Topic: pixelayer.com

Free photoshop tutorials + graphic design

www.pixelayer.com

What no text only pictures...???
Switching from white to dark?
Where does home leads to??

Not finished.

Realy i can not say anything more about it.

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Support Justice for Pat Richard

Please learn how to speak english before you feel you can critique my site, I have no idea what you're talking about.

Actually, Rinswind speaks rather good english, and this is the site reviews forum so if you don't want critiques you're in the wrong place.

My problems with your site:
- not much text, mostly pictures
- when you click on links you go to an "under construction" page with a link to "home", but when you click on that your navigation menu breaks
- your tutorials page has pictures only, no text explaining what tutorial is for what or anything
- a lot of the tutorials are missing pictures or are simply long columns of pictures with no exposition

The links page is down, meaning it is under contrsuction and using an old layout I once had up. I

and none of the tutorials are missing pictures

As silence said, when you click on the links button, you get the under construction page, which is fine, but when you click on home you get a whole different index page, and the banner on top goes to "http://www.pixelayer.com/www.pixelayer.com/".

You also have alot of background color changing, which may not seem like a big deal, but it does annoy me a little. I like sites to be uniform.

The tutorials do need to have some descriptions somewhere by the buttons... And some explanations inside of them. Tutorials are for people who wish to learn something, and on such tutorials as the Z swoosh you have full screen shots at 1014x727 at over 100kb... If I had dial up or my screen at 800x600 I would just leave the site due to side scrolling and load time.

Also, in the tutorials you have: <div id="l-col" align="center">, which needs to be removed. It is for the left column of the layout you got from http://www.ssi-developer.net/main/templates/ . On the main page, you have some XHTML markup errors, check http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pixelayer.com%2F

Also, if you are going to be a smart ass because somebody because they were giving you feedback on a site you posted on "Site Reviews" then you had no business posting it anyway.

(Edited by Ensellitis on 12-25-2004 05:19)

Wow one day I hope I can be half the board trolling geek you are, It took me fucking days to get this site up, only to be fucking torn apart....I'm done with this forum

(Edited by Koroshi on 12-25-2004 06:03)

What are you? 12?

It has taken me 4 months to get mine up, and I love it when people tear it up. It helps you to find the bugs and make it better...

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Yes, I'm 12 because I called you a board trolling geek

4 months and you couldn't make the text in your graphics look decent?

(Edited by Koroshi on 12-25-2004 06:15)

quote:

---

Koroshi said:

Yes, I'm 12 because I called you a board trolling geek

---

Exactly, you are calling people names for reviewing your site...

And I made the text the way I want to...

Anyways, I will no longer lower myself to your level.

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You weren't just "Reviewing" my site, you picked it apart meticulously. There was no need to refer to the site where I found the CSS, no need at all.

I got mine from the same site... And having your site picked apart is the only way to make it better.

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Hey Koroshi! Relax man. Lots of people spend months developing their sites, but you'll find the best feedback is about things done improperly, this helps you to make a better site. I am sitting at my Moms on a 56k modem, so I'm not going to dig into erach page, it takes too long at this speed.

I gravitated first to your tutorials page, that's always the first thing I'm interested in. What I would like to see instead of simply thumbnails of (some kind of) effect would be a description of what each effect is, and then maybe also a picture describing it. If that is what I wanted to learn, then I would follow the link and download the pictures needed.

The screencaps I saw, well, I agree they were just too large for my taste. Pick a format and make things fit into it. Trim away all of the background and other unneccessary imagery, just show what is needed - it will be easier to read and understand.

The pixelayer banner at the top of the tutes I viewed went to a 404 when I clicked it. I like to run through a new site and see how quickly I can click and view every page, playing it almost like a video game. 404's are like a crash in that game, a bummer for the user.

Do please understand, this forum, "site reviews" is not about giving praise for a great design, but a tool for designers to find the flaws with their designs. When you post a site here for a review, you *will* get criticism. It's not about being mean, it's intended to help you build a better site. Read the crits, make some fixes, and post again asking for additional review. You'll end up with a better site in the long run.

Merry Christmas by the way!

Your pal, -doc-

Alright thanks Doc, I just updated the tutorials page. Tell me what you think
http://www.pixelayer.com/tutorials.htm

I'll start working on the screenshots now.

That looks alot better

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http://www.ensellitis.com

Links page is up too

On your contact page, I would add some kind of form, posting you email address can be picked up by spiders/robots and you can get start getting hit with spam real quick, I learned that the hard way...

Check out these places:
If you have PHP: http://www.gurusnetwork.com/tutorial/contact_page/
and a side note on this one, to get the IP of whom ever sent you the email,

right after <?php add $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']; on the next line, then in the area where you define your email address do something like this:

case "name":
$recipient_email = "your@email.com";
$subject = "Message from $name, $ip";
break;

That will put thier IP right in the subject line, which is great if you need to trace...

Check out hotscripts.com for some more scripts that are pre-made, they have PHP, CGI, and plenty of other scripts you can use or even learn from...

Then of course there is Bravenet.com, it kinda sucks having to use a service, but you don't need to write/program anything, all the scripts are free and remotely hosted...
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http://www.ensellitis.com

(Edited by Ensellitis on 12-26-2004 04:03)

That definitely looks better. You've fixed all the issues I was having.

I'm still seeing broken images though, but it may be just my ISP.

The pages in question are the bars tutorial and your links page.

The top image on the links page and the first 3 images in the bars tutorial don't show up.

i saw on tutorialized.com that they listed their email address like this: "blabla[NOSPAM]@whatever.com" I think I'm gonna do that. Thanks for the tip

On the bars tutorial, there are only 3 images. Maybe the big spaces inbetween text made it seem like there was supposed to be an image there. The top image for the links page is showing fine for me, is anyone else having the same problem as silence?

edit: ekkk sorry for the double post, i've had a few

(Edited by Koroshi on 12-26-2004 04:52)

One thing I noticed is that your code is very messy. You have a bunch of open DIV tags when only 1 was needed, and you also have alot of </a> when you have no open links... Try something like this:

<div align="center">



<p>In this tutorial I will show you how to have 2 bars behind your text.</p>



<p>Create your new image and select the pencil tool</p>



<p><img src="tutorial4/10.jpg" alt="describe the image" /></p>



<p>Set the brush size</p>



<p><img src="tutorial4/11.jpg" alt="describe the image" /></p>



<p>Hold shift and draw one of your lines, then draw another a little ways down. Leaving

some space inbetween</p>



<p><img src="tutorial4/step3.jpg" alt="describe the image"></p>



<p>Then right click your layer and click blending options and set these settings</p>



<p><img src="tutorial4/13.jpg" alt="describe the image" /></p>

<p><img src="tutorial4/18.jpg" alt="describe the image" /></p>

<p><img src="tutorial4/19.jpg" alt="describe the image" /></p>



<p>Simple effects like this and do alot to the text.</p>



<p><img src="tutorial4/final.jpg" alt="describe the image" /></p>



</div>

Notice how I only used one <div align="center"> and then after the content I closed it with </div>.

Also, if you use <p> you can illiminate the need for breaks, you could replace those with <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, and so on if you wish...

It is also very clean and easy for you to edit if you need to.

There is one broken image, look in this area:

<p> <div align="center">Hold shift and draw one of your lines, then draw another a little ways down. Leaving

some space inbetween</a><p>

<div align="center"><img src="tutorial4/step3.jpg"><br /></a>

<br />

</p>

One thing you might notice is I added alt="describe the image" in all your image tags. This will cause any broken images (or if the user has turned off images) to display test instead if they are using a Mozilla based browser, or a broken image with the text inside on IE. It may sound silly, but when i am doing a test layout, I always put alt="FIX THIS!" , that way if I put the wrong image name or did somthing else stupid, I can find it easily...

Hope that helps...
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http://www.ensellitis.com

(Edited by Ensellitis on 12-26-2004 06:08)

Thanks, I have had some trouble with the code. I knew that I was being sloppy, but it didn't show on the actual site so I didn't care. And yes I came across that problem with the code earlier today, a friend showed me on AIM.

Is having the tutorials on a whole seperate page stupid? Should I switch all of them to the regular site design?

It is always better to have everything stay within the same design. 90% of users, that would just throw them off. It is always better to have your site relativly stay the same.

Perhaps you should also switch to a 2 column layout, giving you more room in the context area, just an idea.

One last thing... Does yout host support PHP? If so, I would suggest setting up templates, that is what I do, check out Guru's PHP tutorials for info on that...

I took the code I showed you above and uploaded it so you can see what it would look like if you want: http://www.ensellitis.com/untitled.html
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http://www.ensellitis.com

(Edited by Ensellitis on 12-26-2004 06:24)

As of now for the main pages I have been editing them in Dreamweaver, I do the tutorials in notepad....

I'm pretty sure it supports .php

A fellow inmate told me about this: HTML Beauty

It is great for editing all kinds of web related files such as PHP, CSS sheets, HTML, and so on...

It's all I use now.

____________________________________________________

HTMLBeauty is indeed a great program.

Best of all, it was created by our very own mr.maX



(Edited by silence on 12-26-2004 15:04)

I was thinking something like this -> http://www.pixelayer.com/tuttest.htm

I'm liking what I'm seeing a LOT better on those tutorials! I'm really on way too slow of a connection to do this properly, but I did notice one thing useful I can help with now. When you save a screencap of a filter options or pallettes, you can save as GIF and get much smaller filesizes, without JPEG artifacts like in this one...



Glad you're here, Koroshi! We needed a little bit of shaking up, heh. =)

Your pal, -doc-

(Edited by DocOzone on 12-27-2004 08:12)

Yeah that was for one of my older tutuorials, I was too lazy to retake the screenshots.


Here's how they look with my new system

http://www.pixelayer.com/tut12.htm

(Edited by Koroshi on 12-27-2004 16:55)

jumping in late but one thing about your tut page that i noticed. On everyone of the tutorials you start the description as "learn how to make " take that out I think. It would read better if it was gone.

good work.

Later,

C:\

1. The header image has handwritten words that look like they might be links to sections, but are not. It might be a neat trick if just popped a little image map on there.

2. In the tutorials page, it's a neat idea to have the paper scraps as you do--but the image background fails to match the table background.