Re: personal site of not much importance

G'day

Site reviewed: http://www.angelfire.com/me/peacedream

Front page and pages linked to from that page only.

800x600 - 16bit (and also 640x480 / 1024x768)
IE 4.72 on Win95
56K Modem at 46k
--------------------------------------------------------------
I downloaded the site in the background so I don't know how long it took to
load.


ENTRY PAGE.

First impression: I can't be brutal as that's not my style.  Would you
settle for "harsh but fair"?

1. what is this homepage about?  Why should I explore the links?  There's
nothing there to tell me what is hidden behind this dark facade.  Why would
I want to get an email every time this page changes?  If I wasn't doing a
critique, I would have left by now (unless I was a friend/relative who
wanted to see what you've been doing perhaps).

2. Noticed something flashing at the bottom of my screen.  I just HAD TO
look what it was.  Oh No!  The overused animation of the cat and mouse
bashing each other.  Did you know cats have only nine lives?  This one seems
to have an unlimited lifespan.

3. I turned on my speakers and started the embedded sound.   Now I know why
you don't have it set to autostart.  It appears to be a poor rendition of
the star trek theme (or something like it).  To be fair, at least you gave
me the choice to turn it on and off at will :-)  And turn it off I did.

4. What's those symbols around Sweetheart?  Are they meant to be quotes?
They don't come up as such.  Perhaps they weren't meant to.

5. Text is a little too dark and thin.  Consider using a heavier font or a
lighter colour.  The red links kind of "jump" off the page - not easy to
look at against the dark background.

6. Got to the bottom of the page and saw the links.  Let's see what they
deliver - maybe it gets better...

WAVES

Before clicking on this link, I assume you are talking about sound files
here, given the embedded sound on the front page.

1. Yep.  That's what it looks like.  Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately)
there's no sound - I'm working offline on a downloaded copy.

2. Looks like a list of music files, in WAV format.  Must be large files?
MP3 encoded perhaps?  Some indication of how large (or small) they are might
help the visitor decide whether to load them or not

3.  I'd consider putting the links into some sort of table - titles on the
left, links on the right.  As it is, it looks somewhat messy

4. Some of the titles are in all lowercase, some are capitalised. Is this
intentional?  I assume the (multiple) exclamation marks beside some of them
mean you really like those songs.

MIDIS

1. I'm afraid I don't like the animations.  They once again distract from
the content of the page.  In fact, it's hard to read the (small) title of
the page in between them.

2. Same as point three on the previous page.   And I still find the colours
unacttractive (OK, let's be brutal: an eyesore, almost literally)

LINKS

Much like the other pages.   I get the impression this is more of a gateway
to other people's work than an original site.  No real content apart from
the links...

ABOUT ME

1. The animation is a real distraction!   It jumps out of the screen and
causes me to go cross-eyed if I look at it for longer than about 2 seconds.

2. No real content here.  There must be something more you can tell the
visitor about yourself?  At least I now know you are a teenager.  The other
thing I gather from my journey so far is that you like animated images and
music.  Perhaps you might say a bit more about that on this page?  What
music do you like.  What's your favourite movie, etc.

MUSIC SITES

1. Just another collection of links.  Consider putting some text on the
page.  Describe to the visitor what these links are.  Where they lead.  Why
you like them.

2. Another animated picture.  This one does not jump out at me so much but
still gets distracting after a short while.

FINAL COMMENTS:

1. The site needs more content unless the intention has always been to just
provide a list of links.

2. The navigation bars at the bottom of the pages are inconsistent.
Example: Waves is listed as the first link on the home page.  But on the
MIDI page, it is the last one.   Try to make it consistent.

3. The colour scheme doesn't work too well.   The red links are too bright
while the creamy-coloured text is too thin/faint against the dark
background.

4. Be careful with animations.  The ones you use are too bright against the
dark background.  They might look better against a light background.

5. At least you did not design the site for a specific screen resolution
(namely 640x480), like the other two sites I have reviewed so far tonight.

6. Having said that, with the apparent lack of content at this stage, it
does not look all that good at higher resolutions either (try looking at it
with a resolution of 1024x768 or higher - all pages look rather empty).
Perhaps put in some margins or set everything up in a table of say 75%
width until you've added some (original) content to the links.

Sorry I could not be any more brutal :-)

Regards
--
Bert Doorn, Member of the HTML Writers Guild
Author of Beginners' Website Design Tips
at http://www.iinet.net.au/~bdoorn/

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