Name: Olivia
Site: Letters To You
Review completed on: 16/09/07
Guest Reviewer: Katie
SPLASH PAGE
No splash.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
It's very dark in the room right now. Or, at least it was until your site loaded. Very bright colors don't generally mix well with a white background - it's somewhat overpowering. But you've made it work, I think.
LAYOUT
I like the header - it's simple and fun. I do feel that the phrase "the place for all your graphic design needs." could do without the period, because it sounds somewhat incomplete as a sentence and slogans don't usually have periods.
The navigation text needs to contrast more from the background. It's difficult to see right now. You can darken the colors or make the text bold - that should make them readable enough.
Large text is great, but the content area needs to be large enough to accomodate the text. Right now the sidebar is taking up nearly half of the space you've allotted for all the content. Because of this, the large text feels disproportionate in the content area. It's at around 14px right now, you could probably shrink it down to 12px and still have it be readable.
The introduction is littered with things that could be corrected. You could probably rewrite the whole thing like this:
"This website is a personal site owned by Olivia, Rosanna, and Sasha. We are sisters who enjoy graphic design, so we created this site to offer our services and display our work to others. We offer Photoshop tutorials, glitters, scribbles, textures, stock photos, brushes, and more! If you like photography, you can also check out the portfolio to see some of our work.
We'd like to thank our staff: Aliyah, Nicole, Nikki, Jay and Steph. They contribute so much to the site. On behalf of all of us, please enjoy the site!"
The version above is much more compressed, yet touches upon everything necessary in an introduction. You don't want to give away the entirety of the site in the intro!
Do you really, truly need so many Google ads? Every other section of the sidebar contains ads, and they outnumber the info on the bar. Some of the words in the actual content are ads as well! Letters-To-You is surely a large site, but are all these ads necessary?
CONTENT
"Content" should be renamed "Visitor", since content is anything on the site, substantial or unsubstantial. I don't use Livejournal, so I can't comment on the Livejournal layouts, but they seem fairly well designed.
Hang on, going through all the pages I see the same disclaimer and rules at the top of every content page. Perhaps just put this at the top of the graphics index? Make everyone's life easier?
I'm questioning the purpose of the Quotes. I'm also questioning why there are codes provided for people to use to display them. They're just images, you use the tags. The fact that the images are linked to your site is also offputting - they're essentially just ads for your site, since they've already got "letters-to-you.com" embedded on them!
PSP Brushes - "Also, with some sets you will have to download the PSP brushes to get the imagepack, but hopefully you'll figure out which ones those are." Wow, talk about catering to the visitor. I'm sorry if I'm going into bitch mode right now, but you cater to the visitor. Telling your visitors to "figure out which ones those are" is like a waiter laying out seven burgers in front of a hungry guy and telling him to "figure out which one is the marinade". Take a few minutes to separate the image packs from the brushes in ALL the sets so thaat people don't wind up downloading things they'll never use.
I've got a lot to say about these brushes too. You've got one set with major fashion logos, including Chanel. I can just see some Chanel lawyer busting you (not Karl Lagerfeld, he's above such things, I think). It wouldn't be so bad if the logos were just the brand names in different fonts, but these appear to be the actual logos. Not cool. There's also some pixel text brushes that say things like "fucking disrespectful wanker!!!" and "I'm not another teenage fucking whore!!!". Uh, wow. I've got a potty mouth myself, but these are kind of outrageous. If I wanted to proclaim to the world that "you gave me fucking butterflies you dickhead!!!", I'd type it myself, not download it as a brush. There's stuff that should be created and stuff that shouldn't.
Stock Photos - These previews are fucking HUGE. They're saved as PNGS, when you could've saved them as optimized JPGs, or at least used Save For Web! From what I can see they're fine photos, but the fact that you've labelled these as "photos/scans/stock" has me worried. What is up with the "scans"? Are they scans of magazines, scans of developed photos you've taken, or what?
Icon Textures - "The set below contains 18 Icon Texture sets - This was created on the 9th of August 2007 - Please note that this is a big file! 14MB or so". HOLY FUCKING SHIT. I'm sorry, but 14 MB?!? Ridiculous! 14MB would take around a day to download on dial-up. And for textures, too! This could be handy for those with fast connections, but for me it's just a little intimidating in size. The giant read banner across the texture previews isn't helping matters - you can't see the textures because they're hidden behind the giant banner. I presume that this is to stop people from copying the preview image and using the preview textures, but that's what I would be doing were the banner not there. What's wrong with people testing them before committing to downloading a bunch more? You wouldn't buy a car without test-driving it, would you? Same with textures.
Before I forget, you seem to have issues with capitalization. You only capitalize proper nouns and starts of sentences. "Icon" is not a proper noun. "Credit" and "Designs" are not proper nouns, and none of these are starting sentences. You need to fix this on pretty much every page of your site. If you want to emphasize something, either apply a text decoration to it or capitalize the whole damn thing.
Wallpapers - how about "A small (but growing!) collection of wallpapers" as your description? Makes more sense, unless you would rather have "A small collection of wallpapers that is growing" or something of the sort. The "800x500" header should be "800x600". Where's the 1024x768 wallpapers? That's the most common screen resolution, but you offer nothing for it.
And wow, is English your first language? Because the grammar here is hideous. "Welcome to, "Letters To You's" Texture section. This section has been split into several categories so you can quickly find what you are searching for. Because each category has grown so much we have sectioned each category into several pages. So when you look at any of the pages there are additional links within those pages", eh? I'd count the mistakes if I were feeling sadistic, but I'll instead say to remove the first comma and maybe combine the last few sentences so they don't look like parts of sentences.
I can't comment on your Photoshop tutorials because I don't use the program myself, but I can tell you that I've seen pretty much every single one of these on other sites before. There's only so many times you can read about adding brushes or making glitters. I'm hearing cries for original tutorials, and the cries are coming from me.
Cutenews tutorials. In other words, stuff you'll find in the installation guide that comes with Cutenews and at the Cutenews forums, reproduced here. You say that I'll learn to edit templates "like we have done", but I haven't seen any sign of Cutenews here. Nor Wordpress, Greymatter, or even so much as a Haloscan comment form. Try rephrasing the description to simply "Learn the basics of customizing Cutenews templates".
Reviewing
"Reviewing is currently closed and will be opened within the next 2 weeks! 19.08.07". Guys, get with the times. It is now September 15, 2007. 15.09.07. It's been a month. If you can't stick with your deadlines, don't make them. Also, "Over night" is one word, "therefor" has an e at the end, and... WHAT THE FUDGE. PAY FOR A REVIEW TO GET IT DONE FASTER. Girl, if you haven't got the time to review people without getting paid, you haven't got the time to own a resources site. A free service, indeed, if you don't want to wait for months. I'm not even assuming this, you have given me the pieces and I have put them together. "Your Website must either be a domain, sub-domain, Freewebs and or LiveJournal". And/or? You mean my site can be a "Freewebs [site]" AND a LiveJournal at once?! Good god, what must this mix look like? Twice the dodgy banner ads, along with a shoddy cusomization system and unreliable service! How about ditching the "and"?
When reviewing, you say you'll look at CSS and coding - when you're using MULTIPLE internal and external stylesheets at once and useless Javscript every other line. You can't really critique something like coding when you can't do a very good job of it yourself.
7 or 8 sites is not a long waiting list. At all. What is this "such a high demand" bullshit? PSGR currently has a 69 site waiting list, and you don't see Rhiannon charging for reviews. What's your excuse?
"Hush Diamonds - Review Not Available". Why is it there, then? If I come to your reviews page, I want to read the review, not have you tell me that it's not available for some reason.
I checked out one of your reviews - the one of Patricia from Mango Milkshake. You criticize her CSS for being "slightly boring". Do you mean that the effects the CSS has on the site make it boring, or do you mean that the CSS is like the 7th Harry Potter book - boring and tiresome to read? "Before I start on your content section, I think you should take a look at Jem's article @ Jemjabella, regarding copyright violation." I'm dying. You're killing me. This coming from the site with fashion logo brushes.
"I've checked out all your other content pages, they all look great. So I don't need to comment on any of them." You don't need to. But it's common courtesy to comment on at least a couple. What do you think is great about them? How would you feel if I only commented on your lackluster pages, ignoring all your good content?
Portfolio
I've gotta say, I enjoyed the photography very much. I love nature photography a lot, and you have tons here. My favorite was number 57. Good work here.
The header for your layouts says "Photography". Even if the layouts do feature photography, they're layouts. You need to fix this. I can't comment on these, because they refused to load. I'm not sure if it's your script malfunctioning or just the fact that the layouts' file sizes are too large for my connection to handle.
Designers
Rosanna's page is well-done; it contains just enough information for a profile page. I wish I could say the same for Olivia's. I once made the mistake of having tons of pages about myself, but the fact is that your visitors won't care about some of them, and many of them can be compressed into one page. Try redesigning this to be like Rosanna's page so you don't get lost in the links.
On Aliyah's page, the "messenger" needs to be specified. MSN? AIM? ICQ? I'm assuming MSN as it's a hotmail address, but you never know sometimes. On Jamie's page, the pronunciation and spelling of "Jamie" should be switched - the pronunciation goes inside the parentheses.
Sasha is so young - only 9! Are you sure her picture should be up online? Call me a worrywart, but there ARE predators out there. I made the mistake of putting my picture up online at the age of 10, and I got creeps emailing me. Just be really careful with your picture.
"Steph[y] is fourteen, going on fifteen". No shit. I hate this phrase. Obviously if you're 14 you're going on 15. What else are you going on, 39? Excuse my nitpicking.
You're currently hiring an "Emotions designer". Do you mean "Emoticon designer"? Or is it someone who invents new degrees of happy and such? Smiley designing hardly seems like something you need an entire position for. They don't take long to make - just draw the base and change the faces around about 15 times and you've got a set.
I'm not reviewing the blog, just because it's a blog and there isn't anything to critique.
Site
I like the setup here, with excerpts so you can choose whether or not you want to read on. Under "Additional Contact" (which should be just "Contact", as there's no prior section with contact info), you only have "Splash MB" usernames, for two people, yet I recall at least two other staff members having accounts - they said so on their pages. You should also add the other staff's MSN usernames and LiveJournals (if any) to this section.
The Terms and Conditions are awfully repetitive... oh yeah, that's cause I've seen most of this at the top of all the other pages. Reiteration is good sometimes, but here it's reminiscent of third grade, when all you heard out of your teacher's mouth was "I before E, except after C". Just like that phrase, I could probably recite your terms word for word at this point. Try compressing this page a little so it's not as redundant.
Credits - holy tomato, there's so many links here. I thought you were a resources site yourself! You should be making and using your own resources most - if not all - of the time.
I'm glad to see that you provide link buttons and banners, although the codes for them don't need to be provided. If somebody can't figure out how to make a link, then they shouldn't be having a site to link you from.
SUMMARY
This was one of the most exhaustive things I've ever written. Your site has a lot of content, but the purpose of some of it is questionable. As far as your reviewing goes, you make a big deal about not having much time to review - UNLESS you get monetary compensation for it, and then you complete the review in a jiffy. This is a surefire way to not get many applicants, it just makes it seem like you're in it for the money. Your grammar needs work as well - not all nouns are capitalized (unless you're speaking German), and commas should be used sparingly. Many sections need re-writing and many graphics need optimization. I see a lot of potential in you guys, I truly do. If you work on catering to all visitors more than catering to a select group of people, there's no doubt that Letters-to-you will be one of the better resources sites out there today. Good luck.
