Review by Georgina at Heartdrops

Site Name: Woolisauce

Owner: Rachel

Reviewed by: Georgina

Reviewed on: 2nd February 2009

Site Name

I remember back when you were hosted at 110mb.com, you had the name Woolisauce and I thought it was really cute! I like it and it’s definitely unique and easy to remember.

Coding and Validation

Your coding has 11 errors – as we know, it’s due to your Social Vibe badge. At least we know what’s causing the problem.

Some of your other pages aren’t validated like the visitor page. You’ve got your doctype in the wrong place. I’m confident you can fix that, because many of your other pages seem fine. Just make sure you double check all your pages to check they’re validated.

Your CSS is valid – well done!

Browser Compatibility & Usability

Your site looks great in most browsers according to Browsershots.org so well done on that! Your layout is centered which is great, and the width is enough to fit in smaller resolutions.

Navigation is clear and easy to understand.

The main text is a nice size and easy to read.

Layout

It’s so adorable! I like the colours in the header image. Did you take it yourself? Whether you did or didn’t, it’s still a great picture. I like the font you’ve used for your site name.

It’s interesting you’re using green and yellow in your styling. The green isn’t overly bad – I like the green in your navigation links on hover, but the bullet you’re using for lists doesn’t really match. The yellow is also a bit unusual.

I would probably stick to the pinks and purples and perhaps use a brown for darker varied colours – at least it’ll bring out the brown in the little bear.

I really like the subtle spotty background. It gives that right amount of texture.

Content

In your sidebar your affiliates should be in a slightly bigger text and better spaced out. Don’t use too many text effects in your introduction. I actually think this would look better in a list but it’s up to you.

Visitor

The avatars are very cute! I’d love to see more, since I don’t usually see small ones like these. The pixelling style is great as well; not something you see often.

For your form on ‘Build-a-Pixel’, some of the fields should be separated from their labels with an <br /> to be neater.

I love these emoticons! They’re too cute.

The quote bars are pretty pointless. You don’t have many and no one can really use them for anything.

Most people tell me that pixels are pointless, but they’re still a nice thing to have on your site, in my opinion. I really like the snowglobes and snowmen here.

For your stock photos it might be an idea to write ‘click thumbnail for full size’. These are quite nice. They could be increased in brightness but I guess people can do that themselves in a phot editor.

The website material is great. I quite like the backgrounds because it’s pretty hard to find a simple one around nowadays. Back/forward buttons are getting a bit old – I know I offer them and people do still use them though. Ditto for the dividers.

Your visitor section has some useful content but others not as useful. More emoticons, icons and stock images would be great.

Owner

Your owner page is fine, it’s short and simple. With your affie gifts page, one of your gifts is quite large and extends past your content section. With bigger gifts it’s best to open them in a new window.

Hahaha, your prize. I remember winning that exact same one. Maybe this could be combined with your gifts page, since you only have one at the moment. Makes me feel so lazy not having a gifts page at all!

Everything else in your owner section looks good. Sorry that I don’t like many of your songs in ‘Now Playing’ but I do love that song by The Used. I’m more into the old music, haha.

Site

Yay, you have my donated button! Tehee.

Ah, the lovely credits page. Don’t forget Haloscan! And other programs, if you’ve used them; your FTP program, anything!

I wasn’t reading through the old posts, just checking if the links worked. They do, but I came across your old site. Do you still maintain it? Because it’s still open!

Originality & Creativity

Definitely very original and creative. I still like your pixel layouts but this one was still done very nicely. Your content is very unique, even though you don’t have much.

Organisation & Errors

No errors – your spelling and grammar is great. You don’t have any broken links or huge errors.

Your site was very well organised.

Overall Comment

Rachel, your site has always come across to me as being very cute, and it still is! I like how you’re not afraid to try out different layouts and things, and how your site has a variety of content.

You’ve got a good sense of organisation and neatness. I really enjoy visiting your site, also to read your blogs. The only suggestions I have are obviously to tweak those little coding errors and check all pages to make sure they are valid.

Also, I’d like to see more visitor content. More! A lot more! Because most of what you have is good and it would be nice to see an expansion of those.

With the current layout I’d just say the CSS needs to be tweaked, colour wise. Good luck fixing things, and keep up the great work. I was going to give you a score of 4.5 because I think you need more content, but everything else is just so impressive – the quality, the originality.

Rating

(out of 5)