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.

First Impressions

I’m greeted with a blurred (or some kind of effect) image of a water lily and a poo brown background image - eww. The colors of the image clash with the background, so your site looks really unprofessional and yucky.

Man, that’s two reviewers so far that have disliked my “poo brown” background color! Everyone’s hatin’ on brown. :( I still really like the burnt orange and browns used in this layout.

Splash Page

No splash page.

Layout

If I’m not mistaken, the blurriness of the header image was intentional. Great job. It looks pretty and unique. The peach content area looks great with the layout, but the icky brown background - not so much. It would have looked much better if you used a salmony-pink color, either slightly brighter or darker than the background color for the content area. Firefox: check. Time to check in Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera.

In IE, your header is kind of screwed. To the right of your layout, there is a small gap. It would be wise to fix this. Your site looks fine in Safari and Opera. Your site looks fine in 800×600 and 1024×768 resolutions.

Content

Mine

Instead of linking to the IMDb pages of your favorite TV shows and movies, why not link to their official sites or fanlistings?

Wow, you are a great photographer. Keep up the good work.

Portfolio is an external link, not reviewing. Writing’s not exactly one of my strong areas, so I won’t be reviewing this either.

Your graphics are really good as well.

I can’t exactly review your dreams and nightmares, so I won’t be reviewing this.

Yours

I’m completely clueless when it comes to Perl, PHP, and the like, so I won’t be reviewing Geeky Stuff.

Don’t Deal with These Companies is unique and helpful. Good job.

Your WordPress themes look great, and so do your avatars.

Is your Quotes page really necessary? To me, it’s just filler content.

Your LiveJournal overrides are very good.

The Junk Drawer just seems like more filler content.

Links

Everything seems fine here, but I’m curious to know why Harlequin Girl and Oipom don’t get captions while the other personal sites do? Keeping with continuity wouldn’t hurt, would it?

Coding

Your main page has 25 XHTML 1.0 Transitional errors. I know that you said that you worry more about accessibility more than validity, but having valid coding will make your site load faster, increase your search engine ranking, and more. But of course, it’s your decision, and you can continue on with the way you’re coding if you choose.

Spelling/Grammar

“author of my favorite book Ender’s Game” should be “author of my favorite book, Ender’s Game”. I didn’t spot anything else.

Summary

Your photography and your graphics are amazing. Keep it up. I know that you can make much better graphics than the header image in your layout, and the brown color was not a good choice with the peach and pink. But overall, I think your site is really good. Keep up the good work.

First Impressions

If I’m completely honest, this layout does nothing for me. The colours are reminiscent of human excrement (from both ends) and that’s putting is nicely. Knowing that you’re capable of a lot more, I’m left wondering why it looks like a web design n00b made this layout. I’m somewhat a little hesitant about saying what I feel I need to say in this review though because I know you’re probably a thousand times better than me at the game of web design, but I shall be honest.

Layout

Aesthetics: Where to start? From the top would probably the best place, I guess. While your navigation menu is easily found, it doesn’t really seem to tie into the layout, especially when I hover. Aside from the bright pink in the middle of the flower on the graphic, I can’t understand why you used that colour for the hover. Inverting the colours (dark text on a light hover) or using the peach of the rest of your layout would look a lot better and tie the navigation back into the layout. Your header graphic looks like it’s simply been run through a few filters in Photoshop and had some text added. It just doesn’t seem like much effort has been put into it and it looks very, for want of a better word, tacky. The footer of your layout needs some sort of separation from the rest of the layout. If you’re not up for changing the background, a simple border-top or <hr> would do the trick. It just seems to run into the rest of the content the way it is now. The overall colour scheme of your layout is weird. I can’t see where you got the purple used in your headings and metadata from, nor can I see the orange for the visited links. The lack of colour co-ordination makes everything look somewhat messy and confusing. I’ll reiterate what I said in my first impressions, this isn’t a visually pleasing layout at all.

Her dislike of my color scheme kind of saddens me, because this has been my favorite layout of mine so far, but then I like browns and pinks. The reason I submitted my site in its current state is because I’m very proud of this layout.

Coding: But here is where you make up for the lack of aesthetics. Your coding is impeccable. It makes me sob with joy. I especially love the fact that you have added hacks to make your website show up correctly in that evil little browser known as Internet Explorer.

Content

You have a ton of it, which is pretty good considering everyone else is about minimalism when it comes to content these days.

Mine

About Sarah - Taking the easy way out tends to pay of sometimes and in your case, it definitely did. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on any important information about you. Good job!

Contact Me - I don’t like how your contact form is pushed over to the right of your layout, but I can understand why it’s like this. If you can think of any way to fix it, that’d be good.

Photo gallery - Do you use a script you wrote yourself for this page? The organisation is simply amazing!

Yours

Geeky stuff - Hello page full of awesome! This is one of the single-most best pages on the internet!

Don’t Deal With These Companies - Another great idea. I might actually submit my rant about Acer Computers Australia when I’m feeling less lazy. Yes, I’m too lazy to open my webmail account right now.

Free WordPress Themes - These are gorgeous, thus reinforcing the fact that I know you can design better layouts than the one you have up at the moment.

I really can’t fault or make separate compliments about the rest of your content. It’s amazing… and there’s a lot of it. Your writing is fantastic and the ideas that come out of your head blow me away!

Summary

I love 3till7.net in a general sense. As I have said many times before, your content is brilliant but your current design drags everything down a few notches. I know a few people who would completely skip over your website based entirely off the way it looks. It’s their loss because they’re missing out on what the rest of your website has to offer, but if everyone decided to skip your website because of your layout, your content ultimately means nothing. I look forward to seeing what you come up with for your next layout!

First Impression

A very eye-pleasing layout, pretty colors, and wonderfully good-sized fonts that I am able to read with ease. However there are some things that struck me odd in your layout and design:

1. I am viewing your website with a 1280 x 800 resolution. At home on my own PC, I viewed your website in an even larger resolution. I tend to resize my browser’s window so I’m able to multi-task on my desktop without having to keep minimizing and restoring the window. Your website is giving me bucket loads of horizontal scrolling when I even minutely resize it. Your background image is 995 pixels in width; This is far too large considering that if I want to ensure that I will enjoy my stay, I’d have to keep my window maximized when viewing your website at all times. My guess for the reason it’s so wide is because of your navigation links, but I’ll discuss this later.
2. You have some lengthy blogs, which is not a bad thing, but when there are seven lengthy blogs on the index page, then we have a problem. It’s quite tedious to keep scrolling; What I would suggest to match your content with the length of your sidebar, is to have two or three entries at the most, displayed on your main page. For example, I happen to be one of those people who likes to see the footer of a web page and I usually scroll with my wheel on my mouse. The length of your index page forced me to click on the scrolling bar and drag it- this is usually a sign to me that the page is too long. Just saying.

Hm. I’ve never seen the number of entries on the index page as a problem unless they ended up being shorter than the sidebar. It wouldn’t be a problem to knock it down, if this is a problem to visitors. I can do that now.

3. The sidebar is quite lengthy as well, and though many of the things I’m going to point out is just purely suggestion, let’s get some things out of the way first. What’s with this twitter nonsense?– there are tons of twitter links everywhere. I visited the twitter website and still failed to understand what this is– as far as I’m concerned, they are external links. I can’t comprehend why your updates is not on your website but on another’s; This doesn’t make sense to me. You’re directing your traffic elsewhere, you want people to stay, not leave. When I clicked on the update links I found myself browsing through the Twitter website a bit, which is not good considering I’ve lost all my focus, concentration, and attention I had drawn to your website. This is now redirected elsewhere.

Twitter is the new cool thing, and I’ve climbed on the bandwagon, too, because it’s fun to update it with what I’m doing (that’s the ‘Twitter’ section of the sidebar) and it works great as a mini-blog for keeping 3till7’s updates (the ‘Updates’ section). It was just easier, when I wanted to implement an updates section of the sidebar, to work with Twitter than something else. I tried looking for a mini-blog plugin for Wordpress and didn’t have any luck. With this one, the updates are only in the sidebar; they’re not regular posts, and they don’t show up in the main blog RSS feed, which is what I wanted. I could get rid of the ‘more?’ links for the two Twitter blogs but I think they should be there for anyone who might be interested in going through a history of 3till7’s updates or what I’ve been into. I could, however, add a “what’s this?” link for those unfamiliar with Twitter.

My suggestion here is when I click on the update itself I visit a page on your website with a list of all the other updates as well. Also for the “Twitter,” section on the sidebar, another suggestion is to remove it altogether.

The section that says “Like the site?” just screams “Shameless Promotion” to me. You already have truckloads of RSS feeds thrown at every corner when you have a quick e-mail subscriber to your website’s feed should I want to subscribe. If I like your website I just bookmark it or subscribe to a feed. While very few people actually add their favorite blogs to StumpleUpon, Technorati, and Del.icio.us, you should remove it from your sidebar, or should you want to, put it on your domain page or elsewhere. I feel this is unnecessary to have in the sidebar.

Maybe people so rarely add sites to Technorati and Del.icio.us because it isn’t made convenient for them. However, I don’t know how often the Technorati and Del.icio.us buttons are used, so they now appear solely on the ‘About 3till7.net’ page (they were there before, but now they’re no longer on the index page, too). However, my top referrer is StumbleUpon. To use StumbleUpon, though, you have to have a browser toolbar plugin, so anyone that StumblesUpon my site will already have that at their hands, so yep, I was able to remove the StumbleUpon button from the index as well.

Which brings to something else… There really are too much RSS feeds, there’s eleven of them on your index page alone. On your sidebar, the Blog, Photos, and Comments RSS are repetitive since they are already mentioned on the footer.

I don’t see a problem with having a lot of RSS options. They’re along the sidebar so they’re easily apparent to visitors; that’s their main location. I repeat them all in the footer as kind of a summary, so that they’re all collected in one place. I don’t think any of the feeds are superfluous because they each have different niches. The main one is the blog feed, but keeping track of what photos I post or what updates I make to 3till7.net could also be of interest to a visitor. I see no reason to obscure them, and I think it makes sense to have an RSS feed for a section linked nearby that section, such as with the ‘Updates’ section of the sidebar.

“Dailies” is also a bit lengthy, containing over twenty six links. While I don’t mind being on this list on your index page, it’s too long and I think you would agree that this would be more fitting in your “About Me” page ;)

I don’t agree in the least about that, actually. Those links don’t describe me, they don’t lead to pages about me, and they don’t lead to photos of me. They lead to blogs that are interesting to me, sure, but everything I have on this site is interesting to me somehow. By your logic, I should have one big page called ‘About Me’ with the entire contents of my site on it. The length of the Dailies list fluctuates as I find new blogs and decide others aren’t interesting to me anymore; I try to keep it updated as I update my RSS reader’s subscriptions. Since the sidebar is still shorter than the main area, which is a pet peeve of mine, I’m fine with the length of the Dailies link section.

Contents of the layout, graphics, and images

While I brushed up on some of the bad quirks in the “First Impression” section, I’ll be focusing on the other aspects of your layout: font choice, color, background color, color contrasts, and visibility.

Layout

I already said this before, but I can’t say enough on how much it delights me that your font is really big. It’s like “in my face,” and almost impossible to not be able to read it. This is wonderful.

Your font colors meet my “half-sufficient” standard according to Juicy Studio’s Color Contrast Analyzer. I also checked your web page on Vischeck and surprisingly, while I expected your layout to lose it’s cheerful and colorful theme, the only thing that changed was your navigation. This will be discussed later on.

While your layout only consists of two primary colors, being the pink links and semi-black text, it doesn’t make the layout boring. Adding additional colors might make the layout look overdone, so this is done quite nicely. You have quite an eye for color and design.

This about all I can say about your layout. Other than the actual size of your background image dominating how I view the website in terms of browser, you’ve done quite a nice job. You know how to make very attractive layouts and yet maintain accessibility.

Navigation and Usability

The only thing I can find myself really complaining about is your navigation. I’m a reasonable person so I try to look at it through your eyes. If I were trying to find a place to put my navigation, there really wouldn’t be any other place to put it than to put it where you have it now. The only problem here is that your navigation consists of too much links when some of the links can easily be taken out and put into other pages. Let’s run through those now before I go on.

Photos, Creative, and Dreams can all be put into your Portfolio as links. Links can go under your About Me page, since they are a list of your favorite websites. Now you go from eleven links in your navigation to seven, which is much better. This way you can definitely lower the width of your background image by a reasonable portion.

I disagree with that. I send my Portfolio section as a link to possible employers; while I don’t mind if they read in my Dreams section, I don’t see it as a section I want to market to them in particular. Photos? Maybe for some people, but not in my line of work: when I interview for a job, it’s always for a web development or programming position; photography is irrelevant. Creative also contains things that are irrelevant, such as poetry I’ve written. If someone’s looking to hire me to redesign a site for them, they don’t give a damn if I can write poetry. I have been working on a new layout, however, that would link to Photos, Creative, and Dreams in one sub-section, because I realize my list of main links is getting unwieldy.

Now back to mentioning the visibility. Since links would be nearly impossible to see with this background, you choose to use images, which is fine. I felt however, that you should of raised up the contrast because without hovering over them, they blend too much into the background. Another problem with the navigation is that with eleven links squeezed in, there is no breathing room between the links. There is very little space and for a moment “Creative” and “Dreams” I misread for “creative dreams” because of the lack of spacing.

Content

-About Me-
A very well constructed page. You’ve provided more than sufficient amount of information on yourself, and it’s very organized. I’m insanely jealous that you get to go target shooting as I’m a fanatic about guns (don’t get freaked out xD).

-What are you here for?-
A very good idea, I don’t think I’ve seen this implemented anywhere else. I think you should refrain from posting a lot of feeds on the main index though as you have already listed them all here.

-Techy-
My boyfriend is a programmer himself and while he doesn’t have time to teach me C++, I was hoping to at least learn a thing or two from your “Techy” section. After all, it does say that you offer tutorials, but the two that you have available for C++ programming seems more aimed towards those who already know the basics of the language. I’m just offering a suggestion as to maybe adding some tutorials for newbies like me? It would be good start for this section. Other than that, this section is very impressive, you sure know a lot about several different languages. I think it’s wonderful you take the time to share it with others, and the quality of the content is unquestionable.

The lack of C++ tutorials is just laziness on my part. I’ve since had to get back into it for some classes of mine, so I’ve had to re-familiarize myself with it, and could now write a few tutorials, I imagine.

This page is quite long though, so anchors, followed by a “Return to Top” after each individual section would do wonders here.

Ah! I see you do reviews, wouldn’t mind you reviewing my website in about two weeks (when I put up my new layout!) ;)

You have a ton of quality content pages, which are clear and concise, and have no spelling or grammatical errors.

-About 3till7.net-

I test it in Firefox, Safari, IE 6, and Opera.

Do you mean “tested”? Have you tested it in IE7? Might want to update that little bit.

No, I said “test” because it’s something I do every time I release a new layout. It’s an ongoing process.

Aha!

This is the current default theme. I wouldn’t suggest using it with a resolution under 1024×768 because there will be a sideways scrollbar.

So you already knew of this problem, why didn’t you try to fix it?

Two reasons: 3.29% of my users have an 800×600 resolution, and while the site isn’t at its prettiest for them, reducing the layout width wasn’t a big priority because the remaining users all used a resolution > 800×600. (Thank you, Google Analytics.) The site still functions for those using an 800×600 resolution, but I no longer design with it in mind. 1024×768 is the base size that I start with for a layout because I know the majority of my visitors use that or larger. As long as I keep the layout usable for those using smaller resolutions, I’m not concerned.

Coding

Your CSS is invalid with four errors. Your XHTML was invalid as well with one errors. You forgot to add an end tag </p>

I processed all your RSS feeds through the Feed Validator (I have a lot of time on my hands don’t I?) and while they were all valid, many of them had some warnings. I personally wouldn’t worry too much about it, they’re just warnings, but if you’re a perfectionist, I’m just letting you know

Punctuation and other little errors

While I was peering through all pages waiting for something to correct, I couldn’t find any! Flawless.

Accessibility, Compatibility, and Section 508 Guidelines

Ah, and we come here at last. I can see some attempts you’ve made in tackling accessibility. You’ve got perfect-sized fonts, a site map, and “Return to Top” as well. To further educate you on the matter, head straight over to diveintoaccessibility.org to read more about it.

I’ve disabled your stylesheet and viewed your web page. While everything was pretty much semantic, the navigation was sort, “I don’t know.. doesn’t quite look right..” sort of deal. It may be those images- be sure to keep in mind how they changed in the visibility check I conducted earlier. Also, while your website is compatible with Firefox and IE7, in Explorer the hover effect on your navigation doesn’t quite apply. The hover itself is displayed when the page first loads, and I have to say I like it this way because the navigation looks more clear and bright and not so much blended into the background.

That’s due to IE’s lack of support for the CSS opacity property, which is how those hovers function. I have I think 60% opacity on the image links initially, then it goes to 100% on hover.

Overall summary of opinion

Whoa.. I’m here already? Well, to conclude this review… whew.. what to say? With the exception of some minor things to improve on, your website is definitely on my list of “top few websites that Trisha visits frequently.” To be on such a list is almost near impossible, so you know you’ve a special website on your hands. I’m very impressed with the effort you put into your website and that’s easily proven with your quality content. Your website has been around for (7?) years I believe, so your experience throughout the years is incredible and I’m sure that if I apply myself to read your “techy” section, I can learn quite a lot of new things. I’d say this more than proves you’ve mastered the basic principles, hands down.

Your layout is very stunning, quite unique, demonstrates your creativity and personality, but that width is very bothersome so keep that in mind for future layouts! You’ve nailed color contrasts, and you obviously know what you’re doing. Good luck with the website. I’m sorry if I provided “few” things to improve on but I see little fault in your website, no matter how much I tried to find it!

An overall useful review, and I definitely appreciate the length and depth of it. I’m making some changes now based on it and a few will come about with my next layout. I definitely recommend getting your site reviewed by her because of the effort she put into the review.

Overall Design

I like the color scheme and the fact that you’ve utilized all of your space. The sidebar is a bit cluttered, but it’s distinguishable from the main text, which is a thing many webmasters fail to accomplish. This site is easy to navigate. The increase/decrease text size links are kind of unnecessary because all browsers have this function. I love the hover effect on the navigation links.

Content

Your “About Me” page is very well-organized, and you’ve just enough pictures. The “Techy” section is very useful, and I’m immediately engrossed in the PHP section. I love the way you’ve colored and numbered the lines of the PHP code in the articles. The “Photos” section is kind of uninteresting to me, because I don’t know you or your friends. The photos under “My Best” could go in the “Creative” section. The “Portfolio” page has got to be my favorite. The thumbnails look great, and I love the bullets. I much enjoy going through the different layouts here. The “Creative” section is well-organized. The “Dreams” area is original and no doubt fun to read through. The “Misc.” section is fun to sift through, and every other page is well-organized. Both previous themes in the “3till7″ section are well-done.

Coding

You only have 1 XHTML error that can be easily fixed. I can’t check your CSS because of this, but I’m sure it’s fine.

Rating

I can tell you’ve made an effort to keep your site clean, organized, and visitor-friendly.

4/5

I though the review was a bit short and not at all in-depth. It’s one of those scratch-the-surface reviews that don’t really tell you anything.

Splash Page

No splash

First Impressions

Blue and white always look nice together, don’t ya think? Whenever I see them I think that I’m looking at a professional, clean cut sort of site. Your banner is very simple… perhaps too simple. Your blog and navigation lay below but nothing here stands out. I’m thinking that perhaps this website is heavily reliant on content rather than design, and I firmly believe in an equal balance. Shall we dance then?

Layout

As I mentioned above, good colour choice but your layout lacks interest. Interest however is not generated with random celebrity blends or dodgy photo manipulations (and I’m glad you don’t think so either). Let’s start with your banner. White text on a blue glass effect button. Nothing here that compliments your website as a personal site. A good and simple idea would be to crop a photograph you’ve taken and put your site name on it, or perhaps an experimental banner with typography. Those are just my suggestions so feel free to use your imagination. There are so many personal blogs out there that whenever I surf them I usually go for the one that catches my eye. Unfortunately it’s hard to judge content at first glance so juicing up your banner would definitely take things up a notch.

Second thing about your layout is that your content does not stand out enough from your navigation. They are both white with black text, and yes they have different font sizes but again nothing too catchy. Try making either your navigation or content a different colour or adding a border might help. I can actually visualize this with a pale blue background for the navigation and the same blue bordering your content.

And whilst on the subject of backgrounds perhaps you could try using another colour from your banner, perhaps a darker blue, as your main background away from the content and navigation. It would make the content spring up from the page and it gives it a professional element which is always attractive.

I’m not sure why you have a ‘Content’ header on your navigation. Surely anyone who is Internet savvy will realize that those little links are the way to explore your site? I think you could safely ditch it.

Your little welcome at the top of the page is very appropriate for anyone who is new to your site. But if I were a recurring visitor (which I have been ever since I decided to review your site) I know I’d rather see your new blog entry rather than scroll through the same welcome message. If you can’t do without it, perhaps you could incorporate it into your banner.
I’m now looking through your navigation and I’m wondering why the search option is so far down. I think it should be under your primary links basically for convenience. No aesthetic crime there.

Your other layout is far more suitable for a blog. It isn’t perfect but there’s a good variation of colours and textures that keeps a visitor keen. I’m not going to comment any further on this layout, as it isn’t the default one on your site.

Your copyright would look nice centered at the bottom like it is on the splatter layout. Again nothing too major.

And would it kill you to make the transition between layout changes a little more presentable than a hyperlink to the moved document in default formatting? I’m not sure how Wordpress works but surely there’s where there’s a will there’s a way.

Content

Right this is the part I’ve wanted to get onto! I read your entry on hypothermia and I have to say I’m impressed by how calm you remained. I would have probably freaked out and lit a forest fire in an attempt to create instant warmth. Perhaps I’ll stick to being an indoors nerd than face the outside world then, eh?

So what about you? We’re the same age and both at university. You’ve done everything I could only ever dream of doing and if you would be so kind, hand me that gun you’re holding in that photo. You also have a hermit crab named Dr. Zoidberg. That’s so insanely cool on so many levels and I don’t say that about everything. I really do like how you’ve also incorporated photographs of yourself and your hobbies rather than the generic MySpace pose style of photo. Yes, I have MySpace poses of myself in my about section so in effect the previous statement is hypocritical, but I have a webcam and I get bored d: You must forgive me.

All in all there’s a good amount of content on you, and I’m starting to shrink back as I start realize your web design skills are infinitely superior to mine. None the less I will continue! I must prevail!

I click on Techy and reach a nice list of websites about programming, coding and all that. Perl scares me also but I would like to learn the basics of it. And there’s a little mistake here under PHP: “PHP is first language…” - I’m sure you can figure out what it is.

Your photo gallery is superbly organized and the slideshow thing is too damn funky. However you may want to note that they come up in pop up windows, just to warn your user. I’m sort of wondering why the friends album is expanded on the primary page when it has its own page with a selection of nicer thumbnails. I’d say minimize it for convenience, and so your other photo albums below will be a wee bit more noticeable.

Nice selection in Writings. I also have a section similar to this on my portfolio site (which is yet to go online) because I love publishing my own essays and such. I always feel obliged to cause they take so much damn effort to write.

I get onto Digital Creations and I have to say I’m always a little amused when I read that someone was made with GIMP. Just put it down to immaturity (: Ok there’s a load of thumbnails that lead to images on new pages. Why did you make these images? When? Did you learn anything? Did you achieve the desired effect? If these pieces are important enough to publish on the Internet, then they certainly merit some explanation.

You dream journal is a fantastic idea. I usually just blog about dreams I find striking, but that’s just my preference. You were Hitler’s 12-year-old astronaut? I absolutely hate you now because this entry made me drop a load of ketchup down my t-shirt as I giggled vacantly at the screen. Damn you!

And now for a quick blow to the stomach. I have been sincerely enjoying your website up till this point. Your Junk Drawer contains a list of forwards and really I don’t think they’re necessary. If you’ve already laughed, sent them on to your friends and continued with your life then why list them here? I resent calling forwards junk. I think of them as being the inbred cousin of Britney Spears. And what’s with the pictures found on the Internet? They’re the retarded sister of the inbred cousin that is forwards. And now you’ve brought them together in holy matrimony on this junk drawer section. So do what any sensible person would do with a junk drawer and sell its content at a car boot sale. Or delete it. Either is good. The blog memes and quizzes is the only thing worth keeping.

Your LJ overrides are nice for anyone who owns an LJ. I personally don’t so I can’t really comment on anything else here. It’d be nice if instead of coming up with the code on first click if perhaps it came up with a page containing a large screenshot and a box with the CSS so your visitor can see what the layout looks like in detail before copying and pasting.

Ah finally, the part about your site. Every time I read your site name I think of the song by Dolly Parton, 9 till 5. I blame my overabundance of gay friends. And now you say you want to host someone? If I hadn’t just applied for hosting elsewhere I would take you up on that offer. But we could always take about that some other time!

Your list of search terms is rather good and I found myself laughing with ‘forcing to wear frilly pants’. I’m so tempted to do a spin-off site that mimics a Nazi approach to forcing people to wear frilly pants. HEIL!

Blog archives, categories, links… nothing unusual here. Carry on.

Having said that you have a link to sites that have reviewed you - why not place a link to your responses in your blog entries at the same time?

And shouldn’t the Perfection link be in the above category?

Summary

Su sitio ha sido un placer de revisar porque usted tiene mucho contenido fantastico. Al mismo tiempo podrias elaborar en algunos lugares para construye algo realmente personal alrededor de su blog. Su diseno deja mucho para desear y yo se que tu prefieres la funcion de un sitio sobre el estilo, pero un disen bueno podria agregar una elegancia necesitada para cumplimentar su sitio.

Pa que tu sepas, espanol era la lengua materna que aprendi. No soy demasiada habil en escritura pero yo ciertamente lo puedo hablar. Espero que esta revision haya sido de algun uso. Buena suerte y diviertete con tu sitio!

NB: Accents etc have been removed from summary by me (Rhiannon) because my computer didn’t display them and the whole thing looked like a pack of squares and web dings. Sorry!

I found it to be a very in-depth and good review. I enjoyed her use of humor and I would definitely recommend this review site to others.

I’m having difficulty starting this review. Most reviews I start off with a quick summary of my first impression of a website — it’s hard to do that when you’ve been visiting a website for years.

Your new layout is not my favourite. I think the swirly zigzag pattern is fab — like a crazy 60s drug session (or so I’m assuming, heh) but the grey just doesn’t do it for me. I think the gradient divider and border could be made to match the header by using a darker version of any of the colours you’ve used. #6F686D is a dark alternative that might be worth trying.

(I’m going to be filling this review with blatant suck-up-y compliments: just thought I’d warn ya.)

Your site is incredibly functional. I noticed a while ago you started using big text which is great for those like me who’re blind as a bat (only minus that cool thing they do where they can ‘hear’ objects — I wish I could do that). Your link colour is fine for me, but the Juicy Studio Colour Contrast Analyser says there’s not enough contrast. It’s a groovy tool to play with. Your main navigation was immediately obvious and you even have a breadcrumb trail.

The content of 3till7 has got to be the main reason I come back — geeky entries and handy stuff about Ubuntu that has saved my ass on more than one occasion. When I did my first PHP project for my college work experience, it was one of your PHP articles that got me on track. Look at me now, eh.. says it all about the obvious quality of your tutorials I think.

The About Me page was a good combination of information and pictures keeping me entertained both mentally and visually. Always good to see a Terry Pratchett Discworld novel in a person’s favourites list, although Reaper Man is not my ultimate favourite (Monstrous Regiment is a great one — read that if you haven’t already). Good to know I’m not the only person that gets so deep into coding that the world could fall apart around us and we wouldn’t notice.

Your Image Generation in PHP tutorial is a handy dandy piece of knowledge to have, I wish I’d seen it months ago when I was fiddling with captchas. I hope your demo version for the PHP and Forms tutorial has validation of the input — you don’t want people inserting nasties in there. Regarding the line Hell, I don’t even have maxlength in any of the input fields!: I’d actually recommend leaving out maxlength. It’s the kind of thing that makes people think they’re secure but is so easy to get ’round. Check the length of fields server-side with other validation (e.g. if (strlen($input) > 15) { echo "error"; }) although I’m sure I’m trying to teach my Grandma how to suck eggs here.

Had a giggle at your Clichés of a Crappy Site article. Having recently seen people apply to The Quilting Bee using pixel/bitmap fonts on their entire site, I think I should start pointing people here. The point about sites working in all browsers is a current irritation with me. I’m seeing more and more websites that say “Best viewed in Firefox” where the webmasters don’t SEE the issue, and don’t see how this is identical to creating an IE only layout. I swear, we’re going backwards not forwards in the fight for compatibility (I wrote compatility first: really shouldn’t drink and review).

I have to say I love the way your site is organised for maximum click-through effect. Articles in your weblog being linked from your Writings page, archived, archived by category and listed under Possibly Related Posts — it’s like a massive interlinking orgy! Great SEO technique which I’m led to believe helps your rank in key search engines such as Google (though I’d mention that in case you didn’t know already).

Code-wise I expected your pages to validate — I know, I know, it’s rather presumptuous of me to expect your pages to validate perfectly simply because you’re a fellow geek, but there we go. Despite a few errors thrown up by the validator, I have found your website works impeccably in all of my browsers which is the most important thing. Nonetheless errors such as missing “/” in image tags (entry: photos of Todd and I) and unnecessary </p> tags (links page) are so easy to fix even if just for bragging rights.

I really don’t want to summarise this review already. I feel like I’ve added very little of any benefit and I’m kissing some major ass. If I’d waited about 15 months for a review I’d expect more than this.. but what can I say? I’m losing my touch, obviously. Anyway: your site is all things geeky. It’s accessible, usable, bold, beautiful, interesting and geeky — everything anyone with sense looks for in a website. Good work Sarah.