rob.ustio.us

rob.ustio.us

***-- (Rated by 1 person, viewed by 77 people)

My personal site. I've imported all my posts from my old blog, but this is a new endeavor, moving to a more personal and less professional format. The content is a bit messy as of this writing (7/29/10), but that should get fixed shortly.

Added by Rowijo in Personal

rob.ustio.us has 1 Review

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  1. [img: avatar]
    Vera gave it ***-- on 29th Jul 2010 and said:

    For some reason, the last few sites I reviewed all screamed "I like it!". So I thought I'd give a shot at something which I don't necessarily like... at first glance at any rate. I promise not to be too obnoxious. Or at any rate I'll try.

    = First Impression =
    --------------------------------------------
    You obviously looked around a bit, and had some ideas... but the end result didn't quite manage to live up to the standards. Well, my standards at any rate. I do like the background and the header image. Not the header text though.
    If I were a casual visitor looking here, I'd just yawn and wonder why you're reviewing old Nintendo games, and then go back. I'm not a gamer myself, so oldies don't interest me.

    = Presentation =
    --------------------------------------------
    Like I said before, I can see that you documented yourself. Or maybe you have good taste? In any case, I find the background image an excellent choice. It's different enough that it makes me notice it, but it's no distracting. Actually, I think the only reason I notice it, is because I'm always looking for ways to redesign my own site.

    Taken by itself, I also like the header image. It's a nice shade of blue, and the abstract art is not bad. Then again, it is also a rather outdated technique: swirly brushes have been out for a good 5 years now. Your site title, on the other hand, is very badly positioned. I've been looking at your design for 5 minutes now, but I have no idea what your site's called off the top of my head. The impression I did remain with, is that there's some text spanning over a few lines, on the right side of the header. Since I normally read from left to right, I also tend to notice things on the left side much more.
    I'd suggest moving the title and subtitle somewhere towards the middle of the header image. Making the header image larger, along with the site title. I'd also make the subtitle much smaller. It's taking up too much space, and almost the same amount of focus as the main title.

    Looking at your design as one site though, it rather fails. It is much too crowded and full of useless decorations. Oh and the color choice... not a particularly good one. That pink is really striking... and not in a good way. But let's take it stepwise.
    You have a ton of borders. Each individual post has a noticeable border, each section on the sidebar has a border, the pagination on the bottom has a border and... if that weren't enough, they all have drop shadows and the bare minimum of spacing. Any less and the borders'd all flow into one another. I feel like I'm being attacked by a hundred of ads, and none of them makes me want to read it. Heck, I'm really really itching to go away. Also, my attention-span has never been very large... not even on my good days.

    I'd suggest the following:
    - ditch all the borders within the main content. The spacing between the text is good, but your borderitis cuts up the design way too much
    - no need for the light gray background for the posts/sidebar sections either. The spacing is good enough.
    - the blue rounded backgrounds for the sidebar headings can stay, but there's no need for the bolded text. Normal font-weight makes it easier to read the text.
    - I'd also ditch background for the footer. Looks better simple

    I played around with firebug and removed some CSS, and this is what I came up with:
    Layout suggestion
    Footer suggestion

    By the way, your CSS positioning... waaaaaaaaaaaay too complicated. But I'll get back to this later (in the coding section).

    I'm not patient enough to open Photoshop and edit your navigation, but the hot pink background must go. You could perhaps find a blue-ish background which fades into white?

    All in all, after tweaking your CSS around (the result being the two images above), I've come to the conclusion that you see webdesign as a sort of experiment. If you were a clothes designer, and your site were a runway model... well this model would be wearing every single fancy creation you (as a designer) ever made. Not a pretty site, eh?

    = Content =
    ---------------------------
    Presentation is important, it's what decides whether I stay or not to browse around. But what makes me return is the content itself... otherwise, I'm not staying for long.

    Home - you have an interesting writing style. Despite my initial distrust of gaming lingo, your blog posts did make me interested. Having a small attention-span though, I didn't read but the first few (skimmed the novel one). And I felt like you stopped at the good part, in the majority of your posts. Now this can both a good thing (recurring visits), or a bad one (annoyance on my part). Ah well... you write well, which is the important part. Just pay attention to the length of some of the sentences. Yeah, yeah, hi "Mr Kettle, I'm Ms Pot" :P

    Robert - very short. Doesn't really warrant its own page... also what am I supposed to comment on? I suggest you disable comments here.
    You sub-navigation is a drop-down one. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of hover drop-down, but as long as I have no problem clicking the links I guess it's fine. The main issue I do have with it, is that in order to go to a sub-page, from the Robert main page, I have to hover once again on the Robert link. Why not have a section at the top of the sidebar, with sub-pages?
    Jem has a post, with a small code for this in wordpress: http://www.jemjabella.co.uk/blog/wordpress-child-pages-page-or-something

    Oh now I see that you do link the biography page, right at the end. But due to the lack of spacing, I assumed it was part of the content of this page. But why don't you also link the dramaography page as well?

    Site - once again, not sure why you have the comments page open here. And the same issue with the sub navigation as before.

    All in all, your content seems very well written. And that is all that counts, in my books. Interests vary, but if you can draw in someone like me, who is really not into gaming... means your writing's very good. So well done!

    = Coding =
    ---------------------------------

    As I mentioned before, I went through the CSS to "weed out" some unnecessary styling... and I almost gave up on this review. Your HTML to make rounded corners is sooooo bloated. And the CSS for it is organized very complexly.

    Now for a basic, cross-browser compatible rounded corner snippet, this should be the code:
    HTML:

    <div class="rounded_container">

    <div class="corner_top_left"></div>
    <div class="corner_top_right"></div>

    Here comes the content inside your rounded container.<br/>
    It can go on for miiiiles<br/>
    ....

    <div class="corner_bottom_left"></div>
    <div class="corner_bottom_right"></div>

    </div>

    And CSS

    .rounded_container{
    border: 1px solid #color;
    padding: 5px;
    position: relative;
    }

    .corner_top_left, .corner_top_right{
    position: absolute;
    top: -1px; /* the value is -1 = - border_with_value of rounded_container */
    left: -1px;
    }

    .corner_top_right{
    right: -1px; /* if rounded container doesn't have a border, you can just have right: 0px */
    }

    .corner_bottom_left, .corner_bottom_right{
    position: absolute;
    bottom: -1px;
    left: -1px;
    }

    .corner_bottom_right{
    right: -1px;
    }

    I see that your theme is generated by a script, so most of the bloat is probably due to that. All in all, things look quite semantic and well indented, but not very efficient. Your HTML suffers of a bad divitis, while your CSS could use a bit of contracting. Those classes seem rather randomly chosen there.

    In any case, learn more CSS, and clean up your code. If you want to edit it later on, it'll be a big hassle to find something in it.

    Score: 2.5/5

    You show great potential. But your design is much too busy, your coding is... well not done by you. As such it would be unfair of me to give you the same score, as someone who did it all manually. Plus it's also rather bloated.
    And you need to organize your sidebar more efficiently. For example, the search for at the bottom of a very very long sidebar ... not a very bright idea. Speaking of the sidebar's length: aside yourself, who do you think will ever scroll down to the bottom of it. Make it at least half as long.

    All in all I guess I could have made a more detailed analysis of your site. But this should be enough for now. Your content is great, so now you need to present it in a better way.

    Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

    Rowijo's Response:

    Thank you thank you thank you, this is exactly the kind of review I was hoping for.

    I would like to say that I know my CSS is bloated and weird; this is because I used a program to generate it, as you noticed. I'm still learning CSS and it's rather slow-going, but I do hope to be able to do it all by hand one day.

    I like your suggestions for the layout, taking out the borders, etc. I'll look at tinkering with them and see what happens.

    Also, thank you for reminding me to turn off comments in pages. I had forgotten to do that. :)

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