write tutorials for yourself). At a first glance, Articles and Writings seem to be the same thing, so I'm not entirely sure why you need two different sections for them. I don't really see any explanation for this either. That said, instead of 8 main categories, you already have only 5. Much more organized and easier to keep track of.
   Aesthetically speaking, I have a few minor issues:
   1) Style the last list item (li), so that it doesn't have a right border. It seems as if your horizontal navigation is not quite finished, or that you had some extra space and didn't quite know what to do with it.
   2) The hover effect for the tabs, is not quite the best idea. First of all, it looks as if the links move about, which can be somewhat annoying. I'd say ditch the top border, make the bottom border the same color as the beige background, and change the link color as well. All this for hover. The rest is fine.

   All in all, your layout is a quite nice one, but there's still a few issues you might want to look into.

   = Content =
   ------------------------------------
   - Home/Blog -
   There's a rather odd thing with your posts' navigation. It looks find on the main page, but on the rest of the pages, you have both previous page and previous entries. What I find even more odd, is that previous page shows newer entries, but previous entries shows older entries... but the arrow (double quote) seems to point in the same direction for both. Fix that. Also, just have one thing (previous/next entries or previous/next page). Having both, is confusing.

   Also, don't just display one post per page. It's fine for the home page if you do that, but it's annoying when people wish to navigate to previous posts. See this code snippet on how to do that: http://pastebin.com/f318db5f3

   - Owner -
   The following sentence sounds rather confusing to me:

   I tend to think a lot about the subject I’m thinking of, that people sometimes get really annoyed.

   How about:

   I tend to over analyze subjects that interest me, which sometimes makes people really annoyed.

   The following paragraph sounds oddly misplaced in the context, most especially since I don't know you/the people you talk about:

   The closest person to my heart is my mother. After that comes Amna, my best friend and sister, though she can be a pain sometimes, and she’s not a good secret keeper. Then comes my friend Rasha, who is my twin in almost everything.

   Try to explain it in a way, that doesn't necessary put so much emphasis on the names of the persons, but rather what they mean to you. For example:

   Unlike most teenagers my age, I'm really close to my mother. Sure we aren't always on the best of terms, and sometimes we get into stupid fights. Still, at the end of the day, she's the one I can always run to for advice/and some much needed TLC (tender loving care). Of course, I must not forget Amna and Rasha who're my partners in crime. We'll take on the word some day, mind. OK, so Amna will need to work on her secret keeping, but we're ALMOST there.

   This is just an example, to show that I you should try to present people so that readers aren't left trying to remember the names, but rather your opinion of these people. It's easier for everyone, plus random name dropping can be annoying to people who have no tangency with you offline.

   The first point in your Random facts:

   The biggest fear in my life is dying and going to hell after that comes losing a tooth!

   would read better, as:

   My biggest fears are: dying and going to Hell, closely followed by losing a tooth.

   Is there something missing in the following, or is there and extra "and"?

   I’m obssessed with and milk if I don’t get some I get all grumpy.

   The 9th point, is a bit contradictory, you either do or don't trust anyone. Alternately, you could rephrase it as:

   I only trust a handful of people.

   To make your lists easier to read, have a bit of padding between the number and the text. Also don't use paragraphs, in place of ordered lists. If you have lists to write, then use the list HTML tags (ol, in this case).

   Your self description page, is not bad, however you need to rephrase the first part a bit. Right now, it reads a bit disjointed, without any apparent continuity. Sure, that's also interesting to find out random stuff about people, but you already have the lists for that.

   - Articles -
   Please differentiate the headings from the links. I first thought that "Site related" was also a link, yet no amount of clicking sent me elsewhere.

   Your "10 reasons I hate my themes" is by no means an article. It's a very short list, no matter how hard you try to pull it off as an article.
   Regarding your Top 5 rules of webdesign:

   Be sure to use some brushes or textures so your work won’t turn out dull and boring.

   That is by no means true. Actually, no self respecting professional web designer uses brushes and patterns to make their work less boring. Go look at articles on http://smashingmagazine.com There's a lot of "Top X gorgeous layouts/themes" type of entries. Very few of these use brushes and patterns.

   The fonts and text related advice is a bit odd, after all who would make a website with no writing in it? They'll at least include a contact information/disclaimer.
   However is one word, not two. And pay more attention to run on sentences, and commas. It's hard to follow what you write, despite not having long articles.

   The Adobe company claims $999 to get their product.

   Huh? I thought it was the other way around, Adobe asks US to pay that money to get the product, it's not the company who pays that amount to have access to the product.

   Technically affiliate means a site/person/stuff that is somehow related to you. What you describe in your article is a friend. Sure it would be a very nice thing if people never looked for personal gain... but let's face it: affiliation is a process of "mutual back scratching" so to speak.

   I won’t claim that the idea of a CSS layout without any header image didn’t occur before, but it sure did spread after Swimchick had it.

   Er... LOL? OK, make that a double LOL. There were a lot of sites using CSS layouts before Jessica. Heck she got inspired herself, after seeing so many use that style.

   Website trends can be indeed a good thing, but the way you present it in your article seems more like one should follow all of them without previously thinking about them. You know, just because X jumps headfirst into the pool, there's no need to follow straight after.

   All in all, your articles are not bad, but you really need to have them proofread. You make a lot of grammatical and spelling mistakes. One of the most frequent things I see, is lack of commas, run on sentences and separating words into two (eg: how ever, web site...).

   - Visitor -
   Personally I dislike calling content visitor content. The fact that you published a site, and made it available for everyone means that you're writing for an audience. So why the need for content labeled "visitor" content?

   Your brushes are not bad, but the swirls have been overused, quite a few years ago.
   Your wallpapers are lovely, but there's no need to list the same wallpaper twice, for different resolution. Just have a link for each download. Also, since you display a small thumbnail, there's no need for a preview link. The thumbnail does that just fine.
   For the premade layouts, you should have put the credits in the layout as well, most especially since you don't clearly mention what resource you used in these layouts. You just lump everything together. So, most visitors will probably not even bother looking for it. Besides, isn't it kind of hypocritical that you ask for credit for your coding work, but don't think that the artist whose pictures you used deserves the same? After all, didn't you say before that good quality images are what make a site? Personally I don't subscribe to that mindset, but since you said it yourself... at least hold by it.

   I generally, do look over reviews, but since I still seem to have a lot of ground to cover I think I'll skip reviews and writings, since I've seen what you do there, already.

   - Tutorials -
   For the article of using containers, you lack the most important point: explanation for what a container is, why you should use them, what it's purpose is etc/etc For someone who doesn't have at least intermediate HTML and CSS knowledge your article is very confusing. Although in that case, it's highly likely that they won't need such a tutorial.

   CHMOD is a shortcut for Change mode in which you sometimes need to use in order to activate some scripts like BellaBuzz.

   For the love of... well whoever you think is holly (I'm an agnostic, so don't ask me): why the HECK do you write tutorials about things you don't understand?

   For the record, CHMOD is only done under Linux OS (Operating systems). There, unlike in Windows OS, not every user has the right to read/write/execute any file. You have to clearly specify these rights for every type of user. The types of users are: owner, group and other. The process of CHMOD does precisely this: assigns various rights to various user types. The three numbers in the CHMOD correspond to the three types of users' rights, in that order.
   Now go read an article about CHMOD in Linux, and rewrite your tutorial, kthnxbai.

   As for your Wordpress tutorial, don't just copy and paste some code in there. Explain what you do. And if you don't know EXACTLY what every single line of code does, DON'T WRITE a tutorial.

   I can't say anything about the Swahili tutorial, since I don't know the language.

   - Website -
   I don't know about you, but when I look into a Website or Domain section I expect to see a little bit about the site/it's purpose... that kind of thing.
   For the record, if you had chosen "Genuinely Immature" it would have been quite an interesting name, you know.

   I made a new site called 44graphix : a site builder, and it was a graphic designing site.

   You made a site builder? Or made a site using a site builder, perhaps?

   = Coding =
   ------------------------------------
   Unlike most reviewers, I don't validate coding. Same as a literary critic doesn't criticize a novel by doing a spell checking. Basic coding knowledge is implied for me. If not, you can use the tools yourself, no need for a review.

   For your main navigation, use an unordered list, as shown here: http://www.tutorialtastic.co.uk/tutorial/horizontal_css_block_navigation
   You display a list of links, so it makes sense to enclose things in a list.

   For the affiliates, instead of using a table, use a list with two columns. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/multicolumnlists/
   Tables, should only be used for tabular data (eg: a list of products with their different attributes). This, is clearly done for presentational purposes.

   Don't use multiple h1 headings for the same article. Start out with h1, for the article's title. For subtitles use h2, h3 etc depending on the level of the heading. I.e. subtitles should be h2, and sub title for a sub section h3... and so on till h6. Then again, seeing the length of your articles, I doubt you'll ever need to go beyond h3.

   Regarding your CSS, don't repeat attributes, where not necessary. Try to group as many attribute declaration together, as possible.

   For example, looking at your links' definition:
   
a:visited, a:link{
text-decoration:none;
font: bold 12px Verdana;
color:#603c2c;
}

   a:hover{
text-decoration:none;
font: bold 12px Verdana;
color:#725b4b;
}


   It should be written as:
   
a{
text-decoration:none;
font: bold 12px Verdana;
color:#603c2c;
}

   a:hover{
color:#725b4b;
}


   Your way is not incorrect, but it's not the optimum way either. By doing this, you will also lessen your CSS file's size.

   For the most part, your CSS is alright. Do look into optimizing things, by grouping similar definitions together, so as to avoid defining them multiple times.

   For example, if all headings have the same background but differently colored text and different size, you can have something like this:
   
h1, h2{
background: #fff url('image.jpg') repeat-x;
}

   h1{
   font-size: 12px;
   color: #000;
   }

   h2{
font-size: 10px;
color: #ff0000;
}


   = Score: 3/5 =

   You have a lovely layout, nice graphical goodies, and your English is also quite good.

   The problem is, that you think you know more than you do, to the point that you even start lecturing others. Before writing an article it is advisable to do some research; doubly so if you write tutorials.

   The latter, aside the Swahili one, which I can't judge, are rather mediocre. Sure it's better than the ones, trying to teach about basic HTML tags, but it's not nearly enough for them to be good. Look at the tutorial for the multicolumn list I linked from ALA (A List Apart). THAT is the standard you should be aiming for.

   Oh, and please have someone proofread your articles and tutorials. They're in dire need of rewriting. You don't use commas, or use them in all the wrong places. You have some extremely long sentences. Sometimes you leave out words. There are a few occurrences of awkward phrasings, as well.

   Just work on these, rewrite the tutorials with the necessary explanations added, and you're good to go.

   UPDATED 12 Aug 09:
   My point about dynamic sidebars was not because it's a trend. You display a lot of useless information to visitors on every page. Yeah, sure to you it's important info (affiliates, site statistics), but it's not that important to visitors that they'd need to see this on every single page.

   In regards to your CSS, it was just an example on how you can make them shorter. Here's an article that explains the concept better: http://woork.blogspot.com/2008/01/optimize-your-css-files-to-improve-code.html

   Many other web designers do the same.

   Which of course makes it alright, eh? After all, if X jumps head first into the pool, you must obligatorily follow.

   It's called "articles" where I give my OWN opinion and if people decide to follow them it's their choice.

   Take for example your tutorial on CHMOD. Given the definition you give to CHMOD it's clear that you don't really understand what it does.

   You also like to lecture people on what is good and what isn't good about webdesign. But you don't know enough design theory to be qualified to make such remarks. Sure you can have opinions, but if these are based on wrong facts or outdated practices, then how could you possibly form an accurate image on what is right/wrong in regards to design?

   Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

   ditalento's Response:

   Hi Vera, thanks for reviewing my site.
   Yes, I'm going to fix up my layout as many before you complained. About the dynamic sidebar I don't know if I want to code one. I've thought about it and quite frankly i see everyone doing it and it's just becoming old. And I love my sidebar to be neat and to the point.

   As for my CSS the first about my links i can't do that I want to make my CSS shorter. And for

   h1, h2{
   background: #fff url('image.jpg') repeat-x;
   }

   Hmm but i want for each header to have it's own color and that makes no sense at all about what you said. Many other web designers do the same.

   I also, think my articles are quite good, as other people told me they're.

   "The problem is, that you think you know more than you do, to the point that you even start lecturing others." I'm sorry but you cannot judge me, you don't know whether Ive researched or not.,and how am I lecturing others? It's called "articles" where I give my OWN opinion and if people decide to follow them it's their choice. You should know facts before you actually judge.

4. Heather gave it on 11th Aug 2009 and said:

   LAYOUT:
   The background is a little busy for my eyes, but still good because it goes with the color scheme. Personally, I prefer backgrounds to be less busier, because they take away from the content. I love the header image, and your vector is amazing. <3 I also like the CSS used on the navigation links.

   CONTENT:
   Your about me is written well. You have nice paragraphs, and some other interesting things. How about a picture? By the way, I am also 15 years old. Your articles are nice, but I don't think you should get down on yourself, or other people's choices. I do like most of the articles tho. :) Also, I couldn't tell the difference between a link and a subtitle. So, I would make that more distinct. Either change the CSS for the subtitles, or bullet the links at least. In the "Visitor" section the subtitles are a different color than the subtitles in the "Articles" section. I would keep the subtitle CSS for the subtitles in the visitor section. However, the links should be indented inside the subtitles. I really enjoyed your premade layouts. The "photography" of a baby, seems like more of personal content than visitor content to me. Especially if you know the child. Maybe the interview should be under the "Articles" section? Again, in the "Writings" section, the subtitles need to be re-done. In on of your poems, I would take out the small self advertisement for your brushes. Simply because, poems are to read, and if somebody was looking for brushes, they could easily find them on your site.

   OVERALL:
   I would definitely update the way you display links; bullet them, and make all your subtitles match. I also just notices that the line-height of your text in pages, and on links changes throughout your site. That should also be fixed. Overall, keep adding content, and fix those things.

   Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

5. 

   brittneyc gave it on 10th Aug 2009 and said:

   Hey I'm Brittney and I will be reviewing your site today. I think that I am also the first review for this site.

   Site Name: I love the site name, and I love the meaning, and thank you for providing an explanation of it.

   Layout:
   I love the colors you picked on this layout, and I love the stripes in the background mixed with the swirls in the header image. I also like how the links are under the header and in a brighter color, so it makes them easier to find.

   Content:
   I love all of the content that you have, I also love reading your blogs, you are a great writer, and you write about interesting things. Things people like to comment on.

   Using Firefox on Mac | Report This?

   ditalento's Response:

   Thanks so much britney!

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