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: Kyndra
Site: HBW
Review completed on: 17/03/08
SPLASH PAGE
Bored shitless and looking for some extra spice in my life, I decided to cruise on over to my blessed PSGR Queue and look for some new prey. Yes, prey. I am nothing but a bloodthirsty female wolf, salivating over the thought of her next juicy feed. Did you know that a female wolf is called a bitch? How appropriate is that? Gotta love it.
So anyway as I was saying, I was chilling out in my queue, because it's the scene thing to do and all, and I happened upon your site. I clicked on your URL, and then went outside to kill myself slowly via a cigarette. I come back to the computer and what I was faced with made me feel rather hurt, deeply hurt actually. I feel ripped off, and this is something I don't think I'll be able to get over.
Why the depression? Well, your splash page is something I found rudely abrupt and unnecessary. Why present me with a plain white page with a plain text link that says enter? You could at least have adorned it with poorly made MS Paint icons and typical teenybopper squiggles and splatter brushes. Why even have a splash page when it doesn't contain anything useful like site requirements or what have you? This is uber unnecessary, this page doesn't need to be here at all. A silly, unwanted barrier for me and the rest of your visitors should you receive any. Here's a worthwhile tip from me to you: delete this page because it isn't needed.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
The title at the top of my browser window says "HBW: The Potter Site That Struts Originality". Well!! This could be promising then. Hope you can live up to your word and prove this.
LAYOUT
Is it just me or does Emma Watson look permanently grumpy? With all the money she has, perhaps someone ought to introduce her to tweezers. Those eyebrows of hers require urgent pluckage! There's not a lot I can say about the Emma layout, but the first thing I noticed was that certain areas around her head and shoulders look quite jagged, like you just randomly cut the images out and didn't smooth over the edges.
Sadly, your text is unreadable by default. This miniscule pixellated type text seems to be quite popular on Piczo sites. My advice to you would be to change the default size of your font so that it is readable from the get-go. Visitors shouldn't have to go to efforts to enlarge text themselves, you need to be the one to cater. After clicking "enlarge" not once but twice, I discover that your text is actually in capitals. Why? So harsh. Proper text please.
You seem to update your site on a very regular basis - that's really good to see, especially when it comes to fan sites. I know that these type of sites require a lot of constant work and I'm glad that you seem to be dedicated.
Not sure if it was a wise decision to use black text on your sidebar considering the background is a very dark grey. If you're still wanting to use the black you could always change the background into a lighter grey? 
Strangely, when I hover my cursor over your navigation links they appear to 'collapse into each other' and I can no longer read the title of whatever link I'm hovering over. Must be a Piczo thing, I can't be bothered using unnecessary brainpower to figure out what the problem is here.
Oh my God, I can't even click any of the links! Oh for fucks' sake, I'm going to have to plough through your no doubt javascript-ridden CSS to find the direct links myself and I'll have to paste them into my browser. Not good enough.
CONTENT
The first two links here are for your guestbook and a Myspace profile, so these won't be reviewed. Why did you make these links first and foremost, do you consider them the most important part of your site? I should hope this isn't the case. The key aspect of any site is the content it contains, not some silly guestbook or social networking profile.
The Girl
Autobography should be Autobiography. This opens in a pop-up window, so you need to state this beforehand. I know this is just a typo but it does pay to check - webmasters need to at least attempt to maintain some level of professionalism, even Piczo users should aim for this. Not sure if this should really be called an autobiography in the first place, it seems to go on about your friends more than anything else, and people are here to learn more about you, not your mates. This page was also littered with spelling errors. Spelling isn't the be all and end all, but at least try to watch the amount of mistakes your making and even use a spell check if you want. Spelling errors are not covered in QIS but if they're present I'm certainly going to let you know. This should be expected from web page reviewers.
Currently - this is for December 11th 2007. This is not what I'd call currently.
For You
Readables - Two Harry Potter related pages here, looks like some quizzes which....oh wait..*sniff*....*sniff sniff*....*sniff sniff sniff*....what on earth is that stink?!?! Oh, it's your Other section, in which three links are housed: Things to do in a lift, Funny definitions and Funny celeb quotes. Oh gross man, why are you presenting this tripe? Generic much? This is supposed to be, quote, a "Potter site that struts originality". This section is a great example of steaming unoriginal crap that bears no relevance whatsoever to Harry Potter. Best thing to do is delete the garbage and sanitise the area accordingly.
For You - so this section shares the same title as the...oh, whatever. HTML codes don't interest me, so I won't be reviewing them. Again though, what has this got to do with Harry Potter stuff? This "For You" section should be 100% Harry Potter related. If you're going to make out you have some shit hot, original Potter site you might at least fool your visitors into believing you. So far I'm seeing no evidence to support this statement of yours.
Click Here - this leads to a music player, so why don't you just put "Music Player" instead of "Click Here" ? Do you think no one will click it if you say what it is?
Contests
The write up on this page is only very short, and I can't read the top part anyway because the text overlaps. Naturally.
SUMMARY
At first I thought that despite the poor presentation, this would be a comprehensive Harry Potter fansite full of news and related information. Sadly this didn't turn out to be the case at all. For the most part HBW is an average Piczo site that just happens to be masquerading as a Potter related site, when in fact the focus isn't on Harry at all. Unfortunately because of this, it means you haven't come through on the whole "Potter site that struts originality" thing. You really shouldn't have put that there in the first place...false expectations and all that shit.
I notice on your sidebar that this site has been running since 2006, which is a fair amount of time to be having a site on Piczo. Piczo should be seen as a starting base in which webmasters only use it for a short amount of time, just to learn / practise new skills with the intention of finding more reputable hosting. I suggest that you start to think along these lines - focus on your presentation skills and look around for someone who will host you. You have to start somewhere and for you this starting point has been Piczo, but you've been on it long enough and you need to start setting your sights a little higher.
