Ribbonhood

Ribbonhood

***-- (Rated by 3 people, viewed by 124 people)

A personal blog, public diary of an 19 year old. Visitors content are at a minimal because it's a blog, and not a resource site.

Added by karenboswell in Personal

Ribbonhood has 3 Reviews

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

  1. katiiness gave it ****- on 14th Nov 2009 and said:

    Very cute banner for the layout. I like the simplicity of the layout, and it gives a very friendly, charming feel overall. Great job. I’m a big fan of simple layouts. The black textured background brings out your main content very well. However, I’m not too fond of the actually texture you used, but then again, that’s just a personal preference. In my opinion, perhaps and cuter pattern would enhance the down to earth feel of your website and layout in general.

    Tutorials: Easy to follow tutorials, I haven’t tried them but reading through them… they seem clear and concise with examples where necessary.

    Brushes: Very adorable brushes! I hope you continue to make some more. The web needs more brushes like these.

    Wordpress Plugins: I really like this page and can see the potential of it’s usefulness. I hope to see more additions in the future?

    Profile: Clear and concise. I think with some CSS the headers of each section would make the content even more organized. Perhaps a bottom border with gray text, or even keep it as it is with some padding so the text doesn’t run on the sides on the black background, and then extend the whole thing across the page so there’s more distinct division between the sections.

    Handwriting: Very interesting idea! I like it.

    Overall, great personal site, it feels very personal and genuine.

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  2. [img: avatar]
    Sillyish gave it ***-- on 14th Nov 2009 and said:

    You seem to have been giving out a lot of reviews and not getting a whole lot in return!

    Thought I'd give you a review so you didn't feel like your efforts have been totally in vain :P

    Layout
    I think the reason why I didn't choose to review you right away, and I don't know if anyone else felt this way, but for ME, it's because your layout is not to my taste at all. And this makes it hard to review because should I ding points because it's not to my taste? Should I ignore this? What should I say?

    I think I'll just say what I think and see where it leads :-P

    When I compare this layout to other websites, there's a very strong feel of "boring" to me. And it's not necessarily because it's simple, because I've enjoyed a lot of simple layouts, like verbalized.net or calmbanana.co.uk

    I think partly it's the top image - who is this girl? Some random model? Maybe if it was you it would be more relevant, it would be a good start, but as it is, I'm not big on personal(ish) sites that use stock images of random people.

    The title as well seems out of place. The font doesn't seem particularly fitting with the layout overall, and the tagline = huh? I like to think of taglines as somehow relevant as well. Like "Blogging since 2003" or "Girl geek and obsessed blog author" or something. "You will always be my only one" is just sort of sappy and unrelated to anything that the average visitor, at least, can understand.

    I would have liked to see some kind of footer at the bottom of the white content area to sort of 'finish' the overall look. Otherwise the layout has an unfinshed, trailing off into oblivion of the bottom of my browser feel.

    Also, the previous/next entries had two next links (it said "<<previous page next page>> next page>>") which seeemd pretty redundant, but beyond that, I think the links would look so much better if they were larger and centred instead of small and off to the side.

    I thought the sidebar could do with a bit of a revamp. The navigation, for example, has no header but every other section does have a header. And why would visitors and tutorials be two different sections? Aren't tutorials for the visitors?

    Maybe

    Home
    About Me
    Visitor Content

    would be a better choice of words for the navigation, and then just fit the tutorials in the visitor content section.

    The profile animation in the sidebar got a bit distracting after awhile, and I think I would have preferred a short writeup or nothing at all. Maybe fit the animation on the about you page and don't let it loop forever and ever? 101 things in 1001 days was randomly inserted in the side bar in no apparent order to anything.

    Having your twitter UNDER your affiliates seemed odd, because I always think of external links to be the last thing (besides credits/meta data) on any sidebar.

    And yes, I know that twitter is technically external, but it's still about YOU and not a complete different person and site altogether.

    On the about you page, the handwriting and wardrobe links seemed odd at the very top. Because your about page is so small anyway, I think I would have included everything on one page instead of cutting it up.

    Also, this is more of a content thing than layout, but I don't know how necessary it is to have your handwriting on your site. I think that most people aren't overly interested in what peoples' writing looks like :P

    Under visitor, RESOURCES was all caps, but Reads was not. More consistency would be nice.

    Also, the space between the headers and the links under them (in visitor) was really big. Changing that to just 1 or 2 px would look nicer.)

    Having so many text colours for emphasis on your blog ended up being confusing because it gets to the point where the visitor can't figure out what's a link and what isn't. I think sticking with bold and emphasis should be good enough for the most part.

    Also, the styling for the comments and the comment form was basically zero, so making that a bit more custom to the layout would have been nice to see.

    Anyway, that's 720 words devoted to the layout, so let's move on to the coding :-P

    Coding
    I'm never a big coding review nazi because I don't have a ton of interest in it, but I did a quick run through the validator and got a whole bunch of errors, and I also tried the CSS validator which only gave me one easy to fix error.

    Content
    Okey dokey, starting off with tutorials which is the first link on the navigation...

    The bubble font tutorial had no heading to it once you were actually on the page, just launched right in. I thought a header and a short introduction would have been good.

    I didn't think your pixelling tutorial was much of a tutorial since it was just some images with examples of different pixels.

    I guess I should say now that my note about the heading/intro goes for all the tutorial pages.

    Photoshop tips could have been more substantial. It was quite short and only included two tips which I see all over the world of personal website tutorials.

    Okay, Visitors...
    I liked your brushes, they seemed cute.

    When I went into cellphone wallpapers the sidebar disappeared and is at the bottom of the page. Some missed closed div tag, perhaps?

    Also, since you only have one category in cellphone wallpapers, it seems unneeded for ANOTHER subsection of links. I click on visitor, I click on wallpapers, I click on cute, and THEN I get to see the wallpapers? visitor -->wallpapers would have been better for sure.

    Anyway, that's about it for my review, hopefully SOME of the things mentioned here struck a chord with you or inspired you or was useful in some way.

    Good luck!

    Using Firefox on Mac | Report This?

    karenboswell's Response:

    Thanks for the feedback. (:
    From your review, I've changed some stuffs on my site.

    -Added a footer
    -Added a header for my navigation
    -Removed the cellphone wallpaper (accidentally deleted the page)
    -Moved my twitter on top
    -Stopped loop play on my picture.
    -Caps READS
    -Added heading and short introducyion to my font tutorial
    - Renamed Visitors to Resource instead.

    I wanted to add more tutorials and resource in the future, and I want to keep them seperate early.

    About the cellphone wallpaper, someone said my wallpaper was flashy, so I decided to categories them. In the future, they will have categories such as "Simple" and "Emotional".

    I put my video in my sidebar because I think it would be a nice alternative to just a normal picture.

    The 101 in 1001 Days link is there to remind myself that I have goals to do.

    I remember when I first started out pixelling, it was a site's mini pixel tutorial of different sizes that taught me alot. I decided to do the same, not for people who already knows pixelling.
    But for those who wants to learn about pixelling.

    Photoshop tricks is also for visitors who are new to photoshop. I'll add new tricks soon.

    I like to see handwriting, scanned images of real life stuffs from the web owner so I decided to do the same for my site.
    The same goes for the wardrobe.

    The site was coded from a premade layout as I'm not good at coding. :(
    Unfortunately, I don't know how to correct my coding or make my comment box nicer. :(

    Anyway, thanks for your review. I'll improve. :)

  3. robotrally gave it ****- on 13th Nov 2009 and said:

    Website Layout
    Your website layout is okay to me. Your background is a little to plain for me. The header is nicely done. I like the pictures you used. Your also using containers. Yay! Containers look great in all browsers and all screen resolutions. You shouldn't use little hearts to link your affiliates.
    Site Name
    Ribbonhood is cute and its unique.
    Content
    Cell Phone Backgrounds
    There really distracting. I wouldn't use them on my phone in my opinion. I only see one type of background: flashy. Try making plain backgrounds
    Fonts
    You shouldn't redistribute fonts that aren't your own.
    Brushes
    Your brushes are adorable.
    Similes
    I would use these. They are extremely cute!
    Tutorials
    I dont see how these articles (or reads, as they are listed on your site) fit into the tutorials. You are just listing add ons.
    Organization
    Your site is organized fairly well. You should move the articles to some place different.
    Overall Summary
    Overall, your site is good. Keep working on adding more content and updating the cell phone backgrounds and articles.

    UPDATED 13 Nov 09:
    I love the new background you gave it. Just wondering, did you make it? If so, you should offer backgrounds as visitor content. I would definitely use them.
    I like the new organization too.

    Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

    karenboswell's Response:

    Website Layout
    Thanks for the comment. What sort of background should I use? This background was from the original theme I edited out from. I want a dark background as I want my whole focus to be on the blog(entries) itself.

    Site Name
    Thanks. I didn't thought of it. But I'm glad I saw that name, and use it.

    Content
    CellPhone Background: Some people really like them. I guess I didn't know there are people who don't too. Maybe I should categorize my CellPhone Backgrounds, and make some plain, minimal backgrounds.
    Fonts: Hmm, maybe can I use this as a "List of nice fonts?". Because I would like to recommend readers out there nice fonts they can use on their layouts. I should start making my own font. I made one, but it suck. =/
    Brushes: Thanks. ^^
    Smilies: I'm glad you like them!

    Tutorials
    Where shall I place the 'reads'? Into the visitors site?

    Organization
    Will do. (:

    Overall Summary
    Thanks once again. Your review is valuable to me. :)

    UPDATED 12 Nov 09:
    UPDATED SITE
    - Changed Background
    - Gave categories to CellPhone BG
    - Move Fonts to under Reads
    - Move Reads to Visitors Content.

    UPDATED 13 Nov 09:
    thanks. (:
    oh no, I didn't make the background. i used a generator.
    you can see a list of background generator here.
    http://www.justskins.com/design/background-design-generator/1668

    once again, thanks for your feedback. (:

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