Sigrun of Lunastar.org’s review.

Presentation:
I love the cleanliness of your layout, you work well with keeping lines neat, straight, and ordered (without looking too constricted). The drop shadow effects on the sides of your content boxes add a bit of a professional effect, it looks quite nice. However, I’m not sure that I’m a fan of the horses theme you have up. I realize (from a cursory look at your content) that you’re a big horse fan, so it’s important that this layout represents who you are. However, be careful that it doesn’t end up looking too childish. Also, you didn’t fully erase the edges of the blue streak horizontally running across the horse’s face on the left; it’s a small oversight but a bit annoying nonetheless.

Aside from that, I really like your color scheme. You chose contrasting colors and strayed away from being another cliche monochromatic layout. This pleases me!! However, some of your header text was too close in color to your background. Look at the really huge difference from the left side and the right side. I switched the color of the right side to #638aa9 and it’s a lot clearer and more distinct. Be weary of making text too close to the background and washed out.

As for your “Fly to the Stars” theme, I’m not a fan at all. The site title is near impossible to read, the color scheme is a bit to dark and depressing for my tastes, and the layout pales in comparison to the clean, neat linear horse layout. The color you used for the dates in your blogs is way too close to the background color, try darkening it a bit more to make it more distinguishable. The gray font color for most of your text is awkward, to say the least. Try a really egg-plant deep purple, and if it’s too dark/close to the background, perhaps lighten the background a little? I’m rarely a fan of light-on-dark, but the gray and purple just make it worse. I definitely appreciate your horse theme a lot more.

Content:
I want to start this off by thanking you for having sub-menus. I think more sites should have them, and it really makes your site much more streamlined and professional. I totally appreciate you for having this!! As per usual, I’ll break this up into sections:

Owner: The index for this section really gets the visitor’s feet wet. You address your age, childhood, your passion of horses, your webdesign past, your appearance, and your education. I always love it when people can somehow manage to get all of this information into a cohesive narrative: you achieved this. However, the “With that said I think you pretty much should get an idea of who I am.” at the bottom is obvious, no need to have it there. Your awards should definitely be filed away in the “Site” section of your site! The link to “Yourstar blends” on this page is broken, get that fixed. As for the “Contact Form”, since most of the check-boxes are site related, why not put this in the site section? “Likes & Dislikes” was weirdly set up. First, the introduction to the page shouldn’t apologize, if you’re embarrassed of any site content, then remove it!! Secondly, it moves from the stuff you like (unordered lists) to stuff you don’t like (in paragraph form). Try keeping everything in the same format, I personally prefer lists but I think yours are too long, perhaps shorten them? I like your portfolio section, I think it’s really extensive. You could do a lot better with an image management script like Lightbox2 that would allow you to have next/previous links while viewing pictures, and also make them pop-up without having to navigate away from your site. I think the most creative part is your drawings. It would be so cool if you turned one of them into a layout, and even cooler if you had a little information telling the visitor about your drawings: what kind of mediums did you use? What was your inspiration? What was your subject? Try to give people an insight into how you operate. You could even draw a horse and make that into a layout, it would be so original and beautiful! The layouts from your previous sites, especially in regards to “Swished.org” is so overwhelming! There are twenty or so tiny thumbnails with nearly NO explanation!! Tell us more about your design habits, what prompted you to create these layouts! Bigger thumbnails would also take away some of the guesswork as to what’s within. Your projects page is a bit superfluous for now, there’s no need to have it since the one project site you have up is on hiatus… you should put everything back up after your designs site is back up, why bother linking a site that’s not functional?

Domain: Why do you link the “Reviews” & “Resources/Credits” on both the main page and the sidebar? This is pointless. Other than that, I think you adequately described your site! You gave technical details as well as some information as to how you came up with the name. Might I suggest moving the previous layouts to a different page so you can have thumbnails up? All of the links in your “Resources & Credits” page opened without any nasty 404 errors. Access keys are becoming a really trendy thing to have on websites nowadays. I think, even though a lot of people have them already, that you should still attempt to say how they work, and what buttons to push along with the numbers. There’s a Wikipedia article on access keys that you could maybe look at and cite. I think your “link me” page is cluttered and has too much going on. Most sites only really need to offer one or two different kinds of buttons, but beyond that having three or four standard sizes offered is a bit excessive. You might try just cutting it down to 88×31px and 50×50px and keep it to two different link buttons per size. Otherwise, the page just looks like a hodge-podge of clutter.

Visitor: While I appreciate what you’re doing with all of the free avatars and whatnot, you’re breaking the law by infringing on peoples’ copyright. Having screencaps or promotional pictures, as far as I’m aware, unless without written consent of the photographer, is illegal. Other than that, your icons are very well done; most people just cut them down to 100×100px and call them avatars, you went the extra step and stylized them. Since your pixel adoptions and birth month pixels are so tiny, you don’t need to give them their own pages. Try consolidating them into one page for pixels and just have a different header for the birth month pixels. The emoticons are cute, very reminiscent of Beccary’s smilies. However, on the smilies page, you say “I spent a lot of hours working on these”, “a lot” should be “many”. I think my favorite part of all of the graphic freebies you offer is the backgrounds page. These all look so professionally done. I would use all of them except for the two tacky star ones towards the bottom, they pale in comparison to some of your other patterns and quite frankly look juvenile. For your brushes page, as someone who also offers brushes on my site, I’d really suggest putting the .abr files into a zip with a readme and have your site url in the filename, that way people will always remember where they got the brushes from and will credit you for all of your hard work. Your dividers page is also a bit superfluous, you only offer one design in five colors; why not put this in with the pixels? Also, it would look a lot better if you saved them as a .gif with a transparent background–that way people don’t have to have white backgrounds to use them! I’m fairly sure the screen captures are also copyright infringement¹. Your “Rollover Navigation” tutorial was done quite well!! I really appreciate the fact that you broke down the code and really explained everything.

Links: In your Admired section, “Anja”, “Constance”, & “Sophie” all had sites that were either closed or 404′d.  I don’t know what the difference between an “Affiliate” and a “Link Exchange” is, but either way you should list all of your links on the main link page–why did your affiliates get their own page? “Shimindelie” in your “Affiliates” page moved.

Coding:
This section will be really brief. Your site is XHTML and CSS valid, and upon viewing your source I saw everything was in order: you use <p> for paragraphs, you separate style from coding… the source is impeccable!! Thanks

Rating:
So I think that your layout is very clean, even if I’m not a fan of the image itself. Your content, overall, is pretty neat and well organized. You offer a fair amount of visitor content. I wish you went into more detail about your love of horses! Try to play it up a bit and make your site stand out. Your site wasn’t all that memorable, but it certainly has some “oomph” hidden. I think you need to work on making your site a bit more personal, geared towards you. Try doing some horse-riding equipment reviews or have stock photos of your horse for download. There’s an untapped resource in your love of horses, use it!! Good luck with everything, I hope this was helpful.

1. But I’m not an expert on this, you should double check that it’s legal for you to offer them on your site. [↩]

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 7:25 am 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.