Cats Cradle Graphics (v6)

Cats Cradle Graphics (v6)

**--- (Rated by 3 people, viewed by 69 people)

Cats Cradle Graphics is my personal graphics site. It works best in IE 7 and Firefox 3.5.
As of now the HTML can't be checked; I'm trying to find the problem. This site has been put up here many times with different versions, and I hope all your criticism and advice has paid off :]

-Jackie

Added by skykingcat in Graphics

Cats Cradle Graphics (v6) has 3 Reviews

Below are the reviews left by other members on Cats Cradle Graphics (v6). Jump to review form?

  1. [img: avatar]
    rainesart gave it ***-- on 4th Sep 2009 and said:

    Hi! my name is Raine and I'm about to review your site now if you will.

    The first thing I saw as I enter the site is the option for which the visitor would view the site, and I chose Firefox. What I've noticed is that it takes time to load just because of those leaves flying around. As I have entered the main site, I was a bit impressed about the look. I love earth colors that is why. I've noticed that the quote "Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower." is a bit falling outside the frame. Maybe you should adjust that so it could look more organized. You could use smaller font I guess, so that the main area would not look crowded. I would suggest that you make these titles on your navigation's font: Main Goods Site Credits --to be smaller. And I think it would be better if it's not bold black, just use the darkest tone of that yellow ocher. Same as with the link hover colors, you should change it to something relative to the family of brown-yellow-orange.

    Well I think that's it. I believe your site has a lot of potential so try and try to improve it! I'm sure you can do it!
    Good luck!
    Best regards here

    Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

    skykingcat's Response:

    Thank-you for reviewing my site, Raine :]

    I'm guessing everything (basically besides the quote) seemed to line up correctly for you? If so, that's good! (finally) I'll look into messing around with my colors a bit :]

    Once again, thanks!

    -Jackie

  2. Distant_Star gave it ***-- on 3rd Sep 2009 and said:

    Hello, I'm Amanda and I'll be reviewing your site today. I use firefox, so I chose that option.

    First Impression: Waiting for the leaf image to load before giving the options takes too long for me. I am super impatient with this sort of thing. Then you click on it, and huh? It's all over the place. The text is black, and the surrounding background is black, so the words are all chopped off. Nothing lines up right, the boxes at the bottom are empty. ... Is this for real? Is there even a navigation?

    Layout and coding: I actually closed out of your site then and was going to just forget about this review and do a different one. Then I read the review that's posted already and saw that it was a sizing issue. So I came back. I minimized my window, and played around with the size until things mostly lined up and now I can actually see what's going on here. This is probably not ideal to keep your visitors. It's a nice layout, I like it, but the sizing issue is huge. If you cut up your images and have them as backgrounds for your divs, and have your divs stay in place in the center of your layout than that will be taken care of.

    Also, you don't really need two different versions. You can have two different style sheets attached to your one page. You can put all your IE fixes into one and have that one loaded if IE is detected. I wasn't sure off the top of my head how this could be done, but I know it can be, so I did a quick search: http://www.thesitewizard.com/css/excludecss.shtml this has a pretty good explanation, at the end has a fix you could use, too.

    After that, the idea of using your images as a background per div, or however you end up doing it, is for those users who have a slower connection. I have a pretty fast computer, and internet connection, I noticed no issues, but having one big graphic on dial-up *shudder* will take forever to load. Having it broken up, and having as much of that information as css as you can, will speed things up a bit.

    By the way, the code for underline has been depreciated: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_u.asp.

    For kicks, I dusted off my IE to see if that worked better (never even opened it on this computer). No, it didn't. It won't even load. The first time it said it wasn't there and took me to a Google search page, so I clicked on your site there, and it timed out it took so long. I tried one more time, and it did the same thing. I'm not sure what it is, but the address worked fine in FF, but in IE it's coming up as a broken link. No idea. Other websites load fine, just not yours.

    Content    : About the site is an interesting read. I see you have your css validated, what about your code? Your about you is a quick read too, covers a lot but doesn't bog down in details. Nice.

    Goods: You've got quite a few. I like them, but I have to mention the whole copyright issue with celebrity graphics and such. I'm sure you've heard about it before so I won't lecture or anything, but it is technically illegal to use images without express permission from the one who took the photograph. There are a lot of stock photography sites around that offer free high quality photographs for use. Also, the buttons are a little ... I don't know? The same but in different colors. You have a nice layout, and assuming you made it yourself, I expected more from your offerings.

    Site: This has basic information in it. The way you have your affiliates arranged is a little confusing. I would suggest giving each different site its own line or maybe some more spacing around the little leaf to clearly designate that they're more than one link.

    Credits: Basic credits page, but where you got your images used for your goods aren't listed. And, uh oh, your hostess link goes to an error page. If there are none, you either don't need the link, or put up a coming soon page.

    Overall: It's a basic graphics page. The things you offer I wouldn't use personally, but I could see many people liking them. You've got a good amount to click around in and look at, but nothing really spectacular that caught my eye for something I would use. If you clean up the spacing issues, and maybe use some stock photography in what you make, you're defiantly on the right track to a successful site.

    Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

    skykingcat's Response:

    Amanda,

    Thank-you for reviewing my site! I really, really, really have to thank-you for the link to the different CSS files for different versions; I had no clue that was even possible! I'll definately look into that so I can keep it all in one browser. That will also eliminate your problems with the loading graphic in the beginning that takes a while.

    Hmm, I'm using IE8 and Firefox 3.5 on my computer and everything loads up and squares in nicely... I guess I'll just have to try my best to fix this problem in the dark--I'm really not sure where to begin is the hard part :/

    Oh, and thanks for telling me about the broken link to my hostess; I'll get right on that ^_^

    -Jackie

  3. [img: avatar]
    tenthmuse gave it *---- on 2nd Sep 2009 and said:

    Hi Jackie! I'm Ashley, and I'm looking at your website in Firefox 3.5 on a Mac.

    I'm not going to go too deep into your website right now because I feel that there are some major flaws with the way it is set up that need to be addressed before you can start looking at anything else.

    First of all, you have the splash page that comes up that requires visitors to select which version of the site to view; while this is all well and good, your site really ought to be viewable in all browsers right off the bat - this shouldn't be too hard to do. Also, at least for me, the "Internet Explorer" and "Firefox" options don't show up for quite awhile, and this is going to be an even larger deterrent to visitors.

    I selected the "Firefox" version of your website to start, though I looked at both. I have a widescreen display, and it seems that you have your website set up for an 800x600 resolution only. While I am not suggesting that a widescreen monitor is more common, you really want your site to appear correctly in all sizes. Your background is in one place, fixed in the center of my screen, and as I resize my window, the different boxes that you have set up for the content jump all over the place. I can resize the window to 800x600 and see it almost properly, but not a lot of people have this option. I would not recommend using the background image to make the divs of your site as you have done here - ideally, use something repeating, and color the separate divs with CSS (or their own background image, whatever), and position things relatively in the center of the page rather than absolutely.

    Furthermore, your navigation is not very obvious at all - if someone were to see your site right away in the correct resolution, perhaps it would be, but because I was so distracted by your bouncing divs I could not immediately see where your navigation was, which is a huge downside for visitors.

    Please let me know if you want a screenshot of the bouncing divs if you don't see it yourself. Also, let me know if you need anything else clarified.

    I definitely think you've got potential, and I apologize for not looking at the rest of your site, but I feel that you need to address your layout and splash page issues in order to keep your visitors.

    Using Firefox on Mac | Report This?

    skykingcat's Response:

    Ashley,

    Thank-you very much for the review! Grr, browser problems. I tried fixing my coding in just one version, but IE and Firefox kept interpreting it differently from each other and I couldn't get it to work out, so I just decided to make two different versions.
    Hmm, as for the screen resolution, I'm not really sure where to even begin to fix that. My layout was meant so that there are no scrollbars (except for on the main content) so everything should be in place... I'll have to look into that, but thanks for telling me :]
    Oh and the two options don't show up for a while because it waits until after the opening graphic (with the leaf blowing reavling the 'select your version'). But I can see your point for returning visitors :]

    Once again, thank-you for the review!
    -Jackie

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