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: Shelbie
Site: Dirtyrawr
Review completed on: 07/06/08
I'm suspicious. This looks like a generic teeny site with an almost complete focus on graphics and tutorials, with a small obligatory snippet of personal information if at all. Your celebrity layout and the order of your navigation (Myspace, Tutorials, Content and finally Shelbs) does a lot to back up my aforementioned assumption. I'm all for being proved wrong, and I really hope that in some ways I will be. The message at the top of my browser window says "never to come back again". Is that how I'll be feeling once I've finished your review? I hope not.
The header image featuring one "Jesse McCartney" does nothing for me I'm afraid. It looks incredibly washed out, to the point where I can only vaguely make out your site title. You could have chosen to display your site title in a different colour, like the dark green you've used for the sentence below it. Come on - light blue that gradually gets lighter and lighter? How does this work? Site titles should always be easily visible.
I think you could have put more effort into your navigation. Initially it looks pretty bland, until I discovered the rollovers. The links look kind of random placed up in the top right corner of your image. What about a navigation bar underneath the image instead, with an assigned background colour? Or better yet, a vertical navigation system placed at the top of your sidebar?
On the Shelbie section of your sidebar you say "I'm probably going to be your biggest regret. But love me anyway." Pardon? Why is this part necessary? Seems silly and cryptic.
You've also decided to pimp out your affiliates on the sidebar, all sixteen of them. This takes up a bit of space. Most people get around this by including a maximum of five random links instead, or they opt to store the links on a separate page.
Still on your sidebar, under Disclaimer, you've stated that you do not redistribute anything and you expect others to do the same. So where was the Jesse McCartney image from? Where are the pictures of celebs/models on your Stocks page from? Scanned from a magazine? You're still redistributing images even if you scanned them yourself, you're redistributing images that are copyrighted to the magazine you scanned them from. Best to remove this line in your Disclaimer then, since it's false.
The final sidebar header is "Private", which contains links to various login pages, plus a random link to Photobucket and a poll site. Why are these links here? Why can't you just bookmark them instead of displaying them on your site for all and sundry to see? I've seen login links displayed in this way before, and always at certain types of sites - weborexic, amateurish ones. Don't put yourself in that category!
To your credit, your headers are clearly defined, and your regular font size is fine. The font size for your blog dates however is hard to read since it's light grey on a white background. Not the most effective colour combination around. You could change it to the appealing teal font you've used for your headers and blog categories etc. Teal's such a lovely colour. The font colour you've used to display what you're listening to at the top of your blogs is also hard to read, since it's light green / brown. How about a dark grey instead? #999999 maybe?
Oh dear, look at the text hugging that image in your blog. Argh, it looks awful. Padding please! Urgently! Look at that...do you not have a problem with how it looks now? If you're stuck, take a look at how to wrap text around images on Wordpress.
On your footer you have a "Contact Us" link. Who's us? Do you have co-owners here? It doesn't look like it. Best to change this to "Contact Me".
Interestingly, you have decided to kick off your content with a Myspace section. Is this what you consider most important? Is that what it's all about for sites like yours, free graphics and tutorials? The Shelbs section should be first, it's best to introduce yourself before anything else.
On the little write up to this section you need to change customize to customise. You're from the UK, so customise is spelt using their spelling, not the Americanised spelling. A simple mistake here, there's no harm done.
Wanna know something? I quite like what I'm seeing here so far in your Myspace section. I'm pleasantly surprised, especially as I haven't come across a celebrity image yet. Your abstract Myspace layouts are very very good, especially the second one. If I had a Myspace account (I deleted it) I wouldn't hesitate to use it. The backgrounds for the layouts are so cute, you should use one here at Dirtyrawr. I've taken a look at all of the remaining pages in this section and yeah, I've liked everything I've laid eyes on. See, you can hold your own without having to go down the road of mediocre celebrity images. I'm confident you can come up with something great for Dirtyrawr's next layout. (Will continue to nag you about this later on.)
Myspace Tutorials -
Here are a selection of tutorials for you to learn how to use one of the most popular online communities!
Well there's only one here, so it's not a selection. More coming soon I take it? The tutorial that is here is a write up about Myspace. You've explained the basics successfully, but I'm wondering why you've bothered to do so in the first place. Who hasn't heard of Myspace? Everyone is already fully aware of Myspace and how the network functions. Good on you for explaining it I guess, even though I think there was no need to do so.
Unless spelling / grammatical errors are substantial, they are not taken into account when calculating your QIS rating. Interestingly some people - noobs mainly - think it's rude for reviewers to correct peoples' spelling errors. If there's an error to report, every reviewer needs to report it and correct it in their review. Obviously. Nothing rude about providing feedback, tips, and corrections as requested by the reviewee.
Tutorials
Oh goody. The first tutorial here is labelled "CSS Stylesheet and HTML". You don't need the word stylesheet there, as CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. So what you're basically saying is Cascading Style Sheet Stylesheet. Makes me wonder if you really know what one is. Sorry, ignore me, I'm just thinking out loud.
On your CSS Shortcut tutorial, you say this:
Now save your document with your code in. Now you need to copy the code below to every page you want your CSS to appear on but remember to edit it before hand.
That's one way of doing it, yeah, but it's a silly way. Not a short cut at all! Having internal CSS is a waste of your time because whenever you want to change your layout you have to edit every page. Since the full stylesheet is included in every single page, browsers have to parse the CSS info every single time that the page loads. I definitely recommend you start using external stylesheets - these are called up only once by the browser and then cached, cutting down the loading time of the page. All you have to do is create your CSS file as normal, save it as style.css (or whatever you want, provided it has the .css extension) and include the link in the head area of your document.
Your Text Effects remind me of identical pages on Piczo sites. You're displaying code in text boxes for goodness' sake. Who does this still? Also, the <s></s> tags have been deprecated for a long while. <del></del> is the replacement. I find it interesting that you seem unaware of this, especially as your Doctype indicates you coded your site in XHTML 1.0 Strict.
I was disappointed and slightly amused to come across a No Right Click tutorial in the Javascript section. No no no no no! Have I stepped back in time to 2002? No right click scripts are useless and the absolute bane of Joe Visitor's existence. There are numerous ways to bypass this ancient ass, amateurish script. If someone wants to steal your crap, then they're not going to let a no right click script get in their way. They can temporarily turn off javascript on their browser, view your source code from the toolbar at the top of the page...blah blah blah. Plus as far as I'm aware no right click scripts don't work full stop on Macs. They've certainly never worked on any computer I've had, and all of those computers have been Macs. Disabling no right click does nothing but alienate the genuine users who use right-click as part of their usual browsing habits. Driving visitors away is not cool.
You head up the Photoshop Tutorials page by saying "I'm still learning as I am new to it. So please bare with me!". Well, if you're new to Photoshop why on earth are you offering tutorials on it? You should only offer tutorials on applications you have a fair amount of experience with. The more experience you have with using something, the more confident you become, and that's when you can start sharing your knowledge with others.
Clearly, Paintshop Pro is the application you're more proficient in. You have a truckload of tutorials in this particular section that I'm sure would benefit anyone wanting to learn more about the techniques this application has to offer. Not sure why you've repeatedly spelt colourising as "colourizing" here, the former is the correct way to spell it. Apart from this I have no problem with these particular tutorials. You've put a lot of effort into them, and you have a genuine knowledge of PSP. Wish I could say the same about the majority of other tutorials displayed here. Stick to what you're good at, that's what I say. I realise there's 'pressure' among certain types of teen-owned websites to have as many tutorials as possible, and the more tutorials you have the 'cooler' you are, or some shit. Not so. There's nothing cool about offering an exhaustive amount of tutorials covering redundant scripts and encouraging the use of deprecated HTML tags. Like I said, stick to what could actually be useful for your visitors - the PSP tutorials.
Content
Content, eh? So everything else I've covered has been what? Oh yeah...content too. Content = collective word for all the sections available on your website. Content is not a suitable word to describe what, in this case, looks like a visitor section. Appropriate names = You, Visitor, For You, Goodies (lol) and the like. Aiiight?
This page consists of two sections - Downloads and Graphics && Resources. Some thrilling content right there guaranteed to make me squeal with excitement and kiss your feet for being so bloody original. Just kidding. Why the double up on the ampersands? Is this some kind of cool "thing" or whatever? Since when was it cool to e-stutter like an e-tard?
The Brushes are nothing special, no offense. So ordinary, so simple, so commonly found at umpteen other teeny sites. Line/splatter brushes are so old and stale now. Everyone offers these! How about offering some interesting patterns / shapes instead?
PNGs and PSDS - two sets here, one of Ashley Tisdale and the other of Rihanna. According to the sentence at the top, credit is required for these images because 'you cut them out'. Whoaaaa, how strenuous for you! Doesn't matter what the heck you've done to them, you're still not allowed to redistribute these unlawfully obtained celebrity images, let alone have the cheek to ask people to credit you for these images that you don't own in the first place. So what if you cut them out yourself? I don't care whether you applied umpteen filters, blended the living shit out of it or whatever - you shouldn't be offering these full stop. Content such as this is unacceptable, not to mention illegal.
Scripts - "Images aren't copyright to myself but to there original photographer." There = Their, and again, this fact does not matter. Stating that they're not copyrighted to you doesn't take away the fact that you shouldn't be using them in the first place. It's been a while since I've had to have a moan about this in a review. It's a shame I have to. And I do have to.
Still in the Content section, under Graphics && Resources now. I wonder how many && celebrity images I'll find in this && section? Not too many I && hope.
Affiliate Images - Yes yes yes yes yes!! NICE!! Nothing wrong with these at all.
Animations - Moulin Rouge / Rihanna / etc screencaps, with a cheeky "Copyright to Dirtyrawr.Org" on the bottom of each one. Sigh. From now on I'm only going to comment on non-celebrity related content. I'm so over this.
Love the Backgrounds. There's a wide range of colours and designs available for people to use here. Nice work. Same can be said for your Bullets and Blank Buttons.
On your Download Buttons page, it's almost impossible to see the word Download on the green button.
Yay, I'm now at the Shelbie section. I've been looking forward to this.
I do web-design to escape from reality, meet people who won't judge you just because you don't wear make-up or the lastest fashions. I dress for comfort and I like my style. Some people don't get that.
Well said! A lot of people will be nodding their heads in agreement right now. Don't forget to change lastest to latest.
Sadly this page was quite short, with no subpages, but what I did get to read I enjoyed very much. You say you're nothing special and that your life is seriously uncool, but I disagree on both counts. You seem to have a complete understanding of who you are as a person, and I'd love to read more about you. Why not consider adding some additional pages? You could go into detail about your favourite things - bands, songs, TV, movies, books...anything! What about your hobbies - what kind of things do you enjoy doing? What are your goals for the future, what do you want to do with your life? Are there any issues/cause you feel strongly about that might make a good article?
And that brings me to the end of your review. It's been a long one, and at times admittedly quite painful, but I sincerely hope you'll be able to take something from it. I know that you might not have enjoyed reading most of it, but I'm confident that you're mature enough to realise that I'm only offering you my opinion, as requested by yourself. I'm not out to 'hate on you' in any way, I have nothing against you as a person. I do, however, have something against certain areas of your content - the content that involves the use of celebrity images for starters. I hope this review has opened your eyes a bit as to the legal consequences of having such content on offer.
Like every other site owner out there, you have potential. Everyone has the potential to go far if they really want to. Everyone has the potential to improve their sites, to optimise them for the visitor, to offer something different, something unique. Something people will come back for. You'll realise your potential soon enough, and once you do you'll be on the road to making your site a richer, more original environment for your visitors.
Good luck.
