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: Chanel
Site: A Way To Get Your Soul Kissed
Review completed on: 3/12/06
SPLASH PAGE
No splash
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
It's hard to give you something concrete at the moment because as I type this, your site is still loading. In fact, I loaded your site, went off to have another look at my birthday presents, made a cup of tea, had a smoke, and I come back to find your site is still loading. This is not good! I'm going to have to stop loading it because this is simply ridiculous - it has taken over ten minutes so far. Looking at your site, it's not hard to see why it is taking eons to load. iFrames, massive layout that encompasses the background and footer as one combined image, embedded flash file that started playing automatically...golly golly gosh! Come hither, my friend, to the Layout section, where I will kindly elaborate for you.
LAYOUT
Does your site ever stop loading? I'm just wondering. Maybe it will stop loading by the time I finish the review? Yes, I am on a dialup modem, but so what? I've never experienced such a wait on any other site in my life! If it wasn't that I was reviewing your site, I would have definitely left by now, because everyone has their limits on how long they want to wait.
I'm wondering why your layout takes up the whole page, and why you couldn't have your text spaces and side bars driven by CSS. I did something like this once, about a year ago. Ewww, shocking memories of non compliance on my part. I had my own fanlisting called...wait for it....Trashy Princess, and it had about 90 members before I shut it down. Anyway, the layout was one gimundo image, scrolling alllll the way down the page. I'd drawn in places for tables on Photoshop. Yours isn't as bad as mine was, but even so, you can see that this isn't a good practice. The method sucks balls, major ones, and can more often than not be labelled an accessibility nightmare. Instead of having the entire layout as one big image, you could have made your header etc transparent, have the background image loading separately, and have your footer loading separately as defined in your CSS. Better yet you could make the background a solid HTML colour instead of an image, to cut down on all the things loading around here. And yes, your site is still loading. What about people using text only browsers? If you absolutely must have everything as an image - although it is not advised - you could at least cut down on the image size. Right now it comes in at an alarming 950 x 798 dimension wise, and an equally alarming 391.8 KB in file size. Save for web, much? Dearie dearie doo! I just ran your site through a checker at "Sitescore", and you got a 2.8 rating for accessibility! Now, what did I get...6.2! You should definitely be worried when I get a higher score than you, because yeah...I'm not exactly the best at coding. Although I was rather chuffed that I got a 9.3 for design... You might be interested to know that both of us have violated the British Disability Discrimination Act - "This website may be unlawful in Britain. The British Disability Discrimination Act makes it unlawful to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide any service provided to members of the public - including websites". I sit here laughing languishing over our lack of compliance. I wouldn't worry about just quietly...there's a time when even the term "anal" is not appropriate, and I believe this is one of those times. But as for everything else - do try and make your site at least a little more accessible, breaking your layout down into several parts as I explained before, as well as decreasing the file size. In my world, an accessibility rating of anything above 5.5 should be all right.
Now now now...what about this embedded flash file, playing music? It started playing automatically, and since I'm on dialup, a little bit plays, then two seconds later it stops, buffers, and so on and so forth. Righto, I have no choice but to give you another personal scenario. Way back in the day, around 2004, I had a website called Petshopgirl.TK, and for a while it....there's no easy way of saying this...but it contained an embedded MIDI file of "The Candyman" theme song, that would play automatically upon the entry of a visitor. I thought it was soooo cool that I had tricked out my site with this midi, especially as it went with the design of my layout. Anyway, one afternoon in January 2005, I received a guestbook entry from someone I had been friends with, getting angry because she was listening to music and then she came to my site and this MIDI started playing. She was pretty annoyed, and so was I, so I blocked her and whined to my boyfriend about it. Furthermore, not even a year ago (although nearly) I had "Discotraxxx" by Ladytron playing automatically at my personal site. Goodness gracious me, can you believe it!! Accessibility!! Copyright violation!! You reap what you sow in this crazy world of web design, and believe me I've done a lot of reapin'. In the past six months I've definitely wised up on the what-not-to-do's of web design. Now, you reap!!! But not rape, reap. PSGR is a rape-free zone. What I'm trying to get at here is how annoying it is to have music on autostart when you visit a website. It's unexpected, and can be of a considerable annoyance if the visitor is enjoying their own music at the time. Not only that, but the embedded flash file can take an eternity to load on slower connections. If you simply must have music at your site, it would be a fabulous idea to let the visitor choose whether they want to hear it or not. No autostart!
The top of your layout is fairly light, and the "A way to get your soul kissed" part is rather hard to read. Pastels are fine, but there's no need to overdo it. I like your footer though, very much. The clouds and the rainbow look nice 'n' magical, just the way I like it. Lol, that sounded lame. But it's true, you've done a good job with it. I'm not sure about your sidebar intro though, where you go on about how you will be expressing energy and that the visitor will be expressing energy back. I expressed energy about five minutes ago, and boy did it smell bad! Font's a bit small, too. Navigation is fine, although I initially thought the icon on the hover was a tampon. Last but not least, the font size on your blog is a little small and could be made bigger. Also, the line height could be increased, as it is now all the lines look too close together. Space it out, maaan!! Trip out with a clear, easy to read font and a mind altering line height. Peace, love, and good times will result.
CONTENT
Biography
And I quote: "Anyhoo, my hobbies are listening to music, playing spades & braiding my vagina. I'm addicted to Afrin nosespray & hair weaves and have no intention on "healing" myself. I have a strong grip in reality, my cashflow and my man's cock." I don't even know what to say to that. Perhaps you might want to watch your language because it is entirely inappropriate, especially for younger audiences. Do I see an age rating here? No. Do I see any warnings? No. I'm just going to quickly move away from this now because I can't believe what I've just read. Sooo, umm, how come you made your fact file an image? You could have easily aligned your photo to the left, and used coloured html text for the fact file. Anyway, I clicked on the link to read your full biography, and for the most part I enjoyed it. You have clearly led a very interesting life so far, and you've achieved a lot in your 27 years. Good stuff. Nice to see the utilisation of page anchors as well. Included on this page are the complete lyrics to "Because You Love Me" by Celine Dion. Now, I realise this was put up to convey the feelings you hold towards your man, but there's a small matter of copyright violation to be considered.
Gallery
Ah! Thumbnails. Very good - this cuts down on loading time, as does the fact that you've displayed all these pictures on multiple pages instead of just the one.
Journal
This is a link back to your blog, which people automatically see first when they go to your site. Therefore, there's no need for the additional link in the midst of your navigation. Perhaps an "Index" or "Clear" link at the very top or bottom of your nav would be more suitable.
Visitor
Beginning with Domain Info. Domain info on a visitors page? Anyhoo. Digging the "Not Valid" button at the bottom of the first page, I saw that once and was considering putting it up at my site too. Total kudos for your bit on Showing Respect. I agree with you wholeheartedly - in most cases, if someone doesn't like / agree with the shit you have at your site then that's their own problem, and they most likely need to get laid. I have a similar mini-disclaimer on my Articles page after I kept getting emails from someone analysing everything I'd written. My opinion is my own opinion, and I don't care if anyone disagrees and if they do, go whine to someone else or go and make sweaty love to your pet goat. But....if I had submitted my site for a review, then I'm essentially saying "I am asking for your opinion, I WANT TO KNOW your opinion", blah blah blah. But don't think I'm purposefully trying to disrespect you because I'm not, my only intention is to give you my honest opinion and offer tips, that you are free to ignore. I just wanted to get that out of the way in case you think I'm hating on you, because I'm not. I loved looking at your Past Layouts, they're all so colourful and detailed.
Now onto Entertain yourself, where you've kicked off this section with Define Chanel. I thought this might be some game or something, but it was a cut and paste name evaluation job from Kabalarians.com. I think that this generic item of content would be more at home in the trash can, or as a sub link on your "Biography" page. FAQ - I like this concept. Unlike some FAQs, it doesn't consist entirely of boring site related info. Bored offers a hell of a lot for the visitor, from profound reads (authored by you which is cool). Very Oprah Winfrey, but in the nicest possible way. Just don't go for the whole book club thing, please! The rest of this section is passable to be honest...generic reads and forwards and such. Now onto the next page.... Email forwards...oh dear. This page consists of, quote, various funnies and articles sent to me by email forwards. Well, I'll graciously skip this, thanks all the same. Sniff sniff!! Contenido generico!
Self Help, and Sex Ed. Goodness me...I've never seen anything like this before on a personal site. I know you're 27, but do you also know your target audience? I turned 22 today, and I know for a fact that more than 60% of my visitors are under the age of 15. I try and watch my language as much possible - I have an extremely dirty mouth and I swear ALL THE TIME, but I try and steer clear from filthy language online. I also try and avoid certain topics that may be deemed inappropriate for my younger visitors. What do you think a naive 13 year old will think when they come across your pages on Foreplay, orgasms, vagina size, ejaculation... at least put up a warning. Anyway, you've got a notice up saying that all the information has been obtained from various sex ed sites, so I'm not going to review something copied from another source. This would have been much better if it had been original! STD's provides information about well, herpes and genital warts and all that kind of boogie woogie. I would feign interest here, but I can't possibly do that when all of the information has been collated from other sources. If people want to find out about such topics, surely they can just Google them? I don't see the logic in putting up information that has been repeated verbatim elsewhere. Your pieces on Internet Addiction were well-written, although they didn't interest me much. Did you actually write this yourself though?
Variety gives the visitor the option of viewing your site in a different skin. But is it a skin? When clicked, your site loads up again in a brand new window, instead of 'switching themes' in the same window.
Basic HTML codes - yawn. Every site and its brother has a section like this. I suppose your basic codes and colour tables would be of use to a rookie, but as it is I've seen these pages flung around the web like there's no tomorrow, it's all been done before. I'm not too sure about your cut and paste CSS stylesheet....specifying coloured scrollbars and a size 8pt font?
Personal Ventures - these are all external links, so they need to be stated as them.
Links
A healthy collection of links here, all arranged in an orderly fashion. No complaints from me here.
Contact
All hunkydory, form appears to be in working order.
SUMMARY
You have a great deal to offer at your website, whether it be information about yourself, or philosophical insights you want to share with your readers. These features have been marred by the way you've presented your site - design wise, the layout is fine, very creative. I like it. BUT...think of accessibility. There are so many tips that I have given you about how you can make your layout more accessible, and I've even chucked in a few of my own mishaps that occured before I became enlightened, shall we say. If you could even follow a mere few of these tips, your site would surely benefit. In an ideal world, your site should be quick loading, using images only when absolutely necessary, and be rid of embedded music files. Try and think about your visitors needs, and the fact that internet connections do vary.
I was also given the impression on your sidebar that your site was dedicated to your own personal musings and what not, so I was sorely disappointed when the generic content and email forwards outweighed the rest of your content in terms of quantity. I wonder why you feel that there is a need to repeat content that has been included elsewhere. Don't be generic - you're better than that, and you have your own shit to offer that is ten times better than crappy "funnies" or forwards. Concentrate on what you have to give, because you are perfectly capable of giving your own goods. This is what you need more of! More original content, and a more accessible layout. Lastly, some kind of warning for minors before entering your sex section is strongly recommended. Other sites that contain sexual material (whether it be images, text, etc etc) have warnings, so I don't see why you can't have one also.
Good luck with whatever you decide to do. You have a unique concept behind your website, so work with it!
