Victoria E :: Public Ramblings

Hello Victoria E,

Just checked out your blog. I didn’t find any requirements or lack thereof re: your blog/website review preferences, so I hope my review is okay with you 🙂

03.45am Australia! Rather excited, really. This is my first website review – Gosh, hope I don’t stuff it up…

Victoria E, your blog took forever to download – I’m connected to broadband ADSL and I’m using my brand new laptop computer [hp pavilion zd8000 with all the bells and whistles]. I almost clicked the back button – having to wait more than one minute, which is a very, very LONG TIME isn’t especially inviting. But I decided to stay and play because I wanted to check out your blog.

If I was one of your regulars I’d probably get a little irritated by now having to wait so long. Has anyone mentioned this to you (cos I read that you’ve had your blog up for a couple of months now) – or am I an isolated case?

You content was the last to load, which I didn’t like cos I just waited over a minute for your blog to “appearâ€?. Once it did load, I could have a gander. Your header (pic) is about 1cm too short because I can a blue banner poking out underneath. Is this the way its’s suppose to look? I’m using IE6. I really like your background color: very victorian, which I adore. (thumbs up!)

Visually I liked the look and feel of your blog. Like I said, I love your background tile. Your font is very generic, but I’m with you on that one. Fancy fonts are all well and good but its better to stick to “generic� than “invisible�. It’s a rare day in indeed to see blue hyperlinks and I thought that was a nice touch.

I did what “Sticky” suggested and browsed awhile, clicking on pretty much everything – except your ads. I understand the need to advertise, in some cases its required just to keep your blog up and running. I just thought all those ads at the base of your front page and comments section was well, a little overkill and visually distracting. I didn’t encounter any problems (broken links, etc) and that’s gotta be good! Overall your blog was good, and I enjoyed reading what you had to say.

I took a peek at your website – again, I really like your background. I also liked your “Flash”? (I can never tell the difference!) intro. It loaded superfast, and I could navigate quickly and easily. What I especially liked about your .com was your simplistic layout. It felt clean, even though dark colors were used. It wasn’t hard to stay focused, everything I needed was centrally located, which I liked. Well done!

Overall Rating for Blog: 7/10 – less is more sometimes 🙂
Overall Rating for Website: 9/10 – I really liked it.

I’m no expert, but I think the “blue header” is due to a <div> somewhere that is still calling a class or ID in your .css.

IE is th3 sux0r and often does stupid stuff like this. Check to make sure whatever <div> your header is referring to has that blue background or img removed. You may want to check your header.php file also to see what’s being called up as the site loads…you may have a hidden <div> somewhere you forgot to remove.

Depending on the order, FireFox will ignore that bottom <div> whereas IE will show it (ugh). Good luck and great site.

I would like to Welcome you to SF. You will love it, bring warm clothes for summer.
Your blog is very, very slow to load. I have BB and rarely wait for anything to load. I waited for your blog because of the background. I love it and wanted to see what else would appear. Hate the ads.
Nice blog over all.

It does load in a strange order for me, too but one area I would focus on is the sidebar. Right now it is a little busy and it’s hard to see the priority. Think about what you want the visitor to see most. For example, I would move the poll near the top and the blogroll just after your catagories. Move the technorati and firefox links down and using a smaller bablefish banner move it up. Remember, some items visitors only need to find once while others are something they will need often.

Since your a freelance model you may want to look into a gallery and plugin to integrate the two.
http://gallery.menalto.com
http://wpg2.ozgreg.com

Victoria, Your site looks good overall, but does take a long while to load. You may want to look at cutting down your load time by sizing down some of youre images, as well making sure your site validates.

Web Page Load Time Analyzer

W3 Validator

If you want more search engine hits enable you’r nice permalinks. So instead of you links looking like http://victoria-e.com/wordpress/?p=40 they will be something like http://victoria-e.com/wordpress/2005/09/17/the_end_of_organic_goodness/