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So Devious has 2 Reviews

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1. 

   Sillyish gave it on 9th Jul 2010 and said:

   Layout
   There are some things about this layout that feel a little messy to me. I'm just going to list them off because I'm no good at leading into one thing and reviewing through in paragraphs :-P

   -Bottom part of the page: Various links under various headers. There is a LOT of information here. Organization is key. I think recent comments should have a background, with a dotted line separating each comment, maybe have the comment go dark gray background with light text on hover. Or something. Just a suggestion, but I think it needs work.

   Similarily, archives, tags, links out, buddies - all very close together, I think the list of months would benifit from being blocky and big.

   Tags would benefit from being trimmed down to top 20ish tags. Etc.

   Feedburner rotator
   Looks out of place to me.

   Mixed use of me/us
   "Write for us?"
   "Contact Me?"
   Which is it? Us or Me?
   I think it's important to keep things like this the same - pick one and stick with it.

   "Elsewheres" in sidebar looks weird. Should be "Elsewhere"

   Sidebar popular posts - I thought the smaller text was super small, probably best to just get rid of it and make the post titles more pronounced. They're quite dark and on a dark background - I think brightening up and making them BIGGER would be good.

   General Errors
   -When you click on the content link, the Pink Garden WP theme that comes up is nothing more than a broken image.
   -On page six there are some more broken images.

   "So far, SoDevious is ran by Nicole Dominguez"
   should be
   "So far, SoDevious is run by Nicole Dominguez"

   Content
   I read through a few of your articles and I really feel like you could do a lot more with them. I feel like at the moment, many of them don't add enough value.

   For example, in "Always Offer to Subscribe" You talk a little bit about WHY you want people to have it available, but you don't talk about what RSS is, how to implement it on your site, how to write RSS feed friendly blog entries, different types of RSS feeds you can provide to your users... Right now it just feels like a quick short personal opinion.

   Same with "always comment your code"
   A quick sort-of reason for why, and then some examples of how to comment in some common languages, and that's it.

   Some other things to keep in mind when commenting code:
   -Comments should always say WHY a piece of code is doing something, not WHAT it's doing.
   ie
   x+1 //add one to x <- BAD COMMENT
   x+ 1 //increment memberlist count <-- better comment
   -Comments are important so that if other people are editing your code, they can quickly know where to go to make changes. And understand what's going on.
   -Comments help you understand what you were doing if you come back to old code a few months later.
   ------------------

   Anyway, there you have it. Hopefully some of the things I said are useful :-)

   Using Safari on Mac | Report This?

2. 

   Vera gave it on 20th May 2010 and said:

   I'm a big fan of design/development related sites, most especially when I can read articles which deal with more advanced things than basic HTML. Your site seems to fit the bill, so let's see what it all offers.

   = First Impression =
   ------------------------------
   It almost looks professional, I rather like it... but something seems off about it. Not yet sure what it is exactly.

   = Presentation =
   -------------------------------
   It is clear that your main thought was "let's make this professional"... unfortunately, you believed that this should also include the large advertisements found on such "professional" (or professional oriented) sites. Heck, the first thing my eyes are drawn to is the X people like SoDevious.net box. It is MUCH TOO emphasized. I'd suggest switching the black background for a lighter, less contrasting one.

   Next, I notice the images near the articles... and they are rather nice, and well chosen too. OK, I have to confess, a big part in choosing which article to read on Smashingmagazine is influenced by the image. As far as I'm concerned, that is. So good job on these.

   Looking at your design more attentively, I sort of start to see the problem here.
   First of all: color choice .
   Light gray and purple/lilac go well together, no question. Unfortunately, you don't really combine the two in an efficient way. There is a large-ish stripe of purple used for the header ... and then nothing. Well, ok some of the links have this color too. Speaking of which: why don't all links have the same color? At least those from the main content? Furthermore, your regular text is black, and so are the post titles too... which are supposed to be links. Not only is this bad as far as usability goes, but you're confusing your visitors. If it's a link, then make it LOOK like a link as well.

   Secondly: navigation
   You have two sets of navigations, one more emphasized than the other. Personally, I'd choose invert the degree of importance between the two... actually, I'd make both important. The policy of making the list of categories seem like a main navigation, never really sat right with me. OK, so a lot of tutorial/article oriented sites do it... but that doesn't mean I have to agree with them. The reason is quite simple actually: all posts can be browsed through, if you go through the pagination. Certainly, some people might be more interested in a certain category of posts. This is why category lists are important, BUT since most of the top posts one would see by such a filtering are already on the first page, I find it rather superfluous to put so much emphasis on said classification list. Erm, yes, I'm one of the finalists in webs-longest-run-on-sentence-phrase. :B
   Another thing that irks me here, is the way you chose to minimize the importance of the pages shown in the top navigation. At least bold those links. Oh... you have a plugboard... I thought this site was about teaching people stuff, not waving shiny stuff at visitors. Ah well.

   Third: lack of search form.
   Oh wait you DO have one... only, it looks like two rectangles (misaligned at that) put on top of the sidebar. Since the rest of the sidebar is full of advertisements, I first assumed these were some ads which didn't load properly. Anyway, there's no need to have such a huge input text box. How about having a more reasonably sized one, and place it at the top, right of the design. On the same level as the topmost navigation?

   Fourth: twitter updates.
   In retrospect, this is what annoys me the most. That black box with the blue links just doesn't fit at ALL. Heck that particular shade of blue is not used anywhere. Also get rid of the RSS for the twitter. If twitter users want to follow you, they know your URL, and being on this site, subscribing to the RSS feed of WP is more useful anyway.

   Oh one more thing: on the footer. What is the "more..." heading supposed to be? Affiliates? Recommended sites? What's the difference between that and the blogroll?

   All in all, you make a valiant effort to present a professional site, and for the most part you were quite successful at it. Unfortunately, I'm one of those people who scours such sites every spare minute she has, and thus I spot stuff quite easily. Oh and I'm also very picky but... ahem, moving on.

   = Content =
   ----------------------
   At first, I did mention that I like encountering sites with articles I don't meet on every second teenager-oriented site. Ironically enough I had yet to read anything, but the titles sounded good enough. So I'll just randomly choose some articles and see what they're like.

   Using grids part II - I'm not disappointed in hoping for an interesting article, so good job on this one. You might want to proofread your posts though. Being a grammar, spelling nazi I couldn't help but be bothered by things like:
   "Actionly" instead of "Actually"
   "when we are faced to create a nice web design" instead of "when we are faced with creating a nice web design".

   Also, the suffix and prefix left me a bit confused. Not the idea of why one would use it, but the images used didn't exactly do it justice. I suppose this might be because of the pale color scheme.

   Commenting your code
   Oh this is a promising subject... unfortunately the gist of it seems to be all in introduction. And I don't really like the introduction. Sure it explains things, but the author is trying to cram too much info in too little space. Furthermore, you put way too much emphasis on comments being useful for beginners, this might mislead some people into thinking that they're something to start out with only.
   Secondly, when you're trying to show that a comment spans over multiple lines, the logical thing would be to type the content of said comment on more than one line.

   How to Prioritize your online life
   An interesting article, but once again too little. I do commend you though, for putting more thought into its content.

   Whoa, your bloggercode made me lose focus. I almost forgot I was about to review your site. So back to the task at hand.
   Your contact page is useless the way it is now. Either put up a contact form, or just put the e-mail address somewhere on the sidebar.
   Plugboard: ugh! Why? Whywhywhywhywhy???? I liked this site so much... :( Ah well, at least it's relatively hidden.

   Forum - OH MY GOD! My eyes! Please choose a less seizure inducing color choice. Your main website has such a lovely color choice. What happened to the forum?

   = Coding =
   ---------------------
   Somehow I feel even weird touching upon this issue, given the nature of your site. But eh, being a developer, it's kind of a MUST CHECK for me, whenever I review a site :P

   XHTML transitional doctype? Hm... why not strict? Are you clinging to some links opening in new windows still?
   What's with the huge chunk of HTML commented text at the end of the document? If you;re not using it anymore, get rid of it.
   The link to the forum, is outside the UL tag... actually it's also outside the div containing said UL tag. Either fix the code, or don't make the link part of the list, just float it there inside a span or something.

   On the whole, you also seem to be suffering of a bit of "divitis" (i.e. too many divs for positioning purposes). It's not only divs who can have CSS applied to them and be positioned in a certain way, you know? UL and a tags can have that too.

   Your CSS looks correct and nicely indented. Only thing left, is to use short codes, whenever possible.
   For example instead of
   
padding-left: 1px;
padding-right: 2px;
padding-top: 3px;
padding-bottom: 4px;


   write (in that order):
   
padding: 3px 2px 4px 1px;


   Score: 4/5

   I liked the site a lot, but you still have a few issues here and there. Oh and PLEASE PLEASE fix the color scheme for the forum. It's such an unwelcome contrast compared to the lovely design of the rest of the site.

   UPDATED 20 May 10:
   Ah granted, I didn't look at the link, true. I just assumed that since it was in the twitter box, it'd be the RSS for the Twitter. You already have an RSS icon for your blog, on the sidebar. It's a much larger and more easily spotted icon. Why would you need two links for RSS on the same page?

   I didn't mean that you should get rid of the Twitter updates box. Only that you should change its background and link color, and get rid of the link to the RSS.

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   sodevious's Response:

   Thank you for reviewing my site! I appreciate the time you took in doing so. Although, I do have a question. What did you mean when you wrote this?

   "In retrospect, this is what annoys me the most. That black box with the blue links just doesn't fit at ALL. Heck that particular shade of blue is not used anywhere. Also get rid of the RSS for the twitter. If twitter users want to follow you, they know your URL, and being on this site, subscribing to the RSS feed of WP is more useful anyway."

   The black box isn't for twitter, its for the blog's RSS if you looked more closely. So, that being said, should I still get rid of the box and replace it with an rss icon?

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