AnnaNeo has 5 Reviews
Below are the reviews left by other members on AnnaNeo. Jump to review form?
dfmillington gave it
on 28th Sep 2011 and said:As I'm writing this review I'm listening to music from the site - I love it. The opportunity to create your own playlist is a very nice feature. And even thought the very first impression of the green and yellow color scheme is a little bright it does work well together and does not negatively impact the readability of the site. Easy to use navigation that shows up on all the pages - nice - I hate having to use the back button to navigate around a site. I guess I spoke too soon - I just went to the tutorials page - oops. The tutorials are in frames (I'm using IE 8) and don't show properly. A couple other things - the "Art" button takes you off site - why? And my final observation is that when you hover over one of the links in the site navigation it blends into the background making it unreadable. Not good.
Using MSIE on Windows | Report This?
![[img: avatar]](/avatars/Frisby.gif)
Frisby gave it
on 28th Aug 2011 and said:Hey Anna. ^^ I've seen you around a lot, but apparently I've never taken the time to look at your site in depth, so I'll be doing that today. I'll probably be giving the design most of my attention, since that's where most of my expertise lies.
Design Overview
Hm, not bad. Nothing obviously wrong, just a lot of minor tweaking could improve the design. The slight imperfections give it a rather amateur feel, so you'll want to work on that.One important element of design is repetition. This spans all sorts of attributes in the layout, but the main ones that come to mind here are repetition in font, color, alignment and patterns.
Font
You've consistently used a sans-serif font--tahoma, which is good. Or at least better than using a million different fonts. It does feel a little boring though--you've used a freer feeling font for the main header title, but you might want to consider using other fonts to add interest to the headers. Right now, looking at the homepage, the blog title doesn't stand out well from the rest of the content. It's also the same color as the links, so it's a little deceptive. I keep wanting to click on it. On other pages, the headers are the same size as the regular font, so they also blend in.
In the sidebar you've got the opposite problem. The headers look very different from the rest of the text--they certainly stand out, but it seems to me you've over styled them. The headers have a white font, drop shadow, spaced out letters, and a oval gradient background, which seem to pop out of nowhere. Remember repetition. At the very least, your headers on the left and right should match, but more than that, the features of the headers should be present in other parts of the layout. I'm not seeing the color white white, spaced out letters, gradients, or oval shapes in the rest of the site, so I'd advise simplifying it.Font size now. I think tweaking this will help a lot. REMEMBER. Headers are HEADERS. They need to stand out! So why are the sidebar headers so tiny? Make the main headers (h1, h2) bigger than the rest of the text. This isn't some law, but in almost all situations it holds true. It usually takes me until h4 to get down to regular font size, and I almost never use h4s. The most important stuff should have the biggest headers, so I usually use h1s for the main content and h2s for the sidebar. The font sizes I use for them are usually around 25 and 18-15, so both are still distinctly larger than the main text and CONTRAST.
I think I've talked enough about headers now. Let's take a look at font size elsewhere.
You've got a lot of different font sizes going on. The font size of the sidebar actually changes when I click Site, so you'll definitely want to fix that little glitch. Like font-faces, and colors, you don't want to have a million different font sizes floating around. Therefore, I'd suggest having one size for main text, include sidebar text, and then a different size for the important stuff like headers and navigation links (it's not a bad idea to have the navigation links the same size as your headers, as long as you can tell the difference between them). Looking at your coding, I see you've used 11pt, 11px, and 8px. Pt is NOT the same as px. Make sure you note that, or you could accidentally end up with more font sizes than you mean. One thing to keep in mind is that a smaller font, 10px or 11px looks neater in general, although it could compromise readability. In any case, experiment with that and see how font size can affect the 'cleanliness' of a layout.Take away message on fonts: Use font size and font face/family to make sure headers contrast, but use as few different fonts as possible to keep the layout from looking cluttered.
Color
I like that you've tried to stick with a consistent color scheme. That's good. However, even though you're staying within the realm of yellow and green, you have a ton of different colors, and a ton of color in general in the layout. Ignoring black and white, I have made layouts with only two colors, which have usually been similar shades of one color, say a light orange and a dark orange. Here, you've got countless shades of yellow and green. If you want your site to look professional, you don't want to do that.
Take a march around a well designed site. Sayy...hm...Rev.iew.me. xD The color scheme is greens and blues...but the predominant color is...white? The color white makes the layout look very fresh and clean, and if you look at other professional looking sites you should find a similar theme. My advice to you is this--use a color like white or black as the main color (perhaps a background color), and then pull other colors, as you have, from your images (yellow and green) and add them as ACCENTS. Header colors, link colors, etc.If you think about it, this is similar to my advice with the fonts. You want to emphasize the differences. The colors you use should be clearly different, and few. You don't want a bunch of shades of yellow green. Better would be one shade of yellow, and one shade of green, with lots of white to add breathing space.
Alignment
One of the things I got attacked on when I first joined rev.iew.me was padding. Man, some people are just obsessed with having padding. As you should know, I'm referring to the space between your text and the edge of its container. It's important, yeah, but I don't need to go to great lengths to get my point across. Basically, you got a box with text in it. The top, left, right, and bottom should all have the same padding, unless you have a good reason to do it otherwise. I'd say the padding in your sidebar and main content should be the same. Generally 5-10 pixels of it is a good idea.
Right now, the sidebar has about 2px, and the main content has a different amount on different sides. Fix that us, and you'll look a bit more professional.One other note on alignement. I see you've done this well--the space between the sidebar and the main content = the space between the main content and sidebar and banner. What's good about this is that you've repeated the distance! (Repetition, whoo! 8D). Say you wanted to make them closer together though; don't forget repetition. In that case I'd make the distance between them 5 or 10 pixels, to match the amount of padding the boxes have.
Patterns
(My goodness, my fingers are really tired. I'll keep this short.)
The background pattern you used is fun and playful looking. This does not reinforce the professionalism you seem to be going for. Clean shapes, stripes, or solid colors generally are more the professional root, and not smilie faces, although it can be done. x3 On the home page you have a little image bar at the top. Remove that. Its got a random texture that really don't go well with the rest of the layout, plus I can see reds and blues in the image that break the color scheme.Phew. o-o That was a lot on your layout.
I'm gonna be really brief on the rest of your site, 'cause this is taking my entire afternoon. xD
I feel like you have too many intermediary pages to get to the content. Also, the previews on the userlookup pages are a little small. It'd be nice if you could make them bigger.
On the websites layout page, it'd be good if you could have some smaller preview to get an idea of what the layout looks like before clicking the link.
The pixels page content isn't too good. The colors look a little muddy, not crisp, and some of them are really random. Wooden toy soldier? o: I don't know if I could see people using the pixels. The outlines are pretty good, but I'm not sure if I'd see people using them very much. The striped background seem pretty good, but some of the more abstract ones are kind of random and I'm not sure how good they'd look.
In general, it seems like you could improve the quality of your content. Make every piece of content as if you were going to use it yourself. If you wouldn't use it yourself, make it better or more useful.Hope this is helpful, and sorry I focused so much on the layout. xP
Using Chrome on Mac | Report This?
dorinekur gave it
on 20th Aug 2011 and said:Layout
I like this simple layout. It appeals to me in a big way and I like the colors used, as well as the divider on top of every post you've made. However, your CSS has eight errors and your coding has 49 errors and 21 warnings in it. I advise you to fix these errors as soon as you can to provide a more user-friendly interface for your visitors.Content
Site
I don't understand why do you have to put your categories in block-quotes. You don't have to, really. Also, you don't have to put them all in the center. The word "Site" is also very tiny and does not look like a header at all. Try making a <h1> header to make it look nicer.Content
Once again, instead of putting your content in the center, align them on the left. There is no need for a background of another color in your "Graphics", "Resources", and "Tutorials". Instead you can put it as the same color as the background color you have in your content box.Graphics[/i]
I like the way you made the graphics, "Non-Neo" or "Neo". You could change the word "style" to category", though. Graphics should actually fall into the category Resources as Graphics are resources for people to use.Non-Neo and Neo[/i]
Personally I like the fact that you've made a ton of resources for your visitors to use when they need it. Ensure that these are made by yourself, however, and not taken from another website then edited. Also, remember to tell your visitors to credit you!Resources[/i]
The content in here is practically similar to the ones in the Graphics. No no, not similar similar. It's just that "Adoptable Transparent PNGs", "Transparent PNGs", "Blank Buttons" and "Site Naming Ideas" are called resources and the ones in the graphics section are also called Resources. I suggest combining the two together.Tutorials[/i]
These are helpful to people who are new to the web. I thank you on behalf of them for making them. However, on the "Basic HTML" tutorial page, I'd just like to say that to skip a line, the correct code should be <br /> and you should tell your readers that if they want the marquee to scroll downwards, they should change the "up" option to "down".Art
I have nothing much to comment here since this is not part of your site but is deviantART account.Overall
I like your website, but you should correct the errors in your coding. Congratulations on making me attracted to your website by having a simple layout! :PI'm Dorine and I just reviewed your website. I hope you find this review useful for you to improve your website. :)
Using Chrome on Windows | Report This?
![[img: avatar]](/avatars/baiorin.png)
baiorin gave it
on 19th Aug 2011 and said:Hello there :) I'm Christine and today i've chosen to review your site!
Upon entering the site, i'm exposed to a very prominent yellow and green colour scheme. It was pretty blinding to me, since I'm in a dark room, and the colours are high in contrast. I admire the fact that you can stick with a colour scheme, but next time you may want to consider going with softer colours, in consideration to those who may suffer from eye seizures.
The bevel on the "anna neo", is a bit off-set compared to the rest of the layout. I think plain white would've done the title in your header much more justice.
In your sidebar, you have the headers that say "welcome, navigation" etc. It's nice that you have the little yellow oval bg to help it stick out, but it seems strange how the words are aligned to the right, and the oval fades out towards the right. If the ovals weren't blurred out on the right side, and the text centered it would look a lot nicer.
Under the "Navigation" section, the text is centered. This makes it look sloppy, especially since the words don't have the same amount of letters, aligning the links here would've been more appropriate.Next, i'm just going to browse through some of the stuff you have to offer :)
Icons- There's not many of these, and i'm sorry to say that their quality isn't the best. I understand that your site has been around for awhile, but like the site itself, the content must be updated to keep a good overall quality site. The Icons you offer look like they were made in Ms paint, whilst your layout looks like its made in gimp/photoshop.
Background- I wouldn't say they're anything special, mostly because the vast majourity of them have your site's name on them. I understand stealing is an issue, but someone can easily remove your watermarks, and people who don't mean to steal, but instead use these will be turned off because of the watermarks. In short, watermarks are unattractive and won't stop stealers from stealing.
Blank Avatars- I don't quite get the point of the blank avatars if some of them have words on them, and again, your watermark. They are actually a lot more quality than the ones on your "Icons" page.
And Lastly, a look at your tutorials.
I just looked at your "how to pixel" tutorial. It had a good start, but upon reading further I realised that the technique in which you're pixelling (block shading) is the wrong way to shade. Real pixelling requires that you shade according to a light source, and also that the outlining for your pixel must be symmetrical. Also, since the tutorial more specifically talks about making a dog pixel you should've labelled the tutorial "How to make a dog pixel", instead of "how to pixel" since it doesn't cover general pixelling techniques. To avoid teaching people wrong techniques next time, make sure you really read up on something you write a tutorial about. only write tutorials on things you are experienced with.All in all, your site has a good start. Considering you guys are all pretty young (14-16, but I am also the same age and have made quite a lot of progress myself) it is something to work with. just make sure you look at good sites for inspiration and really learn the art of graphic designing and web design if you want to go far with it.
Sorry if I seem a bit to harsh >.
Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?
fugabutacus gave it
on 16th Aug 2011 and said:Your site is set out pretty nicely, all the things I need to know first and foremost are right there in the side bar. The side bar is laid out very well, easy to find your link, twitter, etc. The one thing I don't like about it is the heading above each module, it's just... I don't know, it just doesn't do it for me visually.
You've got a nice color scheme going on. I'm not too keen on the banner at the top, though. It fits the rest of the site very well, but it looks a tad unprofessional. I think that's mainly because of the title - the font and the effects applied to it just strike me as slightly amateur.
Then, of course, there's the main blog itself. It's the center of attention and the first thing to grab your attention, which is good since it's your main content. I have no complaints about the layout of the posts. The thin banner at the top of each one is great, makes it easy to see where one ends and another begins, it might be nice if it stood out from the background more, though.
You have the blog navigation at the bottom page and it's perfect in terms of position and layout, but it would be much better if it were slightly larger. It's less than eye-catching at the moment, but it's a pretty essential tool to anyone reading your blog.
I'm not a fan of your "site" page, however. Simply because there is too much blank space. You have the links there in quite small boxes, so perhaps having two per line would fill some of this space? It's not a terrible thing, it just looks a bit odd.
Over all, it's a decent site. It may have a few little visual stuff that could be tweeked, but all the essentials are there and pretty easy to find. Good job!
Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?
Write Your Own Review
Leave your feedback for AnnaNeo below, and remember - the longer your review, the more points you receive. Don't forget to look at things like style/design, content, coding and originality as they will all help to improve the quality of your review.
You have to be logged in to write a review.