Domain; Reviews

Aria Reviews
Date: 07/31/04
Layout: FLYhigh, version two
Reviewer: Anataya Etoile

Percentage Mark: 86

First Impression: 5/5
    Nice soft colors. The layout is simple and everything is easy to find. I have to say your site's name confuses me a little. I keep thinking it's eant to say "love appears", just without the "a", but I'm not sure. O.o Hopefully II'll be explained somewhere. Aside from that, I don't see any reason not to give full points here.

Design: 8/10
Note: The extra layouts for "union" and "linkage" will not be graded.

    Like I said above, the colors are nice and soft. On second glance however the blend thing you have in the corner has quite a bit of red in it, which clashes with the blue. It's kind of a purply-red, but I think just a nice shade of purple or violet would go well with the blue shades. I like the image of Hitomi at the bottom of your text area. That's not exactly a pose you see a lot, and it gives your layout a unique feel. There's one little thing that bugs me (call me picky. :p): the gird in your background doesn't align with the grid in your layout image. It's only off by one pixel. Just cut off one pizel at the top of the background, and it'll all be aligned. I'm not sure if anybody else cares about that, but I felt I had to point it out. ^^;

    The text and font color and everything you've used works, although the text is a bit too small. I can't just read it, I have to lean a little closer and concentrate on it. Since I can't read with as much ease as I'm used to reading, it kinda makes me lose interest in reading the content at all. :s The headers you've used don't stand out at all, which is kind of the point. Navigation is fine and clear; this area is great. One thing you may want to consider doing to the overall layout is change the iframe for the text into a DHTML iframe, so that the text shows up from under the kinda grungy thing where it turns into light blue. I think you could achieve the same thing in just HTML using layers, but I think it'd be more complicated. Just something to think about. :3

Content: 17/20
Main Page: It seems fine. It gives the requirements and eveyrthing, and there's no necessary information. I think the webrings/cliques could go on another page though (of course I guess it depends on the rules of those things too).

Mistress: The page gives the basic info; nothing much to say about that. As I wander around more and more I'm finding that the text on each page looks all crammed together, particularily when you a lot of writing like on this page. You've only separated your paragraphs with the line down tag, but I think you should use the paragraph tag, just to space it out more. The divider you've used is confusing; it says "loveppears" but then beneath you have contact info. Words don't work as dividers. I think it'd be better if you just made a header saying "contact info" or whatever.

Domain: Pretty good. At the point at the end of the first paragraph where you say how you mother calls you "Xiao Mei" I think you should explain that the "X" is pronounced "sh". I don't know this true but I'm guessing it is since you said you got ShuiMui/ShuiMei from it. Oh, and some clarification of "Pin Yin" would be good too; I don't know what that is. Unfortunately, although you've written quite a bit about it, I didn't get my question about the name of your site answered. ;_;

Network: Ah, my favourite part of all collectives. I like that you keep the thumbnails in the active sites section updated. I don't see why you have the thumbnail for the site under "active: multimedia" on the left instead of the right. If you're trying to alternate the sides, I'd do it between each thumb, not between each category, like how you did in "projects". The link to Funyaraga.net on the "frozen" page dosen't open in a new window. You should add back links to each page too, it'd make it much easier to navigate.

Etc: I don't really see why you have an extra layout for "union", but I'll leave it to creative lisence. Thanks for linking Aria on the reviews page. ^_^ I like that you have the thumbs for the old layouts pop up; I hate it when all you get is a small little thumbnail to look at. -.-; Otherwise this section seems fine. Oh, and the thing I said about the back links above goes for this part as well.

Guestbook: Not much to say about guestbooks, is there? It seems fine, although you might want to center the sign feilds. Otherwise it looks good.

Exits: Ooh, many pretty buttons on the linkage page. :3 The buttons at the very bottom though cover the last couple of lines of links in the politics section though. O.o I'm not going to check through all of these links, so I'm going to assume they're fine, but i recommend checking them from time to time, just to be sure they stay alive. ;3 The rest of this section seems fine, and again, back links!

Errors: 5/5
    There were none. :o Of course I could have missed something, and I didn't check the links in the linkage section, but I'll ignore that and give you full marks. Keep up the good work. ;3

Overall Impression: 8/10
    A very nice site, as collectives go. It has and does all of the basic collective stuff, which is good. A few more suprises would make it more interesting and unique, but then it is a collective. I say leave that stuff for the sites within the collective. Anyway, like I said it's nice. I'm kind of neutral about the whole thing really; it's not bad, but it's not amazingly good. A bit above average is what I guess I could say. :s Anyway, keep up the good work. ;3