Windymill

Windymill

****- (Rated by 4 people, viewed by 197 people)

The schmiski sauce blog of Jenny Aster. Plenty of stuff upcoming. Ron.Blog, web-design blog. Jenuine, beauty blog. WordPress themes. Whatnot.

Added by accentedneo in Personal

Windymill has 4 Reviews

Below are the reviews left by other members on Windymill. Jump to review form?

  1. zaizai gave it ****- on 18th May 2011 and said:

    Hi! I'm Zainab and I'll be reviewing your site :)

    First impression: love the layout. It's simple, clean, minimalistic and the coloured navigation adds intrigue. Intrigue.. I like that word :P Your blog entries are also really funny and interesting and believe me I can really relate with the GCSE stresses you're going through at the moment! I'm sure you'll do well because you have a nice writing style too. I also really like the effect you have on the headings with the wrapped around green background,

    One problem is your photography page. The photos are way too big and spill out of the white box you've got. You can't see the whole image on the screen at a time. I'd recommend implementing thumbnails or a Lightbox would look cool as these photos form a big part of your site.

    That's all! Good luck :)

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  2. [img: avatar]
    Sillyish gave it ****- on 27th Dec 2010 and said:

    Review introductions are always awkward :-P So... Hi! Let's get started.
    -----------------
    LAYOUT
    My first impression of your layout is that it is too busy and confusing. When I sit and carefully study it, I like the idea you had behind it, but at first glance for a brand new user, it's kind of a shock and kind of a hazy feeling of, "okay, where do I click, what do I do, what is this site?"

    There's no "wow" or "cool" or "okay, I know exactly what's going on and this looks neat."

    Here are some more specific notes:
    -The top right navigation: GREAT spot for a navigation, love the IDEA behind it with the title and a short description underneath in a blocky style. BUT. I can see that the background image has been faded out to accommodate this navigation, but it doesn't line up very well and looks weird Here is a screenshot with red lines showing what I mean.
    -The title in the top left has a similar affliction where there is text, and then this black illustrated line that cuts off in order to show the text. To me, the way this line cuts off looks very forced.
    -The fonts chosen for the title, as well as the black line I already talked about, feel likey don't really fit in too well with the rest of the floral-y, lace-y feel of the site.
    -The lacy bottom looks cool, I like this a lot. HOWEVER, I would have never noticed it if I wasn't carefully studying the layout, and I think that part of the problem is that the body's background is white afterwards, and the lace is also white. More contrast could probably work to your advantage.

    Here are some things I would consider for improvements:
    -Make a choice between bold, thick lines and floral. Don't use both. I would either change this design to keep that bold thick line (although mainly slightly edited) and use striking solid colours instead of the lace-and-floral background. OR, I would change up the title font (something more serif-y and pretty), remove the black line around it, and KEEP the floral-and-lace background.
    -----------------------------
    Other layout thoughts that don't fit in with what I was talking about:
    -The italics.... I think italics work well for this layout, but I think your use of it is a bit overkill. I would suggest getting RID of the italics for the main descriptions in the bottom boxes.
    -The orange mouseover..... doesn't really feel like it fits with the colourscheme
    -The bottom 'about' ... 'jenny aster' .... 'friends' feels quite washed out. I would get rid of the numbers, change the titles to black, and move the description text higher up, because right now there's a lot of space between the titles and the text underneath them.
    -The colour of the 'about each of my friends/friending with windymill' feels out of place.. I would have it simply match the rest of the links.
    -----------------------------------------------
    Layout beyond the splash page
    The design of the blog takes away a lot of what I was harping on about, although I still feel that a better font for the title and that weird navigation spacing thing could stand to be fixed :-) Otherwise, I think this looks much cleaner. Still, the white after the lace feels odd to me. Maybe a pale purple? a light light light green? I'm not sure what WOULD work here, but white feels wrong.

    Other things about the blog design:
    -The comment link in the top right feels very blocky compared to the feathery look of the layout. I think a classic "leave a comment?" at the bottom of the entry would probably be more suitable here.
    -The bar separating the title from the entry feels odd as well. You JUST had a lace separator, now ANOTHER separator? The format of the title (green text with light gray description) is different enough from the entry itself that no bar is needed. People will KNOW where the entry begins.
    -The entry text is nice and readable, but I think you're line height is a bit too much. I rarely say this, usually I'm telling people that the text is TOO close together, but in your case I feel it is a TAD too far apart. Just a tad.
    -This needs more space, way too squishy: screenshot.
    -This makes me feel like I'm stuck in 1997. And also totally doesn't go with the rest of the design: screenshot
    -The comment section again feels quite blocky, and because there is a border around the speech bubble, the little "arrow" going into the bubble looks off because it doesn't match the border colour. Getting rid of the border or making it match the background colour would probably help.
    -The form is... ahh. No border, no background colour, no sign of WHERE the input fields are, you just have to guess.. And then the submit button, just a small grey box with no padding or anything... this needs some serious styling, and I have JUST the tutorial for you :P here is a tutorial on creating highly sexy forms. Self promotion ftw.
    ------------
    I like the photography/design link boxes under portfolio. Very nice.
    ------------

    CONTENT. FINALLY.
    Welp, I guess you won't be reading this until sometime after the 4th, if your latest blog entry is correct :P

    Your blog seems fine, so no feedback there.
    The portfolio design link is broken; I'm assuming you know this...
    The photography link...
    Well, your photos look nice for sure. However, the thumbnails took AGES to load, which means you probably didn't create small thumbnails, so I'd suggest that for sure. Also, when I move my mouse over the thumbnails, a slightly larger version is supposed to pop up, but instead I get a broken image version. So that's no good! Definitely some fixing needs to be made here...
    The about page stuff all looks thorough and would not leave me looking for more, which is good! The contact form suffers from the same issues as the comment form however, which I won't re-hash...

    My overall content comment
    I feel like your site's main draw will come from 01. blog, 02. portfolio content. The about stuff is just extra fluff that people like to know about but isn't the REASON why they come back.

    For this reason, I would say you need to fix things up. You've obviously put a TON of effort in the about stuff, which, as noted, is NOT the main draw to your site!

    I would suggest moving your focus to fixing the issues with the portfolio so that it actually works correctly and there are no broken images or links.. This would go a long long way and would give your site more of a POINT, more reason for people to return :)
    ------------------------------
    CODE
    The validator pops up some errors..... there is no attribute "onMouseOver"
    This is because xhtml has to be all lowercase... But if you want a different way of doing mouseovers with only css, you could also do it this way.

    The CSS validator also has some errors... (and I ran it under CSS3 so the errors are not due to the wrong version being used ;) )
    ----------------
    Looking at your code I can see lots of room for improvement.... Here are some notes with corresponding links to tutorials on the issue :)

    -Moving CSS to an external stylesheet.
    -Not using embedded styles as often as you do.
    -Not using tables so much in your design: tables should only be used to display tabular data.
    --------------------------
    Overall... Well, I think your site has lots of potential and room for improvement. Hopefully some of the points I made come in handy!

    Merry Christmas!

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  3. itechdesigns gave it ****- on 7th Oct 2010 and said:

    Hey! I'm Owen and I will be reviewing your site today. I'm not so good at these intro things so I'll dive straight in..

    So, the windmill in your layout is great.. However, the spinny bit of the windmill (I've no idea what the top, spinning part is called. Sorry!) is slightly transparent, which makes the whole thing look a little less 'realistic'.

    I'm guessing it's hand drawn..? I love how you've written your site name. What's the 'XXXX' for? I think it looks a little strange.. I also think you could slightly decrease the letter spacing of the text. Other than that it's great!

    I'm not to keen on how your navigation looks. I think it looks a bit plain compared to your layout. You should try and centre it between your site title. It may just be my screen resolution, but it floats to the left.

    Now, your blog title's rollover effect is a bit too bold for my liking. I think you should tone it down a little, maybe just change the colour of the text instead of the background.

    I love how you'd displayed your date, however, your 'Written by Jenny..' piece of text is overlapping your date. I'm guessing this is a mistake? All you need to do is add a little margin-left: ?px; to the 'Written by Jenny' bit of text.

    You haven't actually specified a font for most of your text. I think you're relying on the text to inherit from the body. All you need to do is add a font to the body, because at the moment, most of your text is displaying in my browsers default font.

    Your pages '1 2 3..' looks very much like your navigation. I'd recommend centring it instead of having it on one side.

    I love how you've done your sidebar headers, although the text isn't in the center (vertically). It's a little bit too high. The rest of your sidebar looks fine.

    The overall look of your site is nice. There's a few well-needed improvements that could be made, but other than that, your site's great! Good work!

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    accentedneo's Response:

    Thank you very much for the review.

    The navigation is slightly floated to the left. The reason being is because if it is placed dead center, the whole layout looks unbalanced. The blog title's roll over effect has always bothered me, I'll look into it.

    The "written by Jenny" overlapping the date is a mistake. I forgot to copy over the margin.

    I don't see any reason why I need to specify a font for each DIV through the CSS. It makes no difference visually and is just an extra block of useless CSS in the stylesheet. Is there any benefit?

  4. [img: avatar]
    Cherry gave it ***** on 6th Oct 2010 and said:

    Hi, I'm Charley and I'll obviously review your site.: D Just so you know, I coincidentally met your site two days ago, before I knew you were in rev.iew.me, and I really enjoyed it .
    Sorry, but today my review will be fairly superficial. I won't go deep in this review, nor see your site's code, but you can be sure I will be as sincere as I can. =D
    Well, here we go:
    First Printing / Layout
    header: I love your header: I do not know exactly why: the font is great, the picture also, but I think the texture of the sky is the best part. It's a great header in general.
    navigation: the navigation is well located and the hover effect is cool.
    sidebar: nothing to say here. The font of the sidebar is a littlesmaller than the others, but still readable.
    fonts: ok
    smilies: I realized that you do not use smilies, but the truth is I'm not exactly a fan of them. Some types are kinda cool, but I personally do not use them, then fine.
    effects: particularly liked the effect of the link. The others are ok.
    Content
    blog: I enjoyed your posts, they are great! And you write really well. When viewing the posts from the homepage, "written by Jenny aster" it's upon the date, specifically the year.
    comments: ok
    about: a lot of things here, and everything is organized.
    terms and conditions: It is great to have one of these in your blog.
    friending with Windymill: You gave new meaning to affiliates =) Very cool.
    the rest, in general, is organized and has all the necessary information, yet more.
    resources:
    layouts: to tell the truth, I could use them as a base and make some modifications but they are not complete, in my view. Sure, they're good, and others may find them useful. What I liked most was the Donkey, is funny and is one that I could use.:)
    Stock images: they are of excellent quality.
    ron.blog: I know it does not exactly part of your blog, but it is a great project, especially the reviews you do, I found them very useful.
    Conclusion: you have a wonderful site here, keep with this. I do not see almost nothing to be fixed, you can not see any big mistake. But surely you can do many more things yet, and even better.
    4.5 =)

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    accentedneo's Response:

    Thank you very much! The thing about "written by Jenny Aster" was well pointed out. It's one of those things that I don't notice because I made it and so I always overlook! Thank you very much!

    Funny, I think I might have joined rev.iew.me only two days ago as well! I had a old site on here and a handful of points so decided to re-set it up. Thank you again!

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