Stunnazine has 3 Reviews
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Olivia gave it
on 26th Dec 2010 and said:Hello! I'm Olivia. I'm always really pleased when I stumble across e-zines like yours where hard work and time is so evident.
First Impressions:
Upon first glance it is not quite obvious or clear that your site is a teenage girls' e-zine. Granted, you have the fun and girly cartoon down along with the Title and tagline (Stunnazine - Where Beauty Lies Within). It would be lovely to see a larger, more clear title that perhaps takes up all of the header.You have so much going on. So many colours and ads and links and articles... where to go first!? I'll be honest I browsed your site for a good 5 minutes looking through all the navigation links thinking that there had been no updates recently. It took me a while to realise that on the Home page you actually can click the titles on the December cover issue to take you to that article! Brilliant! Over all, clarity is needed. Could I suggest a colour scheme for the layout that stands out as Stunnazine's colours? Or perhaps a way that the current cover for the current issue could be placed somewhere obvious in the layout to show visitors, who perhaps don't know their way around already, that the site is being updated?
You have so much content it's unbelievable!
How you've explained the reason behind Stunnazine in the 'About' page is wonderfully detailed. The pictures make a great touch because it's a good reminder that there is a real person behind this and it is this person's (you?) that has worked hard on creating the site!
I noticed you have a fair few contributors and I would suggest a staff page to point out who is your fashion/make up/advice contributor, maybe with a picture and a small bio. That way when browsing the site from the 'About' page onwards a visitor will be able to recognize and identify who has written the article. That again reminds the viewers that isn't a corporate thing - it's for girls made by girls!
Edit: I found a small link for Mag Writers when I was at Site Models. Not very obvious! In fact it's rather confusing at times. I would still suggest having a contributors page under 'About'. The current page also only features pictures and links lead me to the community forum pages which I'd rather not be lead to at the stage (I've enough as a new visitor to take in on the main site!). A few small lines under their picture would be enough!
Your 'Advice' page would benefit from organising previously asked questions into categories like ''Love', 'Body Issues', 'Family' or 'Career'. Again, it took me a minute to realise there was even an option to see previously asked advice questions.
I think one of the strongest elements to Stunnazine is that anyone can model to be a cover girl or their pictures be used as an article image. That's a very good part of the site and should be featured more - you have to dig quite deep to find that out and it's something that should perhaps be more prominent.
Most of the pages hold wonderful pieces of advice - a few miss a bit of clarity and detail. Some are poorly written and lack quality. There are only a few problems, for example the Fall Fashion page tells me that the 'Fall Hot List' is below, when it is not. Some pages are just a tad too messy which leave me following links which I believe is to another article when it is fact to an advertisement site. I think each article should state the writer (perhaps with a picture) as it gives the visitor a bit more of an overview of where the writer is coming from.
The 'How To Become A Model' page must be rather popular! It's a shame there is no statement of who is writing it because the article is in the first person! It really would help to know who is writing especially if it someone talking about their modeling experiences. A look at the bottom of the page reveals a part 1 - shouldn't part 1 have been linked first?
The Quizzes are fun, time-wasting fun, but I guess a good addition to those pre-teens who maybe bored and have nothing else to do!
Last Thoughts:
I think some organisation needs to be done to really clean things up. Serious clarity is needed and all articles need to be strengthened. Trying to cover everything to cater for every subject and topic a teenage girl will want to read about is tricky; I would suggest honing down topics to what you and your contributors are really able to write about well. Take your time and don't rush it.
I can tell lots of work has been put into the e-zine, especially after a look on the YouTube channel too! That perhaps should be an extra feature on the site. Although I'm too old to be a regular visitor I'm sure younger visitors will find the site a good resource. After a bit of cleaning up I'd feel more keen to return though.
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Vera gave it
on 26th Oct 2010 and said:I don't normally review e-zines, especially not the ones geared towards teenagers, since I'm really not interested in the printed magazines of that kind either. Nevertheless, your site's design surprised me in a pleasant manner, so I might as well give it a go. Plus I should probably start reviewing more different types of sites.
= First Impression =
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Very nice... although that girl appears to be missing something, like part of her nose.= Presentation =
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I like it a LOT. One of the things I tend to dislike about magazine-oriented designs, is how they tend to be crowded with so much stuff. You, on the other hand, don't seem to want to present your whole content on the main page. So it can breathe a little.My main dislike, is the top bar actually. I keep thinking that it's an advertisement unrelated to the site, and it bothers me. How about trying to move it below the main navigation instead? Granted, the colored links (create profile, login, subscribe) would probably be a tad bit too much there. I do actually quite like the colored links. Nevertheless, their positioning is not really a good one. First of all, they're in the right corner of the design, and since I tend to look towards the left one, I rarely look to the right end. Other than that, your design has a lot "neat little details". No need to go overboard, and thus overshadowing some stuff. I'd suggest you put those three links in the sidebar, as a regular vertical list, but with a different background. Nothing too drastic, mind.
Your main content area, on the home page, looks weird, with all that white space. Instead of having the "new this month" be hidden by default, why not show it always, along with the Inside. If the "new this month" is too much for the home page, you could use pagination.
I positively ADORE the footer. The signature on the right is not too obvious, but readable enough, and swirls on either side of the design are so elegant. I'm not quite certain I like the positioning of the RSS button. Besides, I see an RSS link in the footer navigation, so get rid of one of the two. Speaking of the footer navigation, you should consider pruning some of it. It's way too much. You should just display the most important stuff there, things like subscribe to my facebook/myspace/twitter/great-grandpa's-oracle (j/k) etc. should really be secondary. Also, the organization of the links here is rather... random.
A lot of links in the footer can be put under the same main category. For example:
- about us, the SZ team, past covers -> are basically all "stuff about the magazine"
- contact us, youtube, twitter, myspace -> are means through which your users can contact you/ interact with you
- apply and advertise would be more suited as sidebar content. Normally, I'd assume that you wouldn't always have positions open. Besides, this is not exactly part of the "meat" of the zine.
- login and register, you already have the links at the top of the page, and they're really distinctive too, I'd say that's enough.
And with that, you'd have the following link list:
Home, About, Site Map, Contact Us, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Subscribe, RSS Feed
I'd say this is more than enough, and only contains the most important links. You have the link to the site map for links to everything.Speaking of navigation still... you main one: IS A DISASTER. The generic internet user has a very small attention span. Teenagers, doubly so. Keeping that in mind: throwing 15 links (WTF??) at once to choose from is way too much. Once again, you need to have a few main categories, and add subcategories to these.
For example:
- forum, radio and store are "extra content"; I assume the meat of the site are the various articles. So I'd leave these two towards the end. Possibly put them on the sidebar, instead of the main navigation.
- horoscope and advice - in paper magazines, I've always seen this stuff as kind of "filler", but something which helped users feel more connected nevertheless. So I'd put these two towards the end of the list.
- as for the remaining categories... I wouldn't display them all. Choose the most important/relevant ones. And have a categories list on the sidebar(indented, using a js accordion effect, if there's too much of it).In conclusion: your site has a great design, but your organization leaves a lot to be desired and is probably alienating a sizable number of visitors.
Check out the following online magazines and look at their organization:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com
http://www.noupe.com/
http://www.onextrapixel.com/
http://sixrevisions.com/
These all have a lot of content, but they don't display every single category in the main navigation, and thus avoid overwhelming their users.= Content =
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I can see that you have a lot of it, but since the topic doesn't exactly appeal to me, I'll just randomly go through some of them, and read some organizational stuff.- About -
On hover on this link, I notice that it has a sublink called "table of contents". That is one very very weird idea... to have a dedicated page just for the sublinks. How about having a brief introduction (no more than 1 short paragraph - 5 lines at most) on the main page, with a "read more" link, followed by a list of sublinks.And your about page starts with a ... plugboard of all things? I'm confused. What kind of information does this tell about you as the owner(s)? My impression from this is that you're extremely desperate for visitors and use an unsuitable method to attract them. Normally, if people would want to plug themselves, they wouldn't go to your about page, right?
The presentation itself is very interesting, and if I were a teenager and interested in these topics, it would definitely make me want to check things out.
The Team subpages (categories?) could be shown on one page. And also the pictures could be styled better. Crop them to be the same size, and align them properly side by side. Also, perhaps a few lines below the pictures describing them wouldn't hurt either. The first few words from the about section in the community. By the way, the links to the profiles are not very well thought out. I was initially going to suggest a link to an individual staff page, before I looked back to see if the picture wasn't a link after all. Have a border or something...
And the rest will be a few random articles, since I can't possibly go through all of your content.
- Girl Bullying -
There's something weird going on here. I see the same article listed twice. The second time with misaligned text. Did you mistakenly duplicate it?
It started out quite nicely, but somewhere along the middle it turned into a rant fest, and a "let's point fingers too, because they did so as well". Instead of identifying each of these girls by their names, just so the writer could describe their flaws, one paragraph detailing these flaws would have been more than enough. I'm not actually familiar with the writer/the people the writer mentions, as such this many names only confuse me as I try to remember each individually. Plus, at the end, that is not what the articles wants, or well it shouldn't want to make me remember a number of individual bullies, but rather bullying types, right.- Teen Summer Jobs -
I'd put the caption under the picture instead of above it. It's not really that important, considering the content of the article, so it shouldn't be displayed before the article's text is. The article itself is quite good, but I'm a bit worried how it puts much more emphasis on the "having fun part" compared to the "responsibility" aspect. Sure, being a teenager, it is important to present jobs in a favorable light, but it is also very important to take the job seriously. After all, people are going to pay you to sell ice cream, and not just to hotties, but every single paying customer.- Back to School: Cool Tips -
This is... not a quality article. It's not even an article, feels more like an introduction to one. It should have examples of accessorizing methods (pictures are always a plus), and perhaps a set of recommended thrift stores, with prices added.All in all, it seems that the vast majority of the article, and well the content in general is of great quality. Some of it is a bit too frivolous, like I mentioned before, then again perhaps it's me who's not a teenager and have a different mentality. Keep up the good work, and make sure that articles like the last one I mentioned don't slip through. It'd be a pity, after all, the rest are so well written, and in depth.
= Coding =
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I'm confused by the large blank space at the top. I can see my scrollbar you know, and I'm sure so can the rest of nosy visitors. Plus, if you have add-ons like Firebug, this is not even an obstacle anymore.I was just about to compliment you (or well the creator of the design), for the excellent coding style. Until I noticed that there are no closing body and html tags. Add them at the end of the footer.php file, in your template folder.
CSS is clean and well organized, well done.
Score: 3/5
You have a very nice site, with a lot of content, which is of great quality. Now if you just fix your organization issues, as well as the small inconsistencies I mentioned (plugboard on about site, duplicate content) you will have one amazing site. Great job! :)
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puffypanda gave it
on 25th Oct 2010 and said:Hi there,
This is my first review on an e-mag and I must admit I was pleasantly surprised. My first impressions was how I love the layout. It has a professional feel to it while also looking fun.
I like your sidebar, with the interactive poll. Your homepage is also pretty cool, I like how your new content is displayed, with the little boxes. Ah, I believe I may have spotted your first issue. I'm using my iPhone to view your site, which I suppose is reasonable given the type of site this is. I can imagine people going on this site on their phones so I do believe it would be important for the site to be working on smart phones as well.
I found the bottom half of your home page, where it says 'new this month' disappeared once the page loaded fully. Ibe reloaded the page several times but that didn't solve the problem.
I like the layout of the forum. The topics are interesting and I'm thinking of joining myself! The only issue here is there's no obvious way of getting back to the main page. Maybe another link on the navigation will be the easiest option.
There is a 'back to' button with what looks like a small square besides it but this link isn't working and brought me to an error page.
The radio page just totally I'd not work. It brought up a blank page with some writing telling me what to do but there were no other buttons.
I think I may repeat this review on my computer as it may be simply because of my phone that were getting so many errors, but onwards for now.
Horray, the horoscopes page looks fab. I like how your menu works. I like your articles too. Although I wonder if you actually interviewed the people on your interviews page. I've read the Konvict one and it seems more like information than an interview, interesting nonetheless.
Some of the images on the pages were not showing up.
Overall, I like the variety of content you have and the feel of the site. The colours are lovely and suit the topics.
Hope you find this review helpful :)
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