Nov 16

Whoa Baby

Owner: Danielle
Website: Whoa Baby

WHOA!!! Baby? Interesting choice of a website name… I’m sorry, but my teenage immaturity is
totally finding a lot of sexual innuendo in the choice of words linked together as a website name. I apologize for my utter infantilism.

Moving on to a more useful advice and comments… Whoa Baby is “represented” by an incompleted cut out image of Ashlee Simpson also known as a “PSD” or “PNG” by teenage dingbats when clearly PSD and PNG are image file formats, not transparent background images of useless celebrities. Okay, where was I? Oh yeah, the bogusly innocent and dodgy image of Ashlee is plastered over brushes that contribute less than a person walking into a wall. At least the colour scheme is maintained. Tip #1: Smaller height. More optimization. More originality.

The CSS is nearing the borderline to being atrocious. First off, the text margins are way to close to comfort. I know you obviously wanted to maintain the colour scheme of the header image, but you need to choose darker tones of the two main colours because the contrast between the bolded text and white background, for instance, is melting away my vision as I type. At least the text size isn’t making me smash my retinas into a blender…

Uh oh, I see redistributed content in the content page! Danielle even lists where she jacked them from. LOLZ, her terms and conditions page even allows for others to redistribute her “work” with permission. That’s just hilarious! I know that colourlovers.com is a site that allows users to share their “creations” (I never knew it took skill to match colours and come up with a “deep” sounding names, but I give the site some kudos for the patterns) to others for distribution. Anyway, it’s not right to provide other people’s work as a service from your site. It is okay to use their work in conjunction with the layout. The gradients are also “works” of that site. Whoa Baby inconvienitly makes its visitors download “their” colour schemes onto a mysterious program that has a .grd file extension. Danielle, you should make the courtesy to tell your visitors what program they will be using when they download those inept gradients. As for the coded layouts, I see a lot of HTML in the Cascading Stylesheet (CSS). When clearly Danielle separates the “coding” from the “CSS”. Aren’t they both coding? The layouts aesthetically are clones of your PSD-PNG-WHATEVER-THEY-ARE-CALLED-BRUSH COLLISION image headers. Tip #2: Better quality and more useful resources! If you cannot accomplish that task, then you shouldn’t be providing graphics/resources to guillible teenage crowds. Oh wait, they wouldn’t know the difference anyway. That explains the millions of hideously useless graphic sites that either worship celebrity “PSDs” or that pretenious “novel” series, Twilight.

As for the tutorials, Danielle definitely over-exaggerates the difficulty level of them to prove to herself and to the visitors that her site is useful. Par exemple, the “advanced” picture tutorials—come on, even a blind dog can follow the input instructions with ease. The little intro blurb in your PHP Includes tutorial really fascinates me. Yes, PHP can be really tricky, but what’s tricky about PHP Includes? There are barely any PHP needed in PHP Includes. I guess this concept of copy and paste could be difficult for ditzes like yourself (just kidding…). Tip #3: You should explain to your visitors why one would use PHP Includes or why one would image map. A list of instructions isn’t the only thing that makes up a tutorial.

It’s CREDITS TIME! I’m going to go straight to what Danielle has forgotten: paper-hearts.org, colourlovers.com, and Paint Shop Pro. Also, you need to credit where you learned about HTML, CSS, and PHP Includes. I highly doubt that an average girl who dresses in Hollister and takes pictures of herself from a mirror came up with the internet’s markup languages. I give Danielle kudos though for crediting most of her sources.

After all these discrepancies, I am rather surprised that Danielle reviews other websites. What on earth is with this trend in reviewing websites when clearly the reviewer has no or little skill whatsoever? Anyways, I find that Whoa Baby’s reviews are has helpless as a broken telephone. Come on, you should be more honest and helpful in the review. I don’t blame you though, your lack of experience should reflect a borderline useless review. You should also explain in more depth why marks are taken off each section—unless you totally randomize the mark to your liking. Okay, I’m going to stop there before I’m rejected from the pearly gates.

Altogether, Whoa Baby is a place where all my pet peeves of the internet meet up for brunch. With much more experience and experimentation, Danielle should be able to take her level of web/graphic design to a much more unique and useful level. The only question is, could she handle the truth enough to make change? We’ll see…

Nov 15

Mirotic

Owner: Rin
Website: Mirotic

Let’s see: eye-friendly layout colours and CSS, not under/over sized header image, generic-less site name… Things in the mirror appear closer than they seem.

Looking for aesthetically into the website layout, I find that images can be more optimized. The image used in the footer headers appear to be a blob of smeared poop that slightly resembles a butterfly. I know you take a lot of pride in using the “transparent-follow-you-down-a-page” horizontal navigation bar, but you should jazz it up a bit so that the links are more noticeable when they are both still and moving. Since we are on the topic on the main navigation links, the order of links should be changed. I find it more organized if they are ordered by: HOME, SITE, RIN, REVIEWS.

The credits page! Wow, I acutally have nothing to say. Never mind, I do (not much though). You need to credit Feedburner, PR Checker, and of course, Extreme Tracker. Excellent job with crediting the credits. How creditable.

You have a good style of reviewing: you review both layout and coding. Kudos are enforcing eye-friendly text You should also concentrate more on the website’s content and review truthfully the quality and accessibility of the services they provide. I know that appearance is top-notch in this physically sustained world, but it’s nice to dig a little deeper.

Arrgh, I’m running out of things to say! Anyway, the truth is that your website rocks in terms of organization and its current content. Create more content to attract more varieties of visitors. It doesn’t necessarily need to be pre-made graphics! Patch up on some grammar and you’ll be set to sail.

(Wow, this review is so minuscule..)