Decoy Lyts

Decoy Lyts

***-- (Rated by 3 people, viewed by 87 people)

A resource, tutorial, myspace site. Lots of Paramore inspired content(:

Added by decoylyts in Graphics

Decoy Lyts has 3 Reviews

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

  1. [img: avatar]
    MsDanger gave it ***-- on 11th Dec 2010 and said:

    First Impression:
    WOW. Very distracting and bright colors. Lets take a look closer. I've been attracted in.

    Layout:
    Uhm like I stated before. VERY distracting and way to much going on. I get the idea, but it distracts the visitor. The letters are also very small. I see that is the in thing to do with a lot of bloggers using that style of layout, but I do suggest NOT doing it. It puts a lot os straining on the eyes, and I do not want to have to zoom in to read you stuff.

    I am not a huge fan of the header in the side bars either. It is hard to read unless you really stare at it.

    Some pages, your footer seems to move. I guess it may be becuase I am using Safari. I tested compatibility in a category later on. :) Links look like the rest of the writing so I can't quickly notice them, but it is up to you what you want to do with that, its just a personal opinion thing.

    Validations:
    CSS level 2.1: You have 31 errors :O That can affect many things, from the way people see it in many broswers and can cause you problems. You should fix them.

    XHTML 1.0 Transitional: 71 Errors. This is not good at all. I suggest you fix these. I know my coding is not perfect but it should never be this much.

    Originality:
    I've seen a few sites like it. Nothing to original other than the person and the blogs. I've seen the layout type and content before. Try exploring new types of designs. You never know what it may bring.

    Content:
    There is a lot. I can't write down something for everything. I will say overall it is quite good, but can always be improved. Try adding new things, and content that other sites do no offer, so that you have a more original site.

    Dead Links:
    You have so many links. So I used a online checker. :D
    17 broken links. All having to do with affiliates.

    Compatibility:
    iPod Touch/iPhone: Eh. Its okay, still very hard to read.
    Safari: Footer is wonky on some pages
    IE: Works fine.
    Opera: Its intact. Which is great.
    Chrome: Same as the others.

    There are many more just I don't have them. I'm sure there are sites you can use to check though.

    Overall:
    I can say that I really like your content, there is quite a bit, and that is always great. I agree with a lot of the review above done by Vera. She has some really good points and I do believe you should listen and take the advice. It will help you in the long run. :)

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    decoylyts's Response:

    Thanks for reviewing my site! I've made a lot of changes to it since you've last seen it so, check it out! Maybe review it again? Or not, you don't have to. Anyway, thanks again!

  2. sarahmae gave it ***-- on 2nd Dec 2010 and said:

    1 First Glance: i actually adore the header's colours and the fact its hayley williams. But a lot of people are using her in their layouts so it gets old. Its very well blended together too unlike some people who just like slop it as a mirror and it looks terrible. This is very well blended.

    The background is way too busy. I love Paramore. But this is really busy. I understand maybe a simple riot or two but the millions there are a little busy.

    2 CSS/Coding: I like the style of it, i however don't like the colours and the size of the font.

    The font for your navigation i'm guessing is "small fonts" and its impossible to read. Your viewer shouldn't have to zoom in just to see your navigation. Some people don't even know how to zoom without internet explorer. I recommend making it a little bigger or changing to a font every computer is compatible with, such as arial.

    The colours are really hard to see on your headers due to the distracting background. The blue/teal is the hardest to see for me.

    You navigation moves a lot too when you hover over it. Especially on your elite affiliates. I recommend fixing it up a bit.

    3 Updates: I see you've updated recently, but you update like every month. I suggest a little more often. But i'm glad I can see you've updated. (:

    4 Originality/Content:

    Layouts: All of them really look the same. No originality in my eyes.

    style1: not sure why this is under myspace considering their site layouts. None of the tables really line up with the image either.

    style2: i adore the first and last one. The second one doesn't align right and its not very well edited in my opinion.

    Premades: What are the point of these? its like you just took an image and cut it out and just added some crazy distracting background. They're childish in my eyes. I get your a myspace layout place, but its a little childish.

    4 Grammar/ Spelling: I only see one misspelled word and that would be "Gradients". You have it as "Graidents". But very good. I can understand you very clearly.

    5 Other: This is the other stuff I love about your site or other things that don't fall into play with these categories.

    I like how i can see all the content you have under each category. I find it neat. But very messy sort of. Maybe a thing like ego-box.com

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    decoylyts's Response:

    Thanks for reviewing my site! I've made a lot of changes to it since you've last seen it so, check it out! Maybe review it again? Or not, you don't have to. Anyway, thanks again!

  3. [img: avatar]
    Vera gave it **--- on 1st Dec 2010 and said:

    So you're "new" (well sort of), don't seem to have any reviews yet, so I figured I might as well give it a shot, since I have a day off today.

    = First Impression =
    Whoa! My first instinct is to either close the windows instantly, or hit the back button.
    More specifically: you have way too much going on in there. There's is no focus point, as everything on this page seems to be vying for attention.

    = Presentation =
    Normally, for a design to be effective, it should have one element which stands out, where the eye should be naturally drawn to. Your design has about 5 or 6 such elements, so my eyes just helplessly go form one thing to another, mainly ending up getting out of here ASAP. Most visitors' attention span (mine included) is either non-existent or close to negative values. A design like yours is definitely not enticing anyone.

    Let's take it stepwise:
    1. BACKGROUND - A site's background is not supposed to attract attention by itself. It is supposed to be merely one of the small "accessories" which should only be noticed once I start analyzing your site in a more in-depth fashion.
    When I look at your design, the background is the first thing attacking me. I have a resolution of 1280x1024 pixels, out of which the content takes up 779px. This means that around 40% of my screen is taken up by your background, so nearly half. Add to this the fact that I can read the word "RIOT" (which is spelled out on it in various sizes) easier than what you wrote in your content area. Aren't you doing something backwards here?
    I feel like someone just started screaming at me, as soon as I opened the door. At least let me come in and do something bad, before you start screaming. Then at least you'll have a reason for it...

    2.HEADER IMAGE - Normally this is what most people choose to make a focal point of. This means that people will put here something larger, and try to make it stand out from everything else on the site. You put 7 and 1/2 emphasized elements. You're not the first one to try the "different faces of a person" look, but you're definitely the first one I've seen trying to cram 7 (and a 1/2) of them into a header image. I'm referring here, to the girl with red hair, because she is the one being put in the spotlight. That's just the most eye-catching problem here.
    The second issue, is the half of a head in the right that bothers me. Why not try to move the image content a bit for to the left, so that the last head would fit in completely? There's only some girl whose face is not even visible behind the red head, on the left.
    The third issue is: you duplicated half of the images of the red head (and two of the images of the people visible behind her). You know, if you're going to to put 8 faces in there, you could have at least made sure that they're different images. This is just plain lazy and it's clear you just put them there to fill up space.
    And last, but not least, your blend is rather awkwardly done. This is especially apparent when looking at the girl's shoulders which look very very oddly cut out.

    3. YOUR SIDEBARS - they jump around when I move my mouse over them. To be honest this is kind of funny, I spent some 5 minutes trying to find all the spots which made them jiggle. But I still have no idea what's written in them. It's rather difficult to read rows of text that overlap each other. Oh and I can't even read the blue heading without first highlighting them (with my mouse).

    4. YOUR FOOTER - the more I look at it, the more I'm convince I'm seeing double. I admit it, my eyesight is pretty bad, but I AM wearing glasses. And the glasses have the correct prescription. Suffice to say, I'm not even bothering to try reading anything here. It'd give me a headache.

    Your main content is readable, but that bright yellow text on the white background is really toeing the line. I'd make it a few shades darker. And what's with the rainbow text? I'm going to assume that you wanted to be all clever, and put emphasis on the different text (bold, italic, regular link, underlined etc etc) by using different colors? This is the number one mistake EVERY DESIGNER WORTH HIS SALT warns against. Bolded text is thicker than regular text, italic text is tilted and underlined text has a horizontal line under it. And THAT is enough to draw attention to them. By having you use 5 differently colored words in the first paragraph only, you've effectively made it all the same to me. You look like a 3-year-old who just discovered colored pencils.

    Another thing that I find rather odd, is the proportion of the main content area. It's the exact same size as the chat box. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but for a new visitor like me, shouldn't it be more important to read what you wrote? At least make the content area's height taller by a few hundred pixels...

    The main impression I'm left after viewing your design is: why do people still make these layouts? I've been seeing these for the past 5 years, isn't it time they try something new? You know, just so I don't go around thinking "another myspace layout" every time I see such a design.

    Go and visit some CSS galleries and get some inspiration:
    http://cssremix.com/
    http://bestwebgallery.com/
    http://www.cssbake.com/

    = Content =
    At the moment, I'm just curious if your content is the same as that of every other site that sports this design. It would be nice, otherwise this review will be a very boring one. So I'll group it according to the sections in your left and right columns.

    1.NAVIGATION
    All content is a list of every single page there is on this site... I recently reviewed another site like yours, that had a similar link as its 2nd or 3rd. Aside that, why would you start with the sitemap as your first link? I, for one, always assumed this was for those people who are lost on your website. Do you think everyone will be lost as soon as they enter your site? And if it is so, shouldn't you DO SOMETHING about it? As in, reorganize the design/navigation I mean.

    When I saw your contact page, I was thinking of letting you know that there are textareas, which can be used to write longer messages, instead of mile wide inputs. Upon looking at the code I notice that the long input box is actually a textarea, and what more? It should let 7 rows of text fit in there. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this textarea's height the same as that of the text input tags? How exactly are people supposed to see what they type in there? Especially since gray on slightly lighter gray is not exactly readable. Also, the content box is side-scrolling ... as well as scrolling downwards. Since you're already having it scroll vertically, why not just lower the width and up the height of the textarea (AND THE FONT SIZE)? Ideally, of course, you wouldn't have a fixed height for the content box, because your main browser window already has one.

    On your hosting page, the second sentence confuses me (emphasis my own):

    It doesnt matter how many friends you have on myspace, I just want to know.

    Normally after this, one would have a list of questions. Well you have one some 5 lines below this, but... Wouldn't it be easier to ditch the first 2 sentences and just have "These are the rules"? Because it's pretty straight-forward. By the way "anything" is one word, not two, "you are" is abbreviated to "you're" not "your" (e.g. Only apply if you're serious about it).
    In "I will ask you about it a comple of times" the word "comple" should be "couple". I'm tempted to ask you where you learned English... but that would make me sound mean. Well more so than I already am.
    Subby?! Wow... this is the first time I've seen the word. Then again, why would I expect something else, when you call layouts, lyts...
    Oh yeah, the "Why would you be a good hostee" textarea doesn't fit in the content box. Make it shorter.
    Also, what is the "Verification No."? Do you mean the captcha code bellow? For me it reads "RJ7PI". Last time I checked that was not a number.

    2.MYSPACE
    Neat... I managed to break your design on the layouts page. I clicked on the thumbnail for Taylor Lautner Layout, and then I clicked back... and there was no more layout list. And Style three tab was selected, even though I couldn't previously go to it. And when I clicked on the first tab again, the third tab was still selected (along with the first). Cool huh? And I'm not even working in QA (Quality Assurance).
    You know how I was worried that these would be the same as other graphics? Well no worries, they aren't. They're much much worse.

    3. RESOURCES
    You must be joking... half of these are under construction, the layout page is the same as the one in the myspace section... and the premades freaked me out.

    4. TUTORIALS
    I'm really sorry for the girl in the first Photofiltre tutorial. She looks like someone's trying to pass a rope through her head or something. That looks really painful.

    I think I've had enough. Your designs are bad. Normally I use the term mediocre, but this is even worse than that. You can't spell... AT ALL. Which means that I have to read your sentences three times to understand what you're saying. And considering your content areas size, that is not exactly a pleasant task. I don't think I'm curious about the rest of your content.

    = Coding =
    Your right column says the stylesheet is from another site? So is that supposed to mean that you didn't make it? Regardless, it's on your site, so any errors are your responsibility to fix.

    It's not as bad as I first thought, but you're still using tables for link lists. You should be using CSS to style them: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/multicolumnlists/

    Also, instead of using multiple line breaks (br tags), use the paragraph (p) tag.

    Your CSS is mainly OK, but you should put it inside an external CSS file, so that your pages will load faster. http://www.tutorialtastic.co.uk/tutorial/creating_an_external_stylesheet

    Score: 2/5

    You get 1 point because your code is not the big mess I thought.

    Your site is difficult to browse. You focus too much on receiving messages from your visitors and don't bother with the rest. As it is, your website is subpar, even among those who target the same audience as you do, and I find that content mediocre as it is.

    For starters, check out the CSS galleries I pointed out to you in the presentation section, and then start reading tutorials on how to create such designs:
    http://tutorialtastic.co.uk
    and once you're more advanced
    http://alistapart.com are good starting points.

    For design tutorials check out http://psd.tutsplus.com/

    Don't try to do it all at once, start by choosing on 1 or 2 things to make (eg web layouts). And learn to make them well. Once you do, you can branch out.

    Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

    decoylyts's Response:

    Thanks for reviewing my site! I've made a lot of changes to it since you've last seen it so, check it out! Maybe review it again? Or not, you don't have to. Anyway, thanks again!

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