Olivia of LTY Designs‘ review.

Presentation:
You can’t really go wrong with a pink/brown color scheme, the two pair off quite well together and contrast beautifully. I like the minimalist approach, but I think you could have maybe added more depth with the use of gradients or patterns. It’s kind of flat as is. Additionally, the pink you’re using for the header isn’t particularly flattering. Don’t get me wrong, the light pink is really pretty and goes well with the brown, but the main strip is simply too hot pink. There is a fine line between using really bright colors tastefully and killing my retinas. I think you crossed it. Other notables: you have a million and a half ads everywhere. I’m all for a starving webdesigner trying to make a few bucks, but these ads are simply suffocating. I think the Google ads on the left sidebar are pretty discrete, but the large ad with a youtube video at the bottom is just… too much.

It is pretty hard to believe how you managed to make such a simplistic layout be too much in so many departments, but I really was taken aback by how much grace the design lacked. Further, why is your “shop” link in the navigation in bright red? It clashes awfully with the brown and sticks out like a sore thumb. Further, the navigation font is kind of small. While you do have pretty large button-areas for all of them, they should stick out a little more–try a 14-16pt font maybe? When I click on the main link to some of the “expanded” sections, such as “Products” I’m met with a drop-down menu. You should also have an index page for these sections just in case someone has javascript disabled on their browser: accessibility is your friend. Also, having your text-links in a different font detracts a little from the fluidity of your site. It messes with the uniform line height and is kind of distracting. Keep the fonts uniform in the main body text.

Speaking of text, the font size for your affiliate links on your sidebar is damn near illegible. Additionally, the font in your site map page italicizes when hovering over a link–consistency is your best friend. Overall, the presentation is mediocre. While the core design concept is healthy, the little bits detract from the overall look. Simplicity, ironically, is really hard to pull off well.

Content:
Judging a graphics-based site on content is a bit harder for me, but I’ll try to be as thorough as possible. I’ll review your written, coded, and designed content as best I can!

Products: Graphics: Your glitter graphics are t-a-c-k-y. Maybe I’m not your target demographic, I no longer own a myspace, but seriously! Why dedicate a page to a million different variations on the same tacky glitter graphic? Some are really outdated, like the summer ‘07 graphics, and some don’t even load (your I miss you glitters led me to a 404 error, probably the least offensive glitters I [didn't] see.). Your quote links need to be way more specific. I shouldn’t be completely surprised when I click them as to which song lyrics I’ll stumbled upon, nor should there be 10 pages of extra content that I have to stumble through. There is such thing as too much visitor content. It’s like playing Russian Roulette, bullet and all.

Your livejournal layouts are a lot less offensive than that awful mess you call a glitter section. However, some of your green-choices were way too neon and way too ugly to be put on someone else’s website. Additionally, I think you should have included the information on how to tweak the actual account in the zip file. And if you insist on linking to an external site, you should notify your visitors with a small little icon or something. It’s bad manners to lead someone outside of your site without notifying them first. As for your LJ icons, I was less impressed with some of the text-content on them¹ and quite bored by the lack of variation. The resounding theme in your graphics section is that quantity trumps quality. You seem to find one method of making anything (e.g. adding sparklies to all of your “scenic” icons) and repeat it instead of varying the color contrasts, adding unique textures/borders/etcetera. I was bored after looking at the first three. You even used the same scripty font on about forty of the icons. Yawn.

Your cute scribbles lack both qualities: they are neither cute nor scribbly enough to be characterized as either. The only thing that truly jumps out is your truly atrocious color scheme (cyan with bright mint green and hot pink?? in the same word?? come on!). All you did was a sad attempt at a scraggly squiggle outline. It fell short. The outlines on some of your Quotes make it illegible; it’s some sort of metallic print, I can’t really tell because my eyes are bleeding and it’s obscuring my vision.

Products: Downloads: The only cool brush set I see (and by cool, I mean original) is the sixth one, and it seems as if you copied and pasted a bunch of scripty-webdings or something from google and didn’t actually draw/design the brush yourself. In fact, a lot of these seem that way. If someone could just go on google and make their own brushes in this manner, why would they waste their time downloading from you and crediting you for someone else’s work if they can just make the brushes themselves? The whole idea of downloading brushes from people is to find unique, carefully crafted designs. Not collections of cat-pictures from google.

Your Photoshop brushes seem a little more skilled, but I don’t know how much of that skill to attribute to you or google. Most of the splatter looks familiar, and I’m pretty sure the sheet music isn’t scanned by you (I could be wrong, and if so please correct me). And quite honestly, most of these look like you just played around with the brushes/spray paint in Photoshop and made a collection out of it. As someone who is really passionate about genuine brush-making, I can tell when a brush is created with repetitive methods and when it’s created in an original manner; guess which one has better results?

Your stock photography, especially the first flower set, seems quite nice and carefully put together. I can’t attest to the image quality because I don’t want to download a bunch of stock photos and clutter my computer, but I assume they’re pretty good quality. It seems like your content is improving, slowly but surely. Your icon texture sets are pretty decent, again I think a lot of them look similar, but I guess that’s what happens when you have about forty different sets. Having your site’s watermark plastered over everything is a bit distracting and ruins a pretty good preview. You can just have a miniature watermark in a corner or something so that your visitors can see what they’re downloading before they download it.

I like how your textures are actually categorized according to type (grunge, blurred, etc.) Finally! A method to your madness! A majority of your blurry textures have the same darkish color scheme, again it looks like you sacrificed staying original throughout so you could have pages and pages of content. This goes for your entire color texture section: they’re all pink/yellow. I only saw a handful out of hundreds of your grunge textures that I would actually qualify as grunge: most were simply loud color schemes with a Photoshop filter applied; making something “watercolor” is NOT equated with a grunge scheme. Sometimes less is more. Your wallpapers have a few nice ones, I like the tree that you optimized for all resolutions. But then again, some of the “text-based” ones left much to be desired.

Products: Tutorials: You spelled “Create” wrong not once but THREE times throughout this page. Tsk tsk. As for those three grouped together, the “old and faded” look? Why not have them all on the same page and simply list the other methods as “variations.” There’s no need to make your visitor click through three different pages to get essentially the same look. To be quite honest, a lot of your tutorials are really tired and can be found on just about any page on the internet. In fact, when it comes to graphics sites, I rarely come across one where I see a tutorial on something I’ve never seen elsewhere. You should keep this in mind when writing tutorials, I know that’s why I don’t have any on my website.

Shop: Ah, so this is the money-making section of your site (aside from the conspicuous ads peppered everywhere there’s space). Upon first impression, I find it odd that you’re charging for website reviews when generally they are given as a free service (coughcough) and it seems like a lot of your cryptic “secret membership” stuff is a bit overpriced.

Your layouts are really clean and simplistic, and I see you have your current site’s template for sale. You don’t really mention if they’re a template for a blogging tool (e.g. WP) or if they’re regular layouts; when I think “template,” I think Livejournal or WordPress or something. Pretty much all of your layouts are the same exact thing, except you sometimes put the navigation on the right and you changed around the colors. It’s kind of confusing to see that and then look at the enormous price difference between to seemingly identical layouts. Anyone with half a brain and beginner web experience can easily re-color any of the purchased layouts to fit their own needs — why would they front an extra 10 pounds to have you do it for them? I will say that your sixth layout is definitely your weakest and probably shouldn’t be for sale — unlike the other ones where you managed to get the colors to work well together (a definite talent that seems to be emerging), this one is just.. a hodgepodge of ugly. Clean and organized, but really ugly. My favorite is the blue/brown combination and it happens to be half the price of an identical layout with a different scheme.

I think it also might be nice to have a mockup of these sites available for visitors to peruse through. Investing all that money on nothing but a screenshot is a leap of faith, and I’m sure you’d manage more traffic by allowing people to investigate thoroughly. As for people “stealing” the HTML coding, I’m sure you could manage a way to lock up the coding so no one could see. There are ways.

Your paid tutorials are a complete ripoff. Firstly, just by looking at the starter image and end result I can get a feel of the exact steps you used. All of these tutorials are up elsewhere for FREE (I’m positive pixelfx.org has a breakdown of different blending modes people can use). Encouraging people trying to truly learn PS to follow step-by-step instructions instead of exploring the different blending modes themselves is misleading and manipulative. Most of these aren’t the groundbreaking techniques you promised, and definitely not worth 3 pounds!

Most of your exclusive packages don’t seem worth it either. For example, the “new” stuff in your first one is screenshots of Windows Media Player. Groundbreaking! Another has more pictures of the night sky, which you already offer on your site for FREE! I would charge a subscription fee to have access to these maybe or cut the price down to a few pounds, but I can attest to the fact that none of these are worth 10 pounds.

The Services page really annoyed me. First off, you have a flat rate for everything. When it comes to stuff that can take a variable amount of time (e.g. validating a page) you should charge an hourly rate so that you get the fair amount from people with less to validate and those with more. It’s completely unfair that someone with 10 pages gets charged just as much as someone with 50.

The moment I read this, I knew how I could totally sum up this section:

we currently cannot customise it for you, maybe when we’re more knowledgeable.

First off, if you are admittedly unfamiliar with a certain program you shouldn’t charge people to install it. Following instructions might be a challenge for some, but if you can’t offer any other guidance than what WordPress already offers for free, don’t. It’s also kind of curious that you can only validate to XHTML transitional, when clearly the trend is moving towards strict. Is it because you don’t know how to validate strict? You shouldn’t offer services on a web language you aren’t 100% comfortable with!! Besides, validation is NOT worth the 35 pounds you charge; it may be painstaking but it doesn’t take more than a few hours and luckily we have people like Jem to guide us through it.

You also do a poor job of talking about how to convert a site to PHP includes. It’s hardly revolutionary, people have been using PHP for years. What are the benefits? Talk about having style separated from content, easier updating due to the layout being separate, etcetera. Why don’t you offer a full website design package? Converting code takes very little skill, creating it does.

I will end this section with a little rant on you charging for reviews. First, tons of sites (such as this one) review for FREE and do a much better job of it. A quick glance at some of the websites that  made the mistake of paying for this dumb service got a cursory review with little constructive criticism. Mostly you made vague statements about error with little comments on how to improve. While you did make an effort to go section through section, you weren’t nearly as in-depth as I am being (I think); should I charge YOU five pounds for this review??

Portfolio: I love, love photography in general. I also love your photography. You made an effort to keep it organized in Lightbox, allowing me to browse through effortlessly. You should include a little tidbit on what the context of each photograph is in the caption. Definitely the only truly artistic section of this entire website.

In your Layouts section, you used Lightbox for some images but not others, and I found it kind of weird. You also only included the header image instead of a screencap of the entire layout. When I think layout, I also think HTML and how everything is coded and the CSS looks; the headers only tell part of the story.

Designers: A lot of the narrative on both of the main staffers’ pages (Olivia and Rosanna) was kind of choppy, especially the paragraph towards the end of Rosanna’s page that had about five or six “explain”s in a matter of two or three sentences. In both pages a lot of pictures were missing/didn’t load, and neither did the signatures.

Further, try using different cliches. You both mentioned “getting lost in the music” separately while referring to the rush you get while dancing; you made a similar allusion to how exercising makes you feel good (in both pages). Your sister Sasha is only 9 years old and is a staffer–for what purpose? Why would anyone want to pay a 9 year old to do anything??

Company: The webdesign background for both of you shouldn’t be on this page but rather in your designer profile pages.

Coding:
I laughed out loud - literally - when I saw your site is NOT XHTML valid. Minimal errors, yes, but you’re charging people based on your impeccable XHTML coding skills (only transitional because you’re unfamiliar with strict, right??) and yet you can’t even keep your site validated!!

Upon viewing your source, I was even more incensed. Your coding is a mess. For one thing, you have a style CSS section outside of the external sheet (which you urge people to utilize in your SERVICES section). For another, you have so many ads and crap that I can’t even sift through what bad coding errors are yours or google’s ads!! From the look of the comments, e.g.

 <!–//end #container//–>

It seems like you copied the code for your website from someone else; unless this is part of the ads. Either way, sifting through your coding was annoying and a waste of my time.

Rating:
Don’t tell me you’re surprised, I tried to make my feelings known throughout the review so this rating wouldn’t come as a shock. Your website does have some positives (the overall look, while a bit overwhelming, is well executed and your photography is nice) but for the most part it made me angry that people so inexperienced are charging lots of money for stuff that shouldn’t be charged. Even the stuff you offered for free was subpar, and the repeating theme was quantity over quality.

You have WAY too much content, and most of it is disorganized. Some pages, but not others, have menus that lead to additional content. A lot of your link names are vague (Quotes in your graphics section) and most everything seems so… juvenile. Which would be okay, but for the fact that you tout amazing web experience and yet charge exorbitant amounts for work that I know takes minimal effort.

1. ”thank you for showing me just how fu**ked u r,” i don’t like your boyfriend he’s a… a… twat,” I mean seriously–what the hell were you thinking??? [↩]

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 10:57 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.