rev.iew.me

Star Box has 7 Reviews

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

1. 

   Rai gave it on 18th Feb 2009 and said:

   Layout: I like the colors used in your background. I can see how you tried to match those colors with the colors in your header, but it still does not look right against that background. Maybe it is because you are using two different patterns (stripes and flowers). You should add a footer to your layout and you should fill that empty space under your content with white instead of leaving it transparent like that. Your ads look messy with all the text used. You should use buttons in a rotation instead. Your 'Top Affiliates' is a very long list. You should divide it into a two columns instead.

   Content:
   Site - List this page in alphabetical order.
   Owner - Instead of aligning that paragraph 'center' you should align it 'justify'.
   Credits - Again this should be listed in alphabetical order.
   Affiliate Application - The text in for your form is too small. You should enlarge it.
   Affiliates - Check this page for broken links.
   Advertising - Again, the text in the form is too small.
   Visitors - List this page in alphabetical order.
   Resources - " ". You seem to have a fair amount of resources which is good.
   Graphics - Alphabetical order.

   Conclusion: Your site is fairly put together well. You list all of your pages in alphabetical order so your visitors can browse through your content easier. You still need to improve your websites overall look.

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2. 

   OhPanic gave it on 19th Nov 2008 and said:

   Wow, that's a huge header image which takes a while to load. Not to mention the fact it takes up all of my screen. You should consider the fact some of your visitors will have smaller screen resolutions. Your visitors shouldn't have to cater to you, you should cater to them.

   I can tell you've tried to center your layout, because that's how I used to do it. You should try containers.

   Looking at your layout for too long gives me a headache o_O

   SITE
   Wow, the links on this page are way too small!

   REVIEWS
   Nothing to say here.

   CONTENT
   Again, the links on the sub-pages are way too small! It hurts my eyes to look at them =(

   Celebrity images, hmm. They are illegal but nearly everyone is guilty of using them. You should get rid of them though. Resources without celebrity images are more unique, obviously.

   TUTORIALS
   I know everyone as already said this, but your HTML tutorials are actually CSS tutorials.

   I don't see the point in naming advanced picture tutorials 'advanced picture one' etc. How can your visitors find what they're looking for? Same with the icon tutorials. Give them a name!

   Your other tutorials are okay. Although you could do with some space after each step.

   OVERALL
   Your site isn't bad. Just needs some work. Get rid of the celebrity images for starters, and use containers. Good luck with everything though!

   Sorry this review stinks, I'm really tired :P

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3. 

   ShadowedLife gave it on 19th Nov 2008 and said:

   First impression when I entered your website was a @_@ feeling in a good way. The header image is really attractive haha. It's not so professional, yet it's very easy to the eye and fun to look at. I like how the welcome, advertisement, and top affie textareas are all at the same height as well as the navigation on the side, however, I do think that the navigation is a bit plain. It's all lime green and I personally think it would be more attractive if it changed to a different color or something of that nature-
   When you do reviews on your site, you may want to include a screenshot of the site that you reviewed back then so that when people reads them, they will know what layout you were referring to when mentioning it as one of the factor of the rating you gave that site =).
   from my point of view, the text is a tad bit small. Nothing wrong with that since I don't have problem with my vision.
   I went through your contents and if not great, they are at least very decent. I notice that there may be some illegal image use and like 90% of the other graphic sites out there, there will be a chance to get caught, however, that's your decision- I'm just pointing out a fact XD.
   You've got a few tutorials that can come in handy which is good-
   Yea, I don't really have much to say haha- Your website is pretty decent. I like the title of your website too XD Starbox is cool- and the different aurora colors-
   I don't know why advertisement is paid, however, as mentioned before, that's none of my concern XD haha- yeah so overall, you did fine- good job and keep up the good work!

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4. 

   meggan gave it on 18th Nov 2008 and said:

   JEEZE that is a lot of header before the content. On my laptop (which is primarily what I review sites on) I can see about an inch of your content, which means that every time I make it onto a page, I have to scroll almost a full screen height to get to the stuff I want to see. There's a newspaper term that's also used for websites and it's called having things "above the fold." This means that you make sure to put the most important things you want your readers to see above the fold, and the lesser-important things can go below. By that measure, your entire site is not important, only your site title is. Which... is weird.

   I think maybe you meant to have your layout look centered? The reason I'm unsure is because on my monitor, I get a stripe of white where your background ends, and it's not actually centered. I see that you're using a stylesheet, but then you put a bunch of inline styles on your divs to position them absolutely AND on those divs, you've got a closing double-quote in the middle of your style so your overflow: auto; and background: transparent; are outside of the style attribute. Try giving those divs an id and then referencing them in your stylesheet.

   Your whole site is pretty squinchy. The content area could use some left-right padding so it's not so squished up against the left edge, and each post could use some space between itself and its post title/date. You could also use a bit more line-height to make your entries easier to read.

   I'm not totally sold on your color scheme. I know you're using the green and the maroon from your site header (I know this because it fills my entire screen every time I load a page) but that green is pretty saturated and neon-y. It feels out of place with the starry, almost nighttime feel of the layout.

   I dislike how the underline on your main nav shifts the rest of the page downward; perhaps you could give the link an underline of white to start out with (so it pre-adds the space but looks invisible because it's on top of the white background) so when you hover, it doesn't add any height. It would make the layout less jolt-y on hover.

   The "quick note" on your credits page is really out of place; it's super dark and attracts a disproportionate amount of visual attention. I think you could lighten it up a lot and it would still be as impactful. I'm also not sure why you've separated out your credits by their tld and made those dividers right-aligned; it looks weird. I'd recommend (if you group them at all) to group them by type. Tutorials, glitters, whatever. Also, just because you credit something does not mean that it's free for the taking. Please make sure you are allowed to redistribute items before placing them on your site. It's copyright infringement otherwise, and if someone were really cranky with you they could go to your host and have your website shut down for the infringement.

   Your disclaimer (?) on the "Content" pages is also out of place. The letter-spacing is unnecessary and it would look a lot better with some padding. I notice you require a link back, but if you're redistributing something that you didn't create, shouldn't they be linking to the original creator? The "Site names" article title is also very out of place (I noticed this on other subpages too), as it's an image and it's unclear that it's the clickable title of the article instead of some kind of header. Also, that font is nearly illegible so I'd suggest either using standard text links or using a more legible font that better matches your layout.

   Also, sorry, I am just laughing at "Sidewalk Glance." Hello, and welcome to SIDEWALK GLANCE, where sidewalks look around very quickly before breaking eye contact. "Childless Play" sounds like it could be a euphemism for... adult things. What is "Hug Staps?" "White Cane" isn't cute so much as it's what blind people use to help them get around. This in mind, you might want to refrain from suggesting entire site titles and go more in the direction of feelings a site title might evoke and suggest words based on that. Do you want something that sounds mysterious? (Opaque.) Something cute? (Snuggly, hugs, etc.) Something unique? (Base it off your name or a nickname.) You could also mention considering problems with a particular name (make sure it doesn't spell something dirty if you mush two words together like Experts Exchange, make sure it doesn't inadvertently reference something you don't want to reference, etc.) and perhaps offer a link to your favorite domain registrar for them to make sure their desired name isn't already in use.

   Overall, I think your site is amateur. This is fine. This isn't meant to be insulting - you're young and there's a lot to learn. Researching things like information architecture (there are people paid to do IA as their career), hierarchy, color theory, principles of design and website conventions will go a long way toward making your site awesome. My first sites were not awesome. I'm not convinced anybody's beginnings are. Check out alistapart.com and read up on web standards (Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, etc.) and strive to improve!

   (Also, since you do reviews on your site, I'd love to hear what you have to say about mine. I've gotten a lot of usable feedback from rev.iew.me and you say you're opinionated and offer constructive criticism, which is what I need!)

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5. 

   Aisling gave it on 18th Nov 2008 and said:

   Your header is huge, and the starkness of the white is a bit harsh on the eyes. The stars are cute, though.

   The container area of it is pretty crowded. More padding for all! The green navigation is out of place, there is no other green anywhere, where did you get it from? The font is too tiny and needs to be a titch darker. Your layout isn't centred, which isn't a HUGE deal, but generally centred layouts are better for consistency between resolutions.

   The links on the actual pages (i.e. Site) are far too tiny as well. Your Owner page is very short and doesn't tell too much about you. I would expand on this a lot more. I never understand organizing sites by their TLDs, as you've done on your Credits page (.com, .net, .etc... oh, wow, I want the domain www.aisling.etc! :O). It doesn't really make sense.

   The rest of the pages in this section are pretty standard. Nothing to say.

   Sections called Content are one of my pet peeves. EVERYTHING in your site is Content. From the header, to the footer, everything in between, all text, all images, etc. Your resources are okay, but they could be better. PSDs are celebrity images which are illegal for you to used due to copyright laws. You also used many celebrity images in your icons and such.

   Your tutorials are okay, but could use some work. Your HTML tutorials are actually CSS tutorials, which is... not HTML. So, that's kind of weird.

   Overall, it's a nice start, but needs a lot of work still. I have full confidence that you will be able to pull it off, however. You seem to have a nice base going on, and you should be able to build it up in no time! Good luck with everything!

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   StarBox's Response:

   Thanks for the review! I changed it from 'Content' to 'Visitor' since you're pretty right.

6. 

   skyefairy gave it on 18th Nov 2008 and said:

   The first thing I noticed when I loaded your site was that your header is rather large and, thus, loads slow. I viewed the properties of the image to check the size (1000 x 600 & saved as a .png).

   One of the things you want to keep in mind to help your viewers is to try to keep your images as small as possible. Some viewers have slow connections which could cause them to load your site super slow (or freeze their computers). Some viewers also have limits on bandwidth and sites that have larger images will use up more than if you kept these things in mind. By keeping this in mind and keeping those visitors in mind, you have a better chance of getting return visitors.

   Your repeated background consists of the same stars that you have in the header so, instead of mixing them up like you do, you could have it continue to repeat and cut your image width in half that way by taking off the sides. Also, as afscom mentioned, your header is taller than it needs to be. I usually aim for my headers to be 300px tall at maximum, whereas yours is double that.

   For example, you could make your white dotted line shorter up top and crop off about 100 pixels there as well as move "the other side of the galaxy" up about 150 pixels and crop the bottom some as well. You don't have much going on that requires the space so the change wouldn't hurt the layout in any way.

   I'm not going to cover much about your header image. It isn't really my style / preference, but it doesn't look BAD. There is only one thing that does bug me enough to mention. You have large white outlines (stroke) added to your header text. While the white DOES match, the size of it is way too large. Maybe 1-2 pixels instead of the larger size you have? Perhaps lower the opacity to make it more transparent, as well? I think that making it more subtle would look better while still keeping the stroke to make the text stand out.

   The next thing I'd like to talk about is your coding. You're using absolute positioned divs to code and, while they do work, they do have limitations. I'm guessing they are also the reason why you have your header image so wide: you can't accurately center a layout in absolute positioned divs and, likewise, your image needs to be that wide to acurately imitate a centered layout. If you put the effort into learning non-absolute divs, you'll find that they are much easier to use and maintain and they also take care of your large image problem. And, they center!

   I've written a 3-part series on them (linked below).
   http://www.skyefairy.net/tutorialdisplay.php?mise=5
   http://www.skyefairy.net/tutorialdisplay.php?mise=6
   http://www.skyefairy.net/tutorialdisplay.php?mise=7

   http://www.tutorialtastic.co.uk/ also has some tutorials that might help.

   Other things to consider...

   I would add line-height to your content text as well as the big green links on the side. Preferably about 150% of the font size. The lines of content text seem to "stick" together--they don't have enough space in between them to separate well. Because of your hover bottom border on the big green links, they "jump" when hovered over. If you set a line-height that is larger, they shouldn't jump.
   I would suggest upping your font size to at least 12 pixels.
   In your CSS, you only specify one font (Tahoma). I would suggest adding multiple fonts in case some people don't have Tahoma as well as specifying the font type.
   On your reviews index, you have little teeny pixel text. Why? It's teeny small and hard to read. It needs to be bigger!
   Just a sidenote: your only tutorial in your HTML category is on CSS. HTML is not the same as CSS; they are two different types of coding.

   I skipped over much of your content as most of what you provide isn't my area of interest / specialty. Instead, I spent much of my time on your layout/coding. Hopefully it helps. I can't wait to see the improvements as Star Box grows. :)

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7. 

   afscom gave it on 18th Nov 2008 and said:

   Ok, first thing that I notice when I load up your site is that the header takes up the entire 'above the fold' area of my screen and cuts off maybe 100px before the right hand side, don't know if this is intentional but it looks rather weird. I'd fix this by setting your background image as the same colour as your header background to make everything a bit more seamless.

   Why are your links green? The colour doesn't match anything in your layout, saying that they do jump out at me which I suppose is a good thing, if only for the wrong reasons.

   Next criticism that I have is don't use small fonts as link text, it's just wrong. It's terribly hard to read and quite frankly ugly. Stick to using the same font as you have for the rest of your text.

   I liked reading your reviews, they're pretty helpful for other website owners but I'm confused as to why you have them linked under 'site' and 'reviews' as two separate pages? Why not combine them into the one (main) page instead of including them in your 'site' section. It just makes more sense for me.

   While we're on the subject, if you're going to give people code to sort their errors, try and use the correct code please? writing
   

   <br /*> (without the *)

   is not only confusing but wrong and easy to display correctly using this code to create 'greater than' and 'less than' symbols which won't convert into HTML. Check out this website on HTML special entities These will give you <br /> without it turning into a linebreak or you having to add in asterisks which your reader then needs to remove. Confusing as heck, especially for those who are new to code.

   I actually really like your icons, you're obviously a dab hand with PaintShop Pro.

   You have ''HTML" tutorials listed as a subnavigation option but the only tutorial in this subject is 'CSS', which isn't HTML at all. It's CSS, funnily enough. You cover the basics but don't think that you go into enough details to be offering tutorials on the subject, to be honest. Stick to the Paintshop ones :P

   All in all, you're site's got room for growth as you grow too (I'm going to do the annoying thing of saying 'Aww, you're 14. Cute). If you're really interested in web design read every article, every (respectable) tutorial that you can and learn as much as you can, it'll really benefit you!

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