17 Wings

This review is from 17 Wings; original location.

Layout

Looks

Colors — They’re fine. Your color choice is atypical, but being different isn’t bad. My eyes don’t scream when I look at your page. I like the brown in your navigation menu and its pink rollover. I also like the soft pink/peach hues present in other aspects of this layout—I’m not crazy about anything else. The oranges and purples remind me a bit of Halloween, but it’s October… :) Everything is readable, and that’s what really matters.

General Positioning — Everything is well-positioned. The navigation menu is easy to locate; there’s a pretty header image at the top; the site’s name is elegantly displayed; blog entries are easy to find. :)

Sidebar — I love that you have a search box and site updates on your sidebar. I don’t like the justified text.

Huge gaps between words (rivers) were created when your sidebar text was justified. I tried to mark some of them with blue lines in the image above. Text aligned to the left may produce a ragged right edge, but I think that it would look better than justified text with odd spacing. Think about not using justified text, at all, in this layout.

I also dislike justified text in general but thought it was useful in the narrow columns featured here. However, the screenshots you gave do look bad, so I’ll probably switch the columns to left alignment.

Footer — The right stuff is in your footer! I like the photos, off-site links, and category links. I love that you also have a link to your site map and to “What Are You Here For?” Some sort of separator (i.e. a | or a —) would be nice between the links under “Special Links” and “Categories” because some of them are two words long. Also, a top-border would be nice above the last line. Consider clearly separating it from the rest of your footer as everything else is divided into three columns.

Also a good suggestion; can do!

—Style Nazi — What I’m about to say is in no way objective. But I feel compelled to say it. :( I would like your links more if they were bold instead of underlined. I feel like the underlined links somehow disrupt the flow of your page (not so much in the sidebar, but everywhere else—especially in the blog). They really stand out.

Haha, exactly! I want links to stand out and be easily differentiated from regular text.

Code

You write neat and well-documented code.. There’s nothing wrong with your style sheet. You also use heading tags properly, and your site doesn’t go to hell when CSS is turned off. :)

There are a couple things, though. Consider using div tags in your footer instead of tables. And if you care to be anal, add a hidden <h1> site name </h1> to the tops of your pages for all of those anti-CSS accessibility nuts. :) Sadly, 3till7.net is not free of coding errors:

Oh man, I did try to get three columns via div layers first, but the CSS was very tricky to make them all float with the left-most column flush against the left side, the right-most column flush against the right side, and the middle column floating equally between the outer columns. It ended up not working right in IE when it worked in Firefox, and so finally I gave up and switched to a table. :(

Coding Errors

About Me

<p><a href="..." style="text-decoration: none;">

<div style="background-color: white; display:inline;"><img src="..." alt="My top 10 artists"/></div>

<p></a></p>

The code quoted above isn’t neat (or valid). It’s coming from where you incorporate Last.fm widgets into your “Favorites” section. You’re a computer programmer, so I’m blaming Last.fm for this interesting smattering of code. If you change it to what I suggest below, everything should be fine.

<div style="background-color: white; display:inline;"><p><a href="..." style="text-decoration: none;"><img src="..." alt="My top 10 artists"/></a></p></div>

Fixed!

Contact Me — There’s a missing </tr> after Email a copy to yourself.

About 3till7.net — In the second paragraph, there’s an error in your link to wordpress.org. The final quotation mark at the end of that link has been forgotten. You have href="http://www.wordpress.org instead of href="http://www.wordpress.org".

Fixed! It’s noticing little details like this that make this review stand out.

Reviews Received —
In the blockquote in which Review from _______ is quoted, there’s a lone </p>. A <p> is missing at the beginning of the blockquote. It’s like this in most if not all of the blockquotes on the page. There’s a similar problem with blockquote and p tags on your “Writing,” “Dream Journal,” “Geeky Stuff,” “Don’t Deal with These Companies,” &c. pages. :(

That’s due to me parsing PHP within a WordPress page and WordPress wanting to insert paragraph tags everywhere. I fixed it by editing my PHP to add an opening p tag but not a closing one, since that’s what WP likes to stick in.

Content

Mine

About Me — Your introduction to this long page is cute and colloquial.

To further describe myself, I’m taking the easy way out with a bunch of lists:

Because your about me page is so long, consider adding a short list of links (linking your interests, hobbies, faults, pet peeves, and favorites) immediately after the sentence quoted above.

Now the sidebar on that page has links to other sections of the page.

Interests — Until a few moments ago, I’d never heard of Ruby. I doubt that many people are familiar with the programming language, so think about adding a link to a site like ruby-lang.org.

Good idea! I added the link.

On specific issues, my beliefs include: gun supporter, abortion supporter, pro-capital punishment, pro-separation of church and state, supporter of the teaching of evolution but not intelligent design, and pro-using open source standards in government, as opposed to closed, proprietary alternatives.

Your paragraph on politics contains a sentence 40 words long. Break it up. It’s confusing because:

1. It’s long.
2. You use different words for the same thing. You’re a ____ supporter and pro-other things. Use one term. Be pro-everything you’re pro or a supporter of everything that you support. If the list of things that you’re for wasn’t crammed into one sentence or one short paragraph, I’d say use different words. But because it is, be consistent.
3. There are little asides (i.e. as opposed to closed). Instead of using “but” or “as opposed to,” to set up things in opposition, just say that you’re anti-_____.

Fixed! I broke it up into an unordered list and reworded things.

You write in a friendly manner. On this page, you come across as being down-to-earth and just very sweet. The downside to this (and this isn’t really a downside) is that you write as though someone’s talking. You use a lot of commas.

Um, I think I’m a pretty easy-going person, easy to get along with.

I was born in the Chinese year of the rabbit, and that fits me, because loud noises, sudden noises, and sudden appearances of things startle me.

Your comma usage doesn’t bother me. I can understand most of what you’re saying without having to re-read things. But just beware of commas and long sentences.

I don’t have any content suggestions for this page because you cover a lot of ground. I’ve learned a lot about you, and that’s cool.

—Grammar Nazi — In “Interests,” you only capitalize the titles that are proper nouns (yay?). In “Hobbies,” you don’t capitalize anything (also yay?), but in “Faults” and “Pet Peeves,” you capitalize every title. I don’t understand—consider capitalizing everything or only the titles that are proper nouns.

Fixed! I lowercased headers in Faults and Pet Peeves.

About 3till7.net — This page is informative. I love seeing past layouts. I’m glad that you’re showing off some of yours. Once again, you’ve got all of the bases covered. I can’t think of anything to suggest content wise.

I agree with what you say about having valid code. If one has to choose between validity and accessibility, accessibility is more important. But I don’t quite get the way in which you’ve set that paragraph up. It’s a little misleading. You make it sound as though having valid code is at odds with having colors that contrast sufficiently, relative font sizes…, and proper alt attributes. Most of the time, it isn’t. Valid code goes hand-in-hand with accessibility (most of the time). Running a site through a validator is a fabulous way to check for unclosed tags and all sorts of other little coding errors. Validators are like spell-checkers: they’re not always right; sometimes they suggest wonky things, but it’s good to use them anyway.

I added another sentence to this paragraph to clarify what I meant.

What Are You Here For? — This is great. It’s sweet of you to have RSS feeds for all of your categories.

Photo Gallery — So many pictures! Wow. Everything is well organized too. I love it. I like what you have in your “Best Gallery” best. :) I also think that it would be great if you posted stories along with some of them (i.e. the “Fuck You Matt” cake).

Writing — Your newest writings are from 2005. :( Write more. I hardly read anything here, but I was amused to see a line about cosines in one of your poems (“Fitting In“). All of your essays are at least two years old; some of them are dry school assignments. I don’t like the first two because they’re short, school-like, and random—without the context of a class or more information, they’re just kind of weird. :( But “The History of Santa Claus” and “UK Honors Program Essay #1″ are lovely. On your “Writing” page, less would be more. Think about removing some of the essays, because the dull ones are obscuring the others.

I actually have a couple of haikus I need to publish that I’ve written in the past month. Also, I prefer to keep my old work on there, so long as it’s still good in my opinion, because some folks do read it. I get search hits from people searching for Antigone, Celsus, and other topics mentioned in my essays.

Graphic Design — This page would benefit from explanations. You say and I can tell that some of the images are from past layouts, but with things like orb.jpg—I just have no idea. What was that for? Why did you make it? Also, it’d be nice if the images opened in fitted pop-up windows instead of just opening in blank pages.

Ooh, you’re not going to sell me on pop-ups for any reason because I hate the things. I find it annoying when a site starts opening new windows or changing around the dimensions of my current windows.

Dream Journal — Oh—This is interesting. I’m sad to see that you haven’t added any recently. Have you not been dreaming? You’ve only been having nightmares? :(

—Style Nazi — On your “About Me” page, the spacing between the items that you list as your favorites is a little strange, especially under “Books.” It’s the same on “About 3till7.net” under “Referrers” and on “Links” under “Memberships.”

I looked in Safari but I’m not seeing any weird spacing.

Yours

Geeky Stuff — There’s a lot here. I’m not a programmer, so I’m not going to comment on the content of your articles. Anyway, it’d be helpful if you listed article categories at the top of this page. Doing that would give your visitors a nice overview and keep them from having to scroll to see what you have.

I added a list of in-page links to the sidebar for this section.

Don’t Deal with These Companies — This section is a little unnecessary. If you have blog categories devoted to ranting, consider merging these articles with them because there are only three articles here (two on Fed-Ex & one that you didn’t write)—they’re basically rants.

This is a new section so I’m still waiting for content. I like the idea of it because I haven’t seen such a section on other sites.

Commando Awards — This is a fabulous thing, and I can’t wait for you to begin handing out awards. :)

Free WordPress Themes — How nice of you! These are pretty.

Quotes — There are more than 400 quotes. I’m impressed—How did you compile all of these? How long did it take? The search box is nice. But because you have so many, consider separating your quotes into categories too.

Pfhew, organizing that monster into categories would take a while, but it could be done. If I get an urge to, that’s a good idea. I’ve just collected them over the years by copying down any quote I saw that I liked.

Book Reviews — Nice. I only wish that you had more reviews and extended (longer) versions of the ones that you do have. Make them more like your game reviews.

Junk Drawer — Consider putting things that have more to do with you than your visitors (i.e. blog memes) in “Mine.”

That’s a good suggestion for content organization.

Links — Under “Personal Sites,” Oipom and Harlequin Girl look lonely without descriptions. That’s all.

Blog Entries

You blog often, almost everyday, and about an amazing variety of things (topics range from your daily life to C++). I read all of your entries from the past three months. Out of those, my favorites are My Take in the Jena 6 Fiasco and Squee Over Numerical Methods. I really like those.. Also, on October 12th or 13th or thereabouts, please update us on Ghost Hunting… :)

I’ll definitely have to do that! Speaking of which, I need to email my cousin now and find out the details…

Sarah, you’re a queen of content. You have tons and tons of it. I know that it must be hard to manage that much, but some of your perfectly good sections have grown a little stale (i.e. Writing & Dream Journal). Update them when you can.

Conclusion

2.3 — 3till7.net’s subjective score is 2.3. It’s all good—your site is good. Sarah, your site has so much content—it’s amazing. But watch out for content going stale, watch out for coding errors on your sub pages, and re-consider your use of tables. Also, stay sweet? I don’t know… You just come across as sweet and southern (yay Kentucky!) on 3till7.net.

Aww shucks, I’m jes actin’ like my mama taught me! ;)

I’m surprised at the low score (2.3 out of 5) because I think my site deserves better than a 46%, especially upon seeing that a site using someone else’s layout received a 48%. However, the review itself was one of the best reviews I’ve received because it was so long and in-depth. She pointed out several problems that I fixed upon reading about them, and gave good suggestions. I appreciate that it was as long as it was and the effort that went into looking at 3till7 in detail.