08.03.03: Amber 163
Take this bitter pill. It isn't easy to swallow.
25/30 - Overall Design:
I love it. I was worried it would be sloppy code, but it's not. It's very neat, even though you call yourself an amateur, and I haven't immediately noticed any browser incompatibility. Only thing I'm not crazy about on first look is your navigation drop down. Style that thing up, girlfriend! It doesn't have to be old school ugly drop down, make it stand up, make it stand out, make it stand proud. Man, am I lame tonight or what? You've got a style tag in there, add some spice and style. That's what it's there for. Go on, you can do it.
20/20 - Functional:
Functional smunctional. Ouch. I just checked out your layout link, and hoowee. Evidently it is not as browser compatible as I thought, but more on that later. Anyway, it works, and i mean that as in it really, really works -- the layout looks great. Everything has a spot, and to be honest, I can't imagine anything other than a text area being in that part of the picture. What the heck. You crazy designer, you. Well done.
10/10 - Aesthetic:
Goodness me, I love it. It's a great image, great lyrics, great everything. There does appear to be a thick black line at the top of every page for no apparent reason, but I believe that's a browser thing, so no points off.
20/20 - Navigation:
Dude. This navimigation is hardcore cool. Nothing broken. When I was reviewing content as well, I cannot tell you how many people I wanted to throttle for linking pages that did not exist.
10/10 - Originality:
Very original. I truly love this layout.
7/10 - Browser Compatible:
For the most part, yes, very much so. Unfortunately, on longer entries, the text exceeds the text box, and runs down the rest of the page and over the graphic. There's really no simple way to fix it, I'm sorry to say -- it is clear that most of the code was copied and pasted from other sites (the only real way to learn html and css in my opinion and experience, so please do not think I'm faulting you), keep in mind, however, that by doing this you also risk copying and pasting other designer's mistakes. This is one of those situations, and the only real solution is to make the image a background image, center it on the page with css, then center the tables, or indent it about 50 -100 pixels, and align the table accordingly. You would also have to alter the text box code, which is a fairly tedious undertaking, especially if you aren't entirely familiar with what does what -- I cannot gauge what your level of experience with css is; I still copy and paste css code, even though I know exactly what it does. Anyway, all of this is simply if you're interested -- you'll probably wind up designing another hot layout with different code anyway, if you're anything like the designers I know. If you do want to fix it up, though, and you're not sure what I'm talking about, let me know and I would be happy to help you out.
Total:
92/100
before & after
