Review
From Ohlovely.org
1. Splash Page:
None, woo hoo.
2. First Impressions:
There's lots of pink, or lavendar or puce or whatever you call that colour, but its not too bad and not too bright. The image is both complicated and scary but it's certainly attention grabbing! The blog looks good and interesting although the small squishy font makes for hard reading. Big big blocks of black small text are often hard on the eyes for viewers so I would recommend enlargening your font and maybe even changing it to a charcoal colour. Its frustrating that in my 1248x1024 resolution your layout only takes up half the width of the screen. This probably doesn't help the font from appearing too small I think.
3. Coding:
Coding, never my strong point and therefore something I'm not going to heavily criticise others for. However, somewhere down the track if you could work out a way of getting past absolute positioned div layers then I think you could find your site a little better. I think there's a tutorial on this here.
4. Layout:
I've already made my comments on the size of the layout and the font, but one thing is that the header image is kind of strange and scary. It might pay off to have an explanation of this on the sidebar somewhere to explain the reasoning behind showing the breasts of toy dolls in a layout. This is just a personal thing, but sometimes giving a little extra information can help the viewer feel more at ease when they don't understand something on the site. The separations between the blog entries could be more emphasised because the headers of the subsequent entries do not appear to be substantially emphasised in any way, and the entries themselves are relatively close together (adding to the large blocks of text feel).
5. Content:
The blog is interesting and informative and luckily easy to read. Whilst you write a lot in your entries, I don't mind so much about reading it all when it appears to be so interesting. The side bar is less of a side bar and more of a navigation system which is fine, but can lead to more clicking involved before a viewer can just find out something simple like your age.
1 - About Me
Having more links here for the subpages is fine although more information on the links is always encouragable. Within the subpages, it's nice to see that you'll show pictures of yourself, although its a shame that the 'about stepherz' section is so terribly hard to read. Paragraphs girl! Other than those sorts of things to work out the information given here is relatively usual but still worth including. More explanation would be recommended though because I don't really understand the 5 senses page and the 7 deadly sins page and their value to your website too much. With all these subpages it never hurts to have some 'back' link at the bottom of the page. The statements is another page which is seemingly pointless. Why list things you haven't done? Maybe just list random facts if you like, but otherwise this doesn't appear to tell us too much about who you are.
2 - For You
I love love love the fact that this page is not over run by disclaimers, rules and plagiarism! With some of the graphics you offer you do say that credit would be nice but you don't make it easy for the viewer to figure out how to give credit. Sometimes just a link to a 'link me' page will suffice and ensure that you are duly credited. Other than that though, it's refreshingly nice to see some real original offerings here. Redistribution of other people's fonts is something that some might get a little grumpy about but what I would recommend doing is simply providing a link to the resources from which you obtained these fonts and continuing with your statement that these were not made by you. Seriously, I'm loving your honesty in this section!!!! The only issue is with the wallpapers where it might be nice to say where you got the images used from, although I'm not at the credits section yet so maybe I'm speaking too soon! The reads are a little unoriginal in that I doubt you wrote these. Your writing on self injury however is beautiful and well thought out as well as providing insight and information for your readers. I applaud you for being brave enough to publish such personal views. I'm also thinking that some of these 'how tos' are a joke? You might want to make that more clear because not everyone can keep up with your sense of humour. The spiritual section is original in the idea although I'm not entirely certain the content within this section is actually 100% your own.
3 - Tutorials
These tutorials are not particularly complex or original but at least you have taken the time to provide such information. I find tutorials such as the grunge picture frame tutorial a little bit wasteful as it doesn't really involve anything particularly innovative. You might want to go through these tutorials and work out which ones are especially original or innovative to help designers create something original or do something original with their websites instead of just showing them where a pre-installed function in PSP lies.
4 - Comics
I don't think that I can say that I've ever come across another site with a home-made comics section! The content of these comics is a little odd and I can't say that I can appreciate your sense of humour. Some of the jokes might come across a little offensive to the more conservative viewer (like myself) so maybe a little note about that would be beneficial. The story lines of these aren't exactly my cuppa either but I guess that's just me.
5 - Cam
This is a pretty basic site, providing the viewer with a direct link to your cam photo. There's not really much more I can say about this page.
6 - Ask Me
Again, a pretty basic ask me page with nothing of value for me to comment on here I guess.
7 - Links and Domain
It strikes me as odd that this page is so far down the list. The 'about stepherz.org' page is more like a web history page. I was looking for the basics of when you got hosted and who by and why the name and that sort of thing. I think this is a good example of where providing a little bit of explanation next to the various links would aid the viewer. Having the affiliates in the sidebar and on their own page is a little bit of overkill maybe? Maybe instead use this page to describe what you look for in an affiliate and that sort of thing. I have no idea what a blog crew is and the images are broken so this doesn't help either. Again, explanation please? The hostees link is a 404 error. Its strange how in some parts (like with affiliates) you have a form and in the hosting part you have a link to email you. I'm not sure why there is the absence of consistency. The 'link me' page is so far down the list that it would be so hard for the viewer to easily find out how to give you credit for the offerings in the 'for you' section. Some buttons are in the reviews section including pending reviews except not mine! Weird! There's another broken image here. I love seeing past layouts pages on websites but its always nice to know things like if you really liked a particular layout or not or how long it stayed up for or that sort of thing. Maybe you could add that kind of description to these images?
6. Conclusion:
There is all the basics here to provide for a great, creative and original website. There is just SO MUCH content that I think that you have run out of the time to really carefully think about what you are putting up and why and that's probably why you have ended up forgetting some explanations for the reader. The absence of any credits page is always a worry considering EVERYONE received help or assistance from somewhere!! The layout itself isn't my cup of tea, but its not always about creating the most mainstream layout out there and you've obviously avoided doing just that. Just remember that you don't have to be the same as everyone else to be aesthetically pleasing!