Name: Jess
Site: Jesshc1993
Review completed on: 30/04/06

SPLASH PAGE

Disorganised, does not serve any purpose. Under your enter graphic (that ought to display the word "enter", at least!) you should state any site requirements your site may have. The purpose of a splash page is not only to provide a gateway to your site, but to provide visitors with information regarding the systems/displays your site is best viewed in. Without these, there is no point to having a splash page, and because you havent stated any requirements, theoretically you shouldnt be needing a splash page at all. Scrollbars are also a big no-no - especially when they're long and lead to nowhere, like yours do.1/10

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

I think you have the potential to pull of something great here if you just paid a little more attention to the finer details, as well as the general alignment of your images and tables. By simply tweaking things slightly your layout could look ten times better than it does at the moment. I'll get into this further in the next section. 3/10

LAYOUT

You need to slightly minimise the width of your Adam Brody layout so that there will be no need for the horizontal scrollbars. The only reason they are there is to scroll across to see the remaining one centimetre of your tagboard. Decreasing the size of a few things is all it takes for those annoying scrollbars to disappear - you'll probably agree that they are pointless in having, when there's nowhere to scroll to. Also, I notice that your layout image and tables are housed within a black rectangular border. Well, at least you've ATTEMPTED to house them in this way, hasn't quite worked out for you though. See, your tables clearly protrude outside of the border, adding to the overall sloppy look your layout possesses. Again - by decreasing the width of the Adam Brody (who is this?) picture and the tables, you'll be able to fit both in snugly, without having to go over the border. Get what I mean? And now, the layout graphic itself. I'm using the term 'graphic' loosely, as it appears you haven't actually done anything with it. By all accounts it looks like you've swiped it from Google images or somesuch, and just slapped it onto your site as a layout. All it is is a picture! I see no evidence of you tampering with it to make it original to your site. You could at least have included some brush work, or if you're not into brushes you could have simply incorperated your site title into the image. As it is now, there is no trace whatsoever of any design skills you may hold. So, I'm assuming you don't have any, since you've been so lazy with the graphic. I'm quite disappointed with this, all round. 3/20

CONTENT

Righto then. First section - "This Girl". The index page to this section could've been laid out more wisely, perhaps by bringing the "In The Spotlight" link up with all the other links at the top, instead of it being struck down at the bottom. "All About Me" - wow, you've used a pretty massive font here haven't you? Why's that? Your text even goes right over all the pictures of you on this page, and this absolutely spoils them. That's a pity, since the pics look really nice, from what I could see. Possible solutions for this issue could include heavily decreasing the size of your font, and taking all the pictures and putting them on your "Pics" page, instead of on the "This Girl" page. After all, you do have an entire section devoted to pics so you might as well have ALL of your pics located on this page. "Pics" - I enjoyed viewing the images of your friends and family. You do need to include the pics on the "This Girl" page here too. "My Form" - a list of all the boys and girls in your class, including surnames. As enlightening as this page was (ha!) is it a very good idea having peoples' full names on this page? Or did you gain permission from every form member? I know I wouldn't like Rhiannon S.E. Phillips being blasted about on personal websites without my permission or knowledge. "Ma M8s" - pictures and information about several of your friends. Nice. I'm sure they feel honoured to be featured here, you're a good friend to include them in this way. "In The Spotlight" is a page consisting of a rather generic survey about yourself. I've seen these questions at many other websites, more often than not at pagebuilder sites funnily enough. You could afford to jazz this page up a bit by including some graphics or a variety of different colours for your fonts - as it is now it looks quite plain.

"Best Of The Best" - a page leading to a links' to pages you've dedicated to your friends. You already have dedications to your friends in your former section under "Ma M8s", why do you need another one? The links to the Martha and Kate pages overlap your text at the bottom of this page. Have you actually noticed any of these overlapping issues at your site? Surely you realise that this does NOT look good, and that you should make ammendments?!

"Her Favourites" - this section begins with a large image of Ashlee Simpson, that redirects visitors to your main page when clicked. Eh? "Favs" - lists of your top 5 favourite tv shows, colours etc all in a tabled format. The tables are uneven, and...overlap. In fact the "Favourite Shops" table overlaps the "Favourite Films" table so much that only the first two film titles are visible. Again - have you not noticed this? It's so blantantly obvious, and one would think that upon your noticing the error you would have changed it. Either you don't actually check your own pages, or you're aware of the error and can't be bothered doing anything about it. "Music Vids" - this is more of a video request page than anything else. Do you have permission by the various artists' recording companies for having these embedded videos at your personal site? Check out the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on google and perhaps you'll realise that the redistribution of such media is prohibited unless proper channels are followed, ie requesting permission from the appropriate places and other such boring bullshit no one can be bothered following. Best just to remove the vids, aight? "Favourite Music" - in comparison to some of the other pages I've seen at your site, this one is presented fairly nicely. Some nice work here, for sure.

"Etc" - not entirely sure what kind of purpose this section serves. From the looks of things it could be a site related page or...I don't know. "MSN Names" - a list of cheesy quotes and the like, apparently good for using as an msn screen name. "God made coke, god made pepsi, god made me coz i'm damn sexi"...well, I think I'll stick to my own msn screen name, thanks all the same! Ahh...teenagers. "My Makes" - several graphics made by you. What's wrong with these? Nothing, that's what. You should use these as layouts, instead of banishing them off to this page. You ought to include a statement on this page saying whether or not people can use these graphics. "Icons". Very, very nice. Did you make these yourself?! If not, be sure to credit the site you nicked them from. "Blends & Layouts" - at first I thought the page hadn't loaded, but then I realised you'd 'done the scrollbar thing' again. All one sees when the page loads is a stark white space of nothingness. One has to scroll down to view the graphics. Why? As with the "My Makes" page, these graphics are quite good. You should definitely feature them more at your site by way of a main page graphic, instead of some plain old boring Adam Brody image with nothing done to it. "Servey" needs to be changed to "survey". "Links" - links to your 'top ten' at the moment. Funny how there's only four sites listed here, then. Maybe you should change 'top ten' to 'top four'. 7/20

SUMMARY

Jess, you've got a bit of work to do if you want to make your site a real winner. Your site is full of sloppy, careless errors and I really wonder why you haven't bothered to fix them. Don't you care about your site? I have to say that I don't think a site such as yours is ready to be submitted to arguably one of the harshest WPRs around - what were you expecting from this review? There is only so much I can say to you, but you're so young - nearly 10 years younger than myself - and you have years of webdesigning ahead of you, should you choose to keep up with it. One can only get better with time, with practise, and by recognising certain errors pointed out to you by others. Accepting constructive criticism is paramount when it comes to wanting to improve the state of your web page. Most of the graphics you've made are pretty cool but you need to work on the actual presentation and structure of your pages. Good luck with everything...

OVERALL SCORE: 14/60