Falling Snow Reviews

Site: Mystical Garden

Date Completed: December 27, 2007

First Impressions

I had pretty good first impressions of your site. Not loving the enter page, but I did love your bold color choices! I noticed that you have celebrity graphics in your layout, I hope you at least gave credits…

Enter Page

Good. I don’t love enter pages, but yours is clear and clean. Because it’s so clean, I wonder, what’s the point of it? All you have is an enter button to your site. There’s nothing to look at otherwise, so why not just get rid of the enter page all together?

Layout/Design

Your layout is pretty good. I love your bold color choices - it’s very “mystical.” Although you don’t have a lot of variety, you seem to pull off the “blue on blue on blue” really well.

Your header’s okay, though a little large for my taste. I hate having to scroll down to read most of the content. I think that you could crop off a bit of the header toward the bottom. I do wonder why you have Vanessa Hudgens in the header, especially since your site isn’t celebrity related. For your next layout, I’d suggest not using celebrities, mostly for visitor reasons. First of all, people will get confused and think that your site is a celebrity fan site or something. Second of all, a lot of people that I know think that celebrity graphics are, well, an easy way to design a layout. A lot of people would like to see something more unique. I don’t necessarily think this, but I’m just pointing this out to you as a suggestion to attract more visitors.

In the header I’d also suggest making “Mystical Garden” more noticeable, so people can see the name of your site.

The rest of your layout is pretty much fine. I’d just suggest making your links have a rollover effect, like changing color. Right now, it’s kind of confusing to me because it’s hard to tell which words are links.

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Site: Final Stop

Date Completed: December 21, 2007

First Impressions

I’ve never been to your site before, and have to say - the first impression was a pretty good one! I liked your layout (finally, something interesting!).

Enter Page

n/a

Layout/Design

I love your layout, and it gave me a really good impression of you designing skills! That, is, until I saw it was a premade layout. Not to worry, I don’t take points off for this, as I’m using a premade (but customized) layout at the moment until I can figure out WordPress. I still have faith in your design skills though - you did a great job customizing it! I love the colors.

I do think it’s a little cluttered though - there’s a lot of information in the main box, sidebar, and footer. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I think that you could divide your information into subpages to avoid looking messy. I’d get rid of the “Content” section of your sidebar, and move it to the main navigation tabs. While quickly browsing through your site, I couldn’t find the content for a while! If I were you, I’d definitely move it where visitors can see it. I’d call the tab “Visitor” or “Goodies.” Scratch the top five downloads. You don’t need them on your sidebar. They’re okay to have there, but they’re better off off the sidebar. Now, move the link button (to your site) to the bottom of the sidebar. See the footer? I’d just put copyright and meta data on the footer. I’d move the recent posts and comments to the side bar.

Now that your sidebar’s all cleared up, lets look at the footer. Yikes! Those statistics and meta data look messy! Do you really need a link to login on your footer? Aren’t you (and occasionally) Karen going to be the only people who login? Get rid of that, and that big blue Saturn-like button that links to your statistics page. If you want people to be able to see all your statistics, put a text link in place of this button. It looks a lot neater.

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Site: Ink Dreamer

Date Completed: December 1, 2007

First Impressions

Lily, your site is the slowest loading site out of my lineup of daily visits. It took 17 seconds to load (Time it. 17 seconds is longer than it seems…), whereas, for example, Clem’s site took 1 second. Any idea why yours takes so long?

Enter Page

n/a

Layout/Design

Your layout is pretty good. I don’t really like how the side navigation goes further up than the header. It looks a little awkward, and it also makes the dangling flower have to dangle even further. I think that you should either cut off the side navigation where the header starts, or move the header up. I know that other people like the navigation and header like it is, so this is just my opinion.

Your color scheme is okay. The gray and red (or is it orange?) look good together. But it’s a little plain. I liked the old flower hover effect over the navigation! It made your layout more interesting.

Speaking of flowers, your dangling flower looks weird, like it dangles too much. But, you don’t have to get rid of it! I think that your welcome message, the one below the flower, would look really cool next to it. That way there’s not so much blank space.

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