it'll prolly never be finished, but... — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

it'll prolly never be finished, but...

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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	I X I: Next time, just give us a plain link the first time around. I had no idea what you were talking about either, especially since this is in the site reviews forum and all I could see was a sig. I think it's time for yet another edition of "Stream of Conciousness Reviews"... Very small content area... that's never a good sign. [i]This website is really only here for one reason: For me to be able to say "Check out my website!"[/i] Wow. OK, this is going to sound harsh, but if that's why you created this, then you need to pack up your HTML and hit the road. Websites are (or should be) created for a purpose, and mere existence in and of itself is not a purpose. That animated gif at the top? The one that keeps going back and forth? Yeah, that's [i]really[/i] starting to get on my nerves. It also happens to be totally unnecessary--right underneath the image, you have a table cell with "IXI" in it. Why the extra title? (Fortunately, I have the Aardvark plug-in for FF, so I can [b]r[/b]emove the image and stop the torture. God, I love this plug-in. Thank you Lacuna!) OK, now that the animated gif is gone I can focus on the rest of the page, which now occupies about, oh maybe 40% of the browser window area. Gray on black doesn't really do it for me, especially with all those colorful buttons on the right that keep drawing my eyes away. One word: padding. As in, please give me some space around words/within borders so my eyes don't implode. I hate when that happens. With those dashed borders, the menu items border on "painful to read." Leading (a.k.a. line spacing) can also be a good thing when used judiciously. Why is there a link to the home page on the home page? Recursive links make baby Jesus cry. They also make me have to aardvark that animated gif again. Clicking on "board" now... oh, I get it. The home page is so short because there's no content there yet. (Aardvarking animated gif yet again... this is getting stale pretty fast. I'm considering just blocking images from your site.) OK, the board... I can see pages getting really long really quick. Your content area itself is narrow, then you've got more horizontal space taken up by the left menu and the colorful buttons on the right. On top of that, each post takes up at least nine vertical lines, even if the post is only one line long. I can see this board being very unfun to navigate in the near future. Also, I haven't looked at the source yet (I usually do that last), but I can see you're using fixed width. This is not good. (More on this later.) Images... sigs... aim... etc. OK, not much to say here. Pretty much more of the same. General thoughts on the look: completely uninspiring. Kind of makes me want to shave the hair off the top of my toes with a rusty razor. You know, just to spice things up a bit. Why gray on black? I still don't understand that. Black can be sleek, black can be classy, black can be cool. But you have to know how to use it. The little black dress of the fashion world is timeless. This current design is not. And, now that I'm thinking about it, what's with the riveted plate metal background? How does that fit into the metaphor? Or am I assuming too much? I'm looking at the "about me" page, and I see "this site's here for me to be able to say that it's here" once again. But reading the text that follows it, I think I get it now. Your site is, in other words, a place for you to experiment and learn new things, and it may end up being a portfolio in the future. OK, that's fine. If that's what it is, say it. But don't say that the site is there just so you can say it's there. That gives people the impression that you couldn't give a flying squirrel about it and just want to have a URL to put on your business card. [i]Especially[/i] if you hope to someday use this as a portfolio, remove that text from the front page and replace it with something meaningful. Another thing, if you hope to use this site as an online portfolio, my advice would be this: less clutter. Lose the background image and break the boxy setup you've got going on. A lot of things are currently getting in the way of the visitor actually paying any attention to your content (things that I have mentioned above, like the colorful buttons on the right (which are on the links page anyway, now that I think about it, so why do they have to be on every page?), that unholy spawn of Satan you've got jigging back and forth at the top of the page, the wholly uninspiring typography and color scheme, etc.). The last thing you want to do is get between your visitor and the content you want him or her to see. Design should assist the visitor, not hinder the visitor. On to the code. You've accomplished something impressive here: you've gotten away from table-based design, yet still managed to make the page look like a nest of tables. Not sure about the use of break tags. All I have to do is increase the text size a bit and the lines start spilling over. This is all wrong, the whole approach I mean. You set the width of an element and then you let the text wrap. You should never use break tags to force line breaks (unless you're writing poetry or something, and even then you might be better served by marking up the text as preformatted). This is why we have paragraph tags, because paragraphs are unchanging semantic elements. Lines (outside of poetry and code) are not unchanging; they change depending on their environment. But this all really goes back to the whole fixed width thing. People view websites at a variety of different sizes (browser window sizes, that is). Attempting to design for the "lowest common denominator" is a bad approach. You should design so that all visitors get an optimal experience. This is sometimes difficult to perfectly realize, but most of the time you can pull it off. Summary: There's a lot wrong with this site, and I've only touched on some of the issues here (mostly the issues near and dear to my heart). I realize that it was probably pretty painful to read this long-winded and sometimes harsh review but, well, you did ask. Some of what I wrote is personal opinion, some of it is conventional, and some of it is possibly useless. Hopefully some of it will be of assistance, and hopefully you'll keep working on it and keep learning new things. [Edit: dear God that's a long review. Sorry about that. Just wanted to comment on this line from your sig: "You know I'd like to keep my cheeks dry today, so stay with me and I'll have it made (Shannon Hoon)" Is [i]that[/i] what that lyric says? I had no idea. I always thought it was, "You know I'd like to keep my cheating strategy." Still have no idea what it means...] ___________________________ Suho: [url=http://www.liminality.org]www.liminality.org[/url] \| [url=http://www.ozoneasylum.com/4837]Cell 270[/url] \| [url=http://www.ozoneasylum.com/5689]Sig Rotator[/url] \| [url=http://www.ozoneasylum.com/22173]the Fellowship of Sup[/url] \| "Hooray for linguistic idiots and yak milk!" [small](Edited by [internallink=2031]Suho1004[/internallink] on 04-26-2005 11:07)[/small] Loading...
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