PSGR is a solo effort by me, Rhiannon, a 23 year old from New Zealand. There's a lot to explore here, so take a look around and have fun!
Name: Dakota
Site: The Dakota Life
Review completed on: 25/09/07
SPLASH PAGE
No splash
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Hello, Dakota! How's it going?
You recently sent me an e-mail asking me why you had been placed in the Low Priority Queue here at PSGR. If you look at the queue, you'll see that the pending sites have been placed in order of the date in which they were submitted to me - the more recent ones are at the bottom and the oldest ones (the sites that have been waiting the longest) are placed at the top. Occasionally I pick a site from a random queue, but in general I like to focus on the High Priority Queue because as the submission dates indicate, those reviewees have been waiting the longest - therefore they're more of a priority than those in the Low Priority Queue. Self explanatory really! Hopefully that answers your question.
You may have noticed that I've only visited your site a handful of times over the past year - unfortunately it is barely accessible at all on a dialup modem. For that reason, it's hard to form a general first impression of your site because parts of it won't load on my computer.
LAYOUT
Apart from The Superficial.Com I refuse to wait for any website to load if it takes more than ten seconds - just as well then, bar the Superficial, every site I visit loads instantly or at least in a matter of ten seconds or less.
I tested your site's loading time at Net Mechanic, and as you can see for yourself the results are somewhat worrying:
Results may vary depending on your locale, but as a dialup user myself I can definitely treat Netmechanics's dialup speed report as kosher. After about ten minutes Safari gave up and stopped loading, which is not surprising since the size of your main page alone is 5336571 bytes! I'm not exactly a budding Pythagoras (ancient maths whizz) but this converts to roughly 5 MB. This is your main page alone! If I was still on my shitty 1GB limit wireless connection hosted by the fascist outlet known as Vodafone NZ, my monthly bandwidth limit could possibly be in danger of being reached if I visited your site at least once a day.
The reason why your site is taking so long to load is because every single blog contains several large, hi-res photographs that have not been thumbnailed or optimised for the web in any way. Check out some tips and guidelines on optimising your blog photos at Scribbit. I'm sure your visitors on slow connections are secretly quite annoyed at having zillions of massive photographs loading every time they try and access your site. I cannot even begin to tell you how offputting this is. You may see this as being harsh, but the fact of the matter is that at the moment you seemingly have no regard for your visitors who are on a slower connection. Dialup still exists - particularly here in New Zealand more than anywhere else, because as a fellow New Zealander you'll no doubt be aware of the fact that our internet is way behind the rest of the developed world in terms of speed and cost.
According to InfoAge.Co.Nz, 90% of New Zealanders are still using dialup. This isn't suprising since New Zealand is considered a third world country in terms of broadband use!
Seriously, if you must cram shitloads upon shitloads of large image into every single blog then at least optimise them for the web. Makes sense!
I think you're aiming to give PinUpDoll.Nu a run for her money in the quest for the worlds longest sidebar. Fan signs, voting links, 71 affiliate links, donation links, advertisements...a lot of the stuff here could be stored on other pages.
What's with the "Cuppakawfee" feature, asking visitors to donate money towards a cup of coffee for yourself, in exchange for a photo of you with said coffee? No offense, but this has to be the most ridiculous attempt at gaining funds that I think I've ever come across online.
Support Dakotaism encourages your visitors to donate money to you if they enjoyed reading your blog. This is so wrong...what with the amount of money-oriented areas in your sidebar already I daresay some of your visitors are going to feel a little uncomfortable with the fact that you're making it so obvious that you desire funds from them.
The "VIP List" featuring a long list of people who have donated (plus the amount donated) seems an unnecessary addition to your sidebar as well.
Going back to the 71 strong list of links you have on your sidebar for a minute - is there any particular reason why you've named Amanda 'JingWen?' You have everyone else linked by name, but for Amanda you've linked her with her site title.
I'm not sure if listing your cellphone number here was a particularly sensible decision...the internet is full of crazies and you wouldn't want to get harrassed!
CONTENT
Taking a look at your navigation (once I found it a quarter of the way down the sidebar) I discovered that there isn't anything for me to actually review here, except Art by Dakota and Dakota's shop.
Your art page contains over thirty 467 x 623 images with an average file size of around 200 KB each. An accessibility nightmare! Like I said, please, thumbnail your images. Perhaps there are some dialup users who would like to purchase your artwork but decide to go elsewhere because your images take too long to load.
Your shop jammed up my browser due to all the images, but I managed to read a bit of the description at the top of the page. Well written, just change jewelry to jewellery. The former is the American way of spelling the word, and the latter is how we spell it down here in New Zealand.
SUMMARY
Well, this has been a relatively short review for you, and nothing much in the way of compliments either. The Dakota Life is obviously a blog/ commercially driven site lacking in personal content, therefore I found it hard to review. Many aspects of your site proved offputting - the ridiculous loading time and the accessibility issues that occured as a result, the numerous donation sections of your sidebar, and the zillions of images found on every page. Just remember, not everyone visiting your site will have a super awesome fast connection nor will they have the patience to wait for all of your images to load. Including a few pictures here and there is fine, but I repeat - thumbnail them! Optimise them for the web! I cannot stress how important this is. Your site will surely gain more exposure and an increased amount of returning visitors if you strive to make it more user friendly and accessible. Good luck!
