Paul of Reserved Secrets review.

Presentation:
Since you took the time to make 3 different skins, I’ll take the time to review all of them. But you should have screen-caps on your web-page of each of the skins to let your visitors know which one they’re choosing. One major flaw all of your themes have: an extremely similar side-bar (alter the headers in your CSS to make more of a variance) and extremely small font size for the links. I’m talking minuscule. You need to make it a lot more legible and user-friendly!

Hides a Knife: This is your default theme. I think it’s rather gloomy looking, and for my big browser (1280×1024) there’s a lot of blank space. I really suggest centering this theme (and all your other ones, for that matter). Also, this is the only theme where the php error shows up, I think it has something to do with a file setting you put in your cookiecheck.php. The font you used for your site title is almost illegible. I also don’t like how you limited your color scheme so much. You only used one shade of pink and black. Try going for more variation, a dark magenta here or there, or a contrasting green thrown in. Experimentation works really well. I also don’t like your brush choice. You have such a “punk” image to work with, why limit the brush use to some spray paint brushes and what looks like newspaper text? The most distracting/unattractive use of brushes was in the text background–it was just so overwhelming. Sometimes less is more. I’m unsure of who the woman is, could you maybe specify in the skins page a bit of background info on them?

The Band: By far my least favorite of your themes. The gradient you used just doesn’t go. While I think you tackled the brush use a lot better in this one than the first (it definitely meshed with the background better), it’s just not pretty. You also have two navigations, one in the header image and one on the sidebar. As this is confusing and unnecessary, you should go into your psd of the theme and remove the menu. However, I just think this theme is plain and could have used some more texturing or a few more images to make it… less “flat” looking. I really, really don’t think the green/blue gradient meshes well with the layout at all.

I Caught A Lovely Butterfly: By FAR my favorite theme. This is classy, has a balance of colors (you can’t go wrong with white, black, and hot pink), and the image you used is just… attractive. I’m usually not even big on images that are cut out of the background with a huge hunk of background still visible, but somehow you pulled it off. The “X” brush behind the skin name is also gorgeous, but I would change the font you used for your site-name to something similar to the one used for “butterfly”. Make this theme your default, it’s a lot more classy! One thing you could change is that there is a vast swath of white background. I think it detracts from the layout and makes it look small. Again, I’m using a huge resolution, but you should cater to all of your visitors. Centering usually makes the white space seem a bit less, but the reality is your header image isn’t big and you’re using white as a background… it’s going to come off a bit plain to some visitors.
Content:
Let’s break this up into sections, shall we?

The Boy: Your “stats” page is very standard, which is code for generic. Try including some interesting random facts about yourself, most of your appearance statistics are unimportant, as it’s your personality that’s shining through the website, not your appearance. In your “autobiography” page, you spelled “instalments” wrong, it’s correctly spelled with 2 l’s. Also, in “to explain what make me tick”, “make” should be “makes”. I noticed you said that physical appearance doesn’t “scratch the surface” of who you are, and then you continue to talk about what you look like instead of digressing into something more abstract. You jump around a bit, describing what you look like, then mentioning your aspirations to be a singer/actor, and then jumping back to something about teeth braces. I recommend making headers for this section addressing stuff about yourself (e.g. “Appearance”, “School”, “Aspirations”) to keep the page organized and free of tangents. I think you don’t address much about your interests, but rather describe your day-to-day life. A good idea would be to add a section about singing and acting: why do you like these things? Are you in a play workshop outside of school? Are you in a choir of some sort? Including that sort of information can be a bit interesting to the reader, let us into your life a bit more!

Site: Your site page is basically pointless and should be renamed “Resources”, at least until you decide to write up a proper site history. Otherwise, it really serves no purpose. “Artnonymous” (brushes) moved, so you should change your link. Not much to say about this page, other than its uselessness.

Visitor: I think your site reviews page could use a scoring rubric of sorts (you mention that you’ll rate someone’s site, but not what you’ll rate it on). Also, having a submission form would probably make this page a bit more user-friendly. Also, are you just going to e-mail them the review or post the review on your site? Your “review” page isn’t at all informative. As for your icons, I think they’re very well made and it’s awesome that you made sub-pages for them so it wouldn’t clutter. The “floral” icons are a bit cheesy, but I think the others are designed quite thoughtfully. The “color palettes” page is very interesting, I wonder why you don’t use similar adventurous color schemes? Sticking to black and white backgrounds is very limiting, I must say! It would be nice if you listed the HEX codes so people planning on using those colors in CSS don’t have to use the dropper tool and whatnot to figure out what color it is. In your tutorials section, the “How to Make a Good Layout” page is very vague and constricting. For instance, you don’t address the idea of using an image-less layout, and you only specify one or two sites as good image sites. You also don’t specify what CSS is or why it’s important to a layout. It would be nice if you had image representations of how you made one of your layouts. This page would do a lot better in bullet points with a few tips, as it’s not really a tutorial but just suggestions. In “making a successful site”, “Know what your doing:” the “your” isn’t supposed to be possessive, but “you are”, so it’s properly: “Know what you’re doing:”. Also, I disagree with the statement ” To make people be attracted to your site, you need to have a good layout.” For instance, Maddox’s website has almost NO layout, yet he gets millions of viewers. Not once do you mention recommending sites have quality content. While the layout may attract people to come to your site, if you have no content, they won’t stay or come back. I think you should remove the “coming soon” layouts link, just post it when you’re prepared to offer layouts… it’s pointless having a non-link there in my opinion.

Set Skin: A description and screen-cap of each skin is very necessary. Nothing is more annoying than having to go through all three themes just to see what they look like.

Nothing about your content was particularly memorable. You shied away from having a personal section about yourself (though this is a personal site) and your visitor content I got through in a matter of minutes. You don’t have any real “substance” here, and I would highly suggest you work on that. Why not add a few recordings of you singing (since it’s your passion)? Be creative, try to add a bit more of yourself to your site! Your site, I’m sorry to say, didn’t leave an impression and was utterly forgettable. This isn’t to say your content is bad, it’s just… too generic to leave an impression. This is easily fixed.

Coding:
You have a whopping 105 errors when put through the HTML validator. I also found it ironic that your CSS had tons of errors too, and yet you mention having “quality CSS” in one of your tutorials. As far as the HTML goes, not only do you not specify a doctype, but you don’t even open <html> above the header. The common structure for websites is as follows:

<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

Of course you’ll want to make your coding valid because this makes your site a. more streamlined by separating content from style, b. cross-browser compatible, and c. might fix your skinning errors. First, you’ll want to specify what doctype you plan on using. This simply notifies the browser as to which coding standard you’re following. I personally recommend XHTML Strict or Transitional because I think it concentrates more on separating style from content. I also recommend you take a looksie at tutorialtastic.co.uk to figure out which doctype is right for you. Since I’m most familiar with XHTML, I’ll guide you through validating XHTML Transitional. You add the doctype above your <html> tag:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

And then you need to specify in your <html> that you’re using XHTML too:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

In between your <head> tags, you put your style-sheet and meta tags. The one meta tag you need to add is what kind of character encoding you’re using. This is important because it lets the browser know how to read your code. Utf-8 is the universal character encoding, but you can read up at w3.org to see if there’s a better one for you.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

This also means you need to add your stylesheet to your header, not in between your <body> tag as you have now!

<LINK REL=stylesheet href="http://www.reserved-secrets.co.uk/nav/style.css" TYPE="text/css">

The above is what you have in your HTML coding, and it’s incorrect for multiple reasons. First, valid XHTML allows no capital letters in between your brackets. Everything should be lowercase. Also, you didn’t put ’stylesheet’ in quotes. Lastly, you don’t self-close the tag. XHTML requires you to “self” close tags that don’t have a closing element¹ you add a backslash and a space before the closing bracket. In correct XHTML, your style-sheet link would look like so:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.reserved-secrets.co.uk/nav/style.css" type="text/css" />

Remember to put this between <head></head>. Also, if you plan on validating your site to XHTML, remember to self-close all elements that don’t have a closing tag. So, <br> would become <br />, etc. A common problem is un-escaped ampersands because they are viewed as an entity, you need to make sure to the HTML code… everything is explained in the cited article.
So, that’s a really quick overview on how to validate your site. I think it will help greatly with your coding competency, skinning, and overall understanding of HTML, so I definitely recommend reading a few articles at w3.org about validation.

Rating:

While I liked the way you presented your site (you are definitely gifted at layout making), I felt a lot of your content was rushed and half-assed. Try concentrating more on you and make the visitor content a lot less generic and a bit more personal. Also, your coding is atrocious but that’s probably due to you following a lot of bad tutorials in the past. You really need to re-haul your site, and I would recommend NOT releasing an imperfectly skinned site with a bunch of php errors on the side.. it’s simply unflattering. While you have a lot to improve, you have a lot of potential. I think just spending quality time on the site would really improve it exponentially. Good luck with all future endeavors.

1. because <link> tags don’t have a closing </link>, [this also applies to <img src=""> and <br>] [↩]

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Reviews Brianna. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.