Ashley of Rainbow Stuff’s review.

Presentation:
I’m a fan of rainbow layouts. I think they’re colorful, hard to pull off, and very pretty overall. The rollovers even add a nicer dimension… your layout is just so well thought out and carefully executed. However, your light blue background is perhaps too light, especially when contrasted with the white you use in your navigation links. They’re almost illegible and need more contrast. To the left I did my own shoddy PS “edit” of your layout and gave your background a darker color, closer to a periwinkle, #abcfee. I think the contrast is much stronger. Also, on hovers, your links shift a few pixels to the left.. I think it’s because the “hover” text is emboldened. Whatever the case, it’s really distracting… any rollovers should be fluid.

I guess this is a personal preference sort of thing, but I hate tag-boxes. Yours is also poorly suited to match your layout, the hot pink on bright blue is really harsh on my eyes, but besides this.. people can comment on a proper guestbook or on blog entries–I just really loathe tag boxes. I love the purple you used for your a:link, but I think the hover background color of sky blue doesn’t work that well. I suggest inverting the colors by making the link text white and the background hover purple, or alternatively, a light gray background color, like #ebebeb. Everything down to your picture borders are rainbow, I love that kind of continuity, and I happen to completely adore the look of your site. It’s cute without being cutesy, rainbow without being too overdone/ugly, and overall very well planned. This review is off to a good start.

Content:
The “Are you lost?” link in your footer leads to your Sitemap. Please rename it as such. I’ll break this up into sections, as per usual.

Domain: Hm… this page seems to be all over the place. Firstly, a more personal run-down of why you created your site, named it rainbow-stuff, and how you got into webdesign would be a lot more interesting to read than the convoluted story about you buying rainbow-stuff without hosting and then later on buying rainbow-wedding and then deciding to put rainbow-stuff back up… you can see how confusing/uninteresting that is. Also, the following quote is superfluous¹.

So you’re curious about rainbow-stuff? Cool! Here is a basic site history, credits, layout information, and more. ^____^

Also, the award pops up out of nowhere. Try creating a heading for it or perhaps incorporating it into the page in some creative way to make it not so… haphazardly placed. Your links to other review sites, etc. at the bottom of this main page would do better to be filed away in a nifty “links out” page that could be merged with your affiliates, etc. Your “Accessibility” page is really informative and helpful. I think you adequately explain how streamlined and cross-browser compatible your site is, I’m extremely pleased with this! Your Sitemap gets confusing when it switches over to the archives of your blog. I suggest making the settings for that WP plugin only for pages, because you have a separate archives page. It would make the sitemap a lot smaller and easier to digest, not to mention less cluttered-looking. Your “domain” dynamic sidebar disappeared when I went to the sitemap. I’ve never been a huge fan of WP Stats pages. Firstly, they do best in the sidebar. Secondly, they don’t serve much purpose. If I do come across these statistics in sidebars, I maybe glance at them for a quick five seconds and move on. No need to devote a whole page to the statistics, I don’t think they give your users a better understanding of your site’s mission statement. Again, your “domain” dynamic sidebar disappears. Your layouts page is in descending order which I find a little odd; I’m used to going from oldest to newest. I wish you had a bit more information about each of the layouts, sometimes you chose to put a sentence or two, sometimes no. Upon reviewing your previous layouts, I noticed a trend (especially the similarities in your previous couple of layouts). I just wanted to let you know, I think the one you currently have up is adorable and shows tremendous growth from your previous ones. The fact that you chose a blue background instead of a rainbow one made your current layout a lot less “busy” and a lot more pretty. Why aren’t the WP plugins you used also in your “Credits” page? I think your “Review Rainbowstuff” should be renamed to something like “Rainbowstuff’s Yoursite.nu Account”; I figured I was going to be directed to a page within your site outlining criteria involving people reviewing your site, but when I clicked the link it led me to the all-too-familiar yoursite.nu layout.

Girl: I really love your anecdotal way of writing, it really shows what you [are probably] like in real life, very sweet and unassuming. I enjoyed reading it because it was so personal and unlike many of the other “I’m-going-to-list-off-123123123-of-my-favorite-band” about me sections. Yours drew on your personality, some of your hobbies, and a bit about your home life as well. Succinct and brief, you didn’t drag on whatsoever, making it a fun and light read. The “Brief History About Me” in the sidebar is really “Random Facts About Me”, because that’s what they are–I enjoyed getting a new blurb on each page, though! The “Quick Info” header in your “Facts” page is superfluous, you rewrote all of your hobbies from your “about me” page, you should try to go for a fresh look. Also, the “neopets” link should probably be categorized elsewhere, in the “Site” section perhaps? I think the padding in your ordered lists should be made smaller. I wish you had made the “Alice in Wonderland” more personal. Instead of showing off everything you own relating to (in my opinion, an amazing movie) Alice in Wonderland, try picking your favorites and offering anecdotes of how you came across it, why it caught your eye, where fans of the object could buy one, etc. Having a bit of background story on why you’re so mesmerized with the franchise would also be a bit interesting. Try having a bit more fun with this section… the possibilities are endless! Usually I’m not a fan of quiz results, but your “Enneagram Test Results” were rather interesting and the page itself was not overwhelmingly long. I think the “101 Things in 1001 Days” is a rather interesting concept; it looked a little slim for 101 bullet points–I only counted something like 72. Anyways, I like the idea of it and I’m glad you’re making some hefty progress on it! I also found when I clicked this page, the handy-dandy “girl” sidebar disappeared². I think it would be nice if you had a little excerpt of your poem next to the title in your “poetry” page. In your “I’ll Be Here” poem, the last verse of the first stanza is extremely long and breaks the pretty regular meter you have going throughout the rest of your poem. Also, “and your live
you were sent from above” doesn’t make much sense; what do you mean by “live”? In “each day, that you’re away”, the comma is extraneous. I also found it weird that in all of your stanzas but the third you end it with “i’ll be here”; why did you skip the third one? I thought your “Leave Me Alone” poem was hilarious, especially the “You’re what restraining orders were made for” part. In “Sittin’ in the Lab (Day Three)” I found a couple of problems: “no i’m not crazy, not am i insane” doesn’t make sense, you might want to alter the syntax in the second clause & later in the poem you use the word “stimulized” which isn’t a word at all, perhaps you meant “stimulated”? In “Sugar Coated Dreams”, you spelled “everything” as “eveyrthing”. In “Geography Class I”, “dervied” should be “derived”. Your “Toaster” poem is by far one of the most creative and original poems I’ve seen in a while. I really enjoyed reading it and even though you didn’t have a background story like with your other poems, I felt that this was the artsy-est of your poetry and enjoyed it greatly. In your sidebar, you should let people know “Rainbow Wedding” opens in a new window.

Content: Your offered graphics look like stuff you would actually use, I really respect webdesigners who actually put effort into their freebies instead of offering up discarded design ideas. I don’t think you need to offer so many different variations of the same divider, most people can change the color themselves in their image editors. Your “movie reviews” seemed more like a listing of movies you’ve seen in the past more than reviews. You didn’t adequately explain why you gave a certain movie the rating you gave it, and most of the review was an excerpt you pulled from imdb or something. Only two or three sentences were of actual commentary, and it didn’t really say much. I think the information about your cat is more of a personal nature and should be in your “girl” section. The jigsaw puzzles are pretty interesting, but again make sure to let your visitors know they’re external links.

Links: I don’t understand why you list some links in your “domain” section and also here; it’s a bit redundant. You should also move all of the review links here, as it would make more sense.

Coding:
For the most part you have really neat coding. I do have a couple of problems that I’ll address here, though. But just know that your site is pretty neatly organized.

<div class="postpic" style="width: 267px">

Try removing the width and putting that in the CSS class. That way, you’ll completely separate the style from content & when you update your site in the future and perhaps change the width, you only need to edit your CSS file.

<img src="http://www.rainbow-stuff.com/wp-content/themes/default/images/top.gif" width="10" height="10" alt="Return to Top" />

Try adding the width and height to a CSS class. Be sure and include units. Say you’re using pixels, try:

.topgif {
height : 10px;
width : 10px;
}

Then it’s just:

<img src="http://www.rainbow-stuff.com/wp-content/themes/default/images/top.gif" class="topgif" alt="Return to Top" />

Your page was valid XHTML as promised, as well as CSS. Good job, I always enjoy people who enjoy validating their sites, hah

Rating:

I enjoyed your site, I really did. I wish your personal content was a bit more “personal,” and I wish you had a bit more content in the content section than in the domain section, but you put so much effort into your site, and it really shows. I can’t stress how much I LOVED your layout. Keep up the great work.

1. And probably was up before you converted to the lovely WP and got your dynamic sidebar [↩]
2. I love the fact that you have dynamic sidebars, by the way. Very forward-thinking and streamlined of you! [↩]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 6:50 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.