I switched to strictly Sprint a little after the new inspi(red) phone came out because I wanted it. I was previously with strictly Nextel, who gave us some problems, but other than that it was all good.

Recently within the past few months, I’ve had to personally call them a few times because my dad wasn’t around or he didn’t feel like calling him (my phone is a ‘business’ phone under his name). To ask ANY question, I had to give them my dad’s password to the account and the last four digits of his social security. So I did, and it was OKAY. It wasn’t great service but it was alright.

I was recently part of a phone scam happening in Florida. I called Sprint and gave them the password and social security number and they gave me an awful time. I just needed to ask a question - Do you know what these incoming numbers are? I spent twenty minutes trying to dig up my dad’s social security so I finally told the guy I would call back.

I called back and they wouldn’t take the social security, but finally did the second time (I read the number wrong). So I was pretty upset by this point - I just had to ask a question NOT pertaining to the account! They were of no help.

I hung up and called back again, getting an Alfonso this time. I gave him the password and social security. His response? “I’m sorry, ma’am, the password and social security number you have given me don’t match the account.” WTF I JUST GOT IN WITH IT TEN MINUTES AGO!

I called my dad in tears and told him I couldn’t get into the account TO ASK A QUESTION ABOUT A POSSIBLE PHONE SCAM I WAS A VICTIM OF. My dad told me “Oh, I can never get into my account. They do that to me all the time.”

Don’t deal with Sprint—They obviously don’t care enough about their customers to even want to hear about a phone scam.

Ok, so today, I was supposed to take the bus to go home. I go to the stop at 8:50, the bus was to leave at 9:05am. By 9:30am, the bus still had not shown up. I call the bus company, and the woman is soo rude.

All I wanted was to ask her who I could speak with about the issue, this was the station in my home town, but they all use the same buses, even though there is a transfer. “Oh, I can’t help you,” she says. “You can’t tell me what number to call?” I ask. “No, that’s the bus for Ithaca,” she says. “But, they are all Shortline,” I point out. “Sorry, but we don’t do things that way,” she interrupts, “I only speak to people from Middletown.” She blabs on and on, and I’m trying to say that that is a waste of time to make 3 phone calls when you can easily make 1.

Anyway, she hangs up on me after I tell her to give me a number of someone who would know anything because she obviously didn’t. I am then forced to speak with 5 more (rude) people before I can finally talk to dispatch and they say, “I’m sorry, but due to ’special circumstances’ you have to make your own way down to the Ithaca Bus Terminal.”

… Ok, but the bus is supposed to leave that terminal in -5 minutes (if it hasn’t left already) and it takes what 20 minutes to get there. HOW am I supposed to get there? “I’m sorry,” and she hangs up.

I finally give up and go home, call the Ithaca Bus Terminal and they finally tell me that the bus broke down and I can take the next one, but of course she interrupts me while doing so.

My word of advice for today: Don’t use Coach Usa/Shortline buses. Their employees are rude and inconsiderate.

The layout is fairly simple but with pleasant, soothing colors; I definitely like the color scheme. I enjoy seeing more graphics in a layout, or at least more complicated graphics, so I would appreciate it more if your header graphic was more complex. There are a few little details I’m picking up on that I think could be improved:

• The purple bar that fades at either end beneath your header ‘Blog’ is very pretty. I think this should be replicated beneath other headers, such as your entry titles where you have a bar the same color, but which doesn’t fade out. Having such a similar-looking bar under the other headers makes me think, “Oh, it’s that purple fade thing again. Oh no wait, it’s not, it just looks really darn close,”–it introduces some confusion to the eye. Since your other headers are left aligned, you might experiment with having the fade occur only on the right side. I think this would help with consistency and the fade effect just looks nice.
• The flower in the header has kind of a pixelly edge to it, as if it’s a transparent GIF with some issues or like it was cut out of a full photo but some jaggies were left. I see it’s a transparent PNG, though you could just as easily have placed it on a segment of the header background and made it opaque. Then, you could have slightly blurred the edges of the flower to have it blend in better with the background and not show those jaggies. I also have a concern that your transparent PNG won’t work properly in IE; I’ve had that problem before where, instead of transparent regions, I would see a solid, and seemingly arbitrary, color.
• Looking closely at the gradient body background, I notice little horizontal lines running through it. That happens for me when I choose too narrow a sample as the background. You might widen your bg.jpg image so that those horizontal marks disappear. It could also be that the original gradient wasn’t that smooth, but I doubt that.
• I think it’s a source of confusion that your link hovers have dotted underlines, just like acronyms and abbreviations usually have, when they’re not acronyms or abbreviations. I would go with a solid underline on regular-word links.

If a site has an overall pleasing layout and structure, then I think focusing on the little details is an important next step. I tend to react better to a site if I can tell the owner has put in a lot of work. One thing that shows that, as well as indicating that you care about the entire visitor experience, is prettying up little parts. One thing you could do, for example, is have an image instead of the default bullets. You could maybe use some green from the flower’s leaf. Even if it’s just a solid-colored circle, by using an image you can make it rounder than the default round bullets (at least in Firefox), and it would also tie in nicely with your layout. Another thing, and this would also be useful because it might be less confusing, would be to have form buttons look like buttons. I never like it when I see buttons styled with a solid border because then they look just as flat as an input field, and this doesn’t lend itself to looking clickable. A way I get around this when I’m styling my input elements is to just do border-width: 1px; border-color: #c0c0c0;, something like that. I completely skip over the border-style property, so that each element retains its default.

Now for some content! In your Scripts section, I don’t any kind of licenses for either of the scripts. I would suggest making note of the license you either applied yourself or the project inherited from its previous author. In your About Amelie section, you say that you play flute up to “Grade 5 standard,” but I have no idea what this means. You don’t need to go so far as to explain it on your page, but you might link to a Wikipedia article about it with the words “Grade 5 standard” so that unfamiliar visitors can find out easily. In your “A load of things you never knew you wanted to know” (haha, that’s a fun title) section, I think your content could benefit from being in a padded list. Having it just in paragraphs separated by br tags means you can’t easily adjust the spacing between entries. You could adjust line-height for those paragraphs, but then everything would be spaced out, and it wouldn’t clearly delineate which item was which. Having a padding-bottom of even 5px would help readability here.

I don’t understand the need for a link to your FAQ on both the main navigation bar and in your About section. I find that to be a little confusing, actually, because I thought they would be two different sections. I would choose one location or the other to hold the link to it. Something that might be more annoying than helpful is your ‘Oops’ reset button in the contact form. I find myself hitting reset buttons sometimes instead of submit buttons and getting all annoyed that my form was just wiped out. This is especially possible when you do what everyone else does and put the reset button right next to the submit button. This problem is aggravated when some developers put the submit button on the left and others put it on the right. I personally don’t see the need for a reset button; if I change my mind about sending the form, I just don’t hit any button, or I leave the page. Easy. I would suggest removing the reset button entirely or, if you must keep it, making the submit button stand out a bit more. Give it a different background color, bold text, something.

Also in your Contact Me section, I don’t think the bullets next to the icons for how to contact you are necessary. You’ve already got the little icons to delineate each method of contact, so the bullets are just extra fluff. They’re not even pretty extra fluff, since they’re the default I’ll-pretend-I’m-a-circle Firefox bullets for me.

Overall, I think it’s a good site; there’s really not much to complain about. :) I just think there are some details that you could work on that would make your site more polished.

I really like this layout. I don’t give a darn about planes, but that’s still a pretty, sleek image you’ve got as your header. I think it’s a nice touch that you have your site’s name along the body of the plane and your site’s initials on the… back… thingy (besides not caring about planes, I also know jack about them!). The colors are pretty, the sunshine-y bars behind the plane add a Web 2.0 feel to it, and I love how the header isn’t confined to a box shape, but instead sticks outside of the rectangular background.

My only real problem with the layout is that I think more colors could be involved. For example, instead of using more shades of blue in the sunshine rays behind the plane, you might have used a pretty yellow. The text on your plane might have been in a different color as well. You could then pick up on those colors by using them as header colors or with your links. It wouldn’t be difficult to incorporate a variety of colors, or at least two additional ones (the sunshine and the plane text), and I think it would really spice up the layout. It would help to add interest and make the overall look of the place brighter and, I think, friendlier. It’s not a particularly cold layout, especially with the hints of sunshine, but having warm colors as well as all the cool blues would be nice.

I think the order of your main navigation could be improved. Specifically, I don’t understand why you have the ‘Versteckt Sein’ link above ‘Digital Stuff.’ I personally don’t find information about the site I’m visiting to ever be more interesting than photos and art the designer has made, and I think most visitors would agree with me. If the order is for your own sake, do you really find reading about your own domain to be more enjoyable than looking at pretty photos and digital art? Also, your ‘Digital Stuff’ section looks to be a portfolio, and portfolios are meant to be viewed. You want people to see them, admire them, and possibly consider you for a job. I think moving the ‘Digital Stuff’ link up to be the second link in the main navigation would make more sense than what you have now.

In your ‘The Nerd’ section, I like how you intersperse photographs of yourself and things relevant to you with your biography. It’s nice that they alternate sides, too. With your ‘Randomocity’ section, I think there should be more padding between bullets. Right now, they all kind of run together, and it just looks daunting to read through all of them. It’s kind of like when you see paragraph after paragraph on an ‘about me’ page with nothing to break up the flow of things and add interest. Your photos take care of that with your bio, but something needs to be done in this ‘Randomocity’ area. Adding maybe 5-7 pixels of padding below each list item in that list would help. It would also be nice if you had little icons incorporated that associate with the bullet, one every few bullets or so. That would help to draw the visitor’s eye and might encourage them to read more of your bullets than they would have had there not been any images (as is the case now), since images will catch their eye. If you had a little photo of an alarm clock (try searching stock photography sites or Flickr for Creative Commons-licensed photos that you can use) in the bullet starting with “I hate alarm clocks,” for example, a visitor might see the photo and think, “Hmm, what does she have to say about clocks,” and then read your bullet.

I like that you have photos of your room in your ‘The Nerd’ section. That’s something I don’t think I’ve seen before on personal sites, and it’s interesting to read the little notes you have about various items in your room. For convenience to your users, you might incorporate information such as your email address elsewhere in your site, or at least on that page. At the moment, having to scroll through your entire ‘about me’ page to find out how to contact you is annoying, especially since I haven’t seen an email link elsewhere in the site. You could link the word ‘Melissa’ in the first paragraph of your bio to your email address, for example, and it’d be fine. If you’re worried about spam, you could try one of the various mailto encoders to encode some or all of your email address in the hex values for each letter. The browser interprets it and it shows up just fine to your users. You can also require Javascript to print out your email address, though that would exclude those without Javascript enabled.

It’s a little startling when I go to your ‘Digital Stuff’ section and the layout changes. I like the layout, but the sudden change from the blue plane layout is still a surprise. I dislike that you have a link to the same page I’m already on for ‘Web design’ because that section isn’t up yet. Make a note of it in your introductory paragraph, maybe, but I see no sense in making a self-link to a nonexistent section. I think the links to different sections (’Photos’, ‘Graphics’) would look better laid out horizontally (in an inline list) as opposed to their current vertical orientation. That would also help shrink the height of the main page so that, at my 1024×768 resolution, there might not be a scrollbar, or at least a small one. You might also shrink your ‘Recent posts’ list such that the page doesn’t require a scrollbar at a 1024×768 resolution. I think aiming for a one-page homepage for this gallery would be good because it would make the page look more cohesive and clean.

I don’t understand the need for a thick black bar underneath the comment form area on individual post pages. It just looks chunky and unnecessary. While I like the gradient box around the comment form, I dislike it around the actual post. It seems distracting, taking my attention away from the content of the post, because the gray top of the gradient doesn’t match the black page background. You might also conserve vertical space by placing your post data (date, category) horizontally; I think that would look cleaner. Perhaps it would also help if that text were smaller and aligned right or center.

I also don’t understand why the submit button of your form says ‘Abschicken’–the rest of the site that I’ve seen has been in English, so why is this one piece of text in German? When I click on one of your sections, like Graphics, I scroll through a page of images and then see a link stating ‘Previous’, but pointing to the right, as if indicating the next section. The text itself is also confusing, since it takes me to the next page of graphics, and not to the previous page I was on. I think it would make more sense if it said ‘Older entries’ or ‘Next page’, instead of the misleading ‘Previous.’

If I’m going to start doing this reviewing thing again, who says I have to start at the bottom? Jemjabella is a lovely site, but I want to show that even great sites have flaws for some visitors, not in small part due to the differences between the site designer and her audience. What makes sense to the designer can be confusing for her visitors because they think differently, the visitors don’t understand the designer’s big idea, or because they don’t have a full understanding of how the site fits together.

The first thing that pops out at me with the site is the header, which is logical because you want to introduce your site to your audience before anything else. However, the header statement, “Ultimately better than you,” doesn’t leave me as a visitor feeling very welcome or appreciated. Catty humor can serve a purpose later on in your site when your visitors already feel comfortable there. If you insert it in the middle of your ‘about me’ page, for example, then the user will most likely come across it after having read a few paragraphs about you. They’ve begun to get a feel for you, and hopefully if you’re the type to use such humor in the first place, they’ve picked up that you have a sense of humor and that you’re not just a bitch. Having a message like that as the headline for your whole site doesn’t sit well with me. It puts me off a bit, and I have to think others will feel the same way.

The look of the header text also seems incongruous with the rest of the design, which is smooth. The header text seems almost as if it’s aliased, particularly the smaller ‘Ultimately better than you’ message. There’s a mixture of serif and sans-serif fonts throughout the headers on the site, but I notice the headers closest in size with that of the logo text are those of your entry titles. The entry titles are in a sans-serif while the logo uses a serif font, then for the smaller sidebar headers you use serif again. Using a sans-serif font in the logo would have made it look smoother if only because all the little serifs wouldn’t be there looking slightly aliased as well. To add interest to the logo, you might also have made the ‘Ultimately…’ message sans-serif, since it’s the smaller text, and the site title serif, since it’s the larger of the two. This would also have helped with the aliased look since it’s the smaller text in the logo that looks the worst in that respect.

The gradient in the top-most red part of your design is nice and adds some depth to the area. I think you could have successfully pulled off similar gradients elsewhere in the design. The logo, at least the ‘Jemjabella’ part, would benefit the most from a gradient. Its current green to a lighter green, vertically, would look nice because it would complement the same green-to-light-green gradient at the start of the content section.

Your divider image is cute and fits in nicely with the sarcastic humor displayed in your logo by saying ‘Divider’, but I think the text is too small. I think you could keep it that small if you changed it to a sans-serif font.

The link hovers in the main column are nice and sufficiently different from the unvisited and visited link colors. However, in the sidebar, the hover color doesn’t stand out as much. I notice the text color in your main column is slightly darker than that in your sidebar, and I think if you carried that through with your link colors as well, the sidebar link hover color would contrast sufficiently. The lack of contrast is especially noticeable in hovering on the green links in the sidebar.

In your ‘Articles’ section, I find it counterintuitive to have the field label ‘Topic Suggestion’ to the right of the input field. It’s as if you’re asking the visitor to enter some data, and then find out what they were to have entered. Upon seeing it, I wondered if it might be a link to something related to the field that just happened to be a different color. Also in this section, on its index, I think it’s unnecessary to list the articles again in the sidebar when they’re available in the main column. Having such links show up when on an article’s page would make sense and be a convenience to the user; as it is now, I think it’s just a source of confusion.

I can understand having a monospace font within form fields so that a user can more easily tell what has been entered, but I don’t think it’s necessary for buttons, since the user can’t enter any data into them. I think to go along with the rest of your layout, you should change buttons and select fields as well, if you have any, to the regular sans-serif font you’re using elsewhere.

I can’t say much about the rest of your content because I think it’s done well. :)

About twenty minutes ago, I heard what I thought was just another person leaving or coming into the building. Apparently, it wasn’t, it was the jackass who works for FedEx slamming his shoulder into the outer door (which requires a combination) or something. I checked outside a minute later, out of hope or paranoia, and there was a ‘We tried to deliver your package but fucked up hopelessly because no one has explained to us what a knock is’ sticker on the door. I tried calling FedEx and, while it did make me feel better to bitch the guy out for my having waited around all afternoon when his guy can’t even knock on a door, FedEx was overall pretty useless. He said the guy hadn’t even scanned the tracking number yet, but there was a handwritten one on the delivery slip so I read that off to him. I wanted to arrange a pick-up because they’re obviously incompetent, but that wasn’t even possible because the package isn’t going back to the storage facility tonight. I guess Todd’s Macbook is just going to hang out on some truck because some idiot can’t do his job.

The guy on the phone said I could sign the slip and have the package left outside the building. Bull shit! I explained that it’s a laptop, and there’s no way I’m leaving it on an unsheltered porch where anyone could steal it, it could be rained on, some jerk could kick it out of the way of the door, etc. It’s also very clear in the little agreement clause under the signature line that FedEx assumes no responsibility for the package should it be damaged, lost, or stolen. The guy advised me that it would be pretty much luck if I caught the guy tomorrow, but that they generally take the same routes. I guess tomorrow after I get out of Engineering Day (Jess and I are helping out), I’ll come over and wait around again. This time, I think I’ll bring a book and sit outside so the dumb shit doesn’t run off again. Todd told me I shouldn’t be so upset about it but it just bugs me. I wait around doing nothing for a few hours and then I have to either do it all over again or have the Macbook left on the porch. At least I can hope the guy gets fired for not doing his job, but I doubt it.