Okay. Today we'll be reviewing
Sacred Grounds. Hold on tight and lets dig in!
Okay. From the outset, I'm going to be completely honest with you. There's nothing really good about this website. I thought for a while about how to present this review without hurting anybody. After a while though, I came to the decision that I would be doing you all a disservice by sugarcoating this article. You're here to learn, and I'm here to teach, and we can't do that if we let our feelings get too involved. So let's get down to business.
ABOVE THE FOLD - 1/5
Well, The good news is that almost everything on the site is “Above The Fold”. The bad news is, there's still too much wasted space. Much too much. For a website this sparse, I shouldn't be seeing a scrollbar with a 900 pixel tall view port. The banner is far too tall, and the padding too large. It just wastes so much space presenting nothing. We'll address both these issues further in to the article.
USE OF COLOUR - 0/5
Nothing really works here. I can't say that the colour choices are bad really. Red and Gold can certainly work in theory. But not like this. The stock coffee bean backing sprinkled around feels like a generic windows 95 wallpaper. I understand it's supposed to be a coffee theme (I think), but it just isn't working.
What we need to do s establish a pallet. You've done the first step, which is picking two primaries. Red will act as our dark base colour, and gold will be our lighter accenting colour. But now we need to tweak those colours, and expand the pallet just a bit.
The red will work as a deep backdrop colour, but the gold is far too dark to act as an accent colour. We'll need to lighten it up just a bit. Try #FFFF66 (R255 G255 B102). A nice yellow that will act as a bright accent. Of course, you may find another colour you prefer. The point is to brighten up that secondary colour!
Now we'll also need to expand the pallet. You have your polarized primary colours. But now what about the more subtle colours in between? What colour will your text backdrop be? Will you use a separate colour for your comic area? You need to block out all your primary regions, and decide what colours each one will use.
I also notice you're writing in gold. This is just wrong. It's been wrong since the end of the nineties, and with any luck, will be wrong for the duration of the Internet. Coloured text is harder to read, becomes an eyesore, and is just generally considered tacky. Header text is acceptable, but colouring all your text? Keep your primary text black (or in some extreme cases, white).
Finally, the backdrop photo. Now, photos can successfully be used as a backdrop. However, not only is this the wrong photo to use, it's a long way from a finished backdrop image. It's loud, distracting, and generally feels unrelated to your comic. Learning how to make a photo blend in to a website subtly is a bit of an art that I can't explain in a paragraph or two. My best advice is to simply not do it right now.
*Note: I'm sure after this is published, I'll get links to a dozen sites that use coloured text. Out of these dozen, Three will use it well. Trust me however, you're not one of those three. Only very experienced designers can pull off coloured text.*
BANNER - 0/5
First of all, this banner is HUGE! The smallest width I could get this down to was 1084 Pixels. Current statistics (
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php) agree that approximately 25% of the Internet using populace run at 1024x768 resolution. While this number fluctuates, and is decreasing rapidly, that's a quarter of the Internet that will see a scrollbar at the bottom of their browser for no reason. The rule of thumb for designers right now is Nothing wider the 900 Pixels. I think 925 to 950 are the most extreme widths I've seen acceptable.
But the real question here should be "What Banner?" Once again, we have the generic coffee beans, with some generic pixel font. It's taking up a HUGE amount of space, and is generally telling me nothing. My advice here is to scrap the whole affair.
Redesign a simple banner or sidesaddle logo at half height, and no more then 900 pixels width. The key words here being redesign. Nothing here works, and that includes the aliased not-quite-papyrus text we have here. Logo design is another topic deserving of it's own article, so I won't attempt to condense years of advice in to a few paragraphs. Just do your research, and ask for tips and opinions from people you know have good design skills.
NAVIGATION & LAYOUT - 1/5
You get a point for a decent theoretical layout. Not much else though. While the three columns with the sidebar blog had potential, It's ruined by 1990s esque table borders, huge padding, and the overall poor design flaws I've mentioned throughout this article. There are so many things wrong with the site that I really can't give you advice on how to fix this, because it depends FAR too heavily on what choices you make in the earlier parts of the article. But the layout has promise. A three column layout could really work.
SOCIAL TOOLS - 0/5
There's not much to say here. You aren't using any social tools that I can find. Take a look at some other reviewed sites to get a good idea on how to approach this.
SECONDARY CONTENT - 0/5
Once again, I'm forced to ask "What Content"? There isn't even a cast page, or any way to contact you. I can't grade what doesn't exist.
TOTAL – 0.5 out of 5
In closing, Here is my advice. It's clear to me you don't understand a great deal about HTML/CSS or PHP coding, or design. As such, take the two colours you've chosen, and scrap everything else. I recommend installing a basic content management system. ComicPress (
http://comicpress.org/) is good because it will do all the designing for you. You can tweak the colours, add a banner, and have a passable site without too much work. It will also automate the comic uploading process, and give you a much better blog interface. I have a suspicion these are both being updated by hand. Then as you learn more (Or hire a designer) you could look at a custom theme, or other less automated content systems.
I really hope that I didn't upset or offend too many people with this article. But consider it an indicator of things to come. The first couple of websites where really fantastic. But it's not all lollipops and gumdrops here. I'm here to tell you the honest truth about your websites, not hold your hands.
NEXT WEEK: We review
Hallow! Keep up the Coding. EXCELSIOR!