Good evening, boys and girls, and welcome to kitten's review of review-me.net.

What is review-me.net? Put simply, it is a "review site", wherein dozens of would-be webdesigners beg an elite cadre of reviewers to dispense sage wisdom and criticism upon their site.

Who are the webdesigners? Generally, they are high school girls who discovered Photoshop and Paint Shop, and decided they like screwing around with graphics. Straight away they steal pictures of their favorite celebrities, mangle them and make them into cartoons which they call "vectors", and then decide they need a website to show everyone this picture (which they call a "layout"). They then buy domain names like penny candy, beg for vhost subletting, and before you know it, they have a website chock-full of nothing that would interest the casual passerby, unless the casual passerby happens to give two shits about a random teenager's favorite bands, when they bought the domain name, and links to about forty seven cut-and-pasted "tutorials" about how to use HTML, all crammed into itty-bitty iframes about two inches on a side with colors that make the text unreadable.

And who are the reviewers? They are usually also high school girls, but not always. They've discovered CSS and think they are therefore demigogues of webdesign, able to spot the best and worst of the web, and they therefore deign to crawl down from atop their mountain of enlightment and cast their words upon all the squalid wretched dwarves in the village below.

And today, we're going to review their own site.

The first thing you'll notice upon viewing their main page is the huge honkin' empty space on the right side. These nitwits have decided to use absolute positioning and width markers. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that, but this is implemented poorly, as there's no reason for the entire content area to be crammed into a two-inch strip down the side. They would have been better advised to use so-called liquid design, where elements are arranged as percentages of the browser window, thus ensuring maximum compatibility across all window sizes.

Next, please take careful note of the font color. It's a medium orange, against a light orange background. With this utter lack of contrast, it makes reading the text nigh unto impossible. Still, we have yet to see the worst. Let's move on.

A key rule of hyperlinks is that they should be immediately obvious to the viewer. If that means making them underlined, or a different color than the rest of the text, so be it. These twahns, however, have opted to make their links the same color as the rest of the text, with absolutely no clue as to their linky-nature beyond the fact that they are boldfaced, which doesn't exactly scream "click me". It took me quite a while to figure out that Mellissa's name there is supposed to be a link.

You'll also notice that the menu links are a game of "hunt for the little + sign", because review-me.net has decided that making the entire word or phrase clickable just won't do. Somehow, you're supposed to intuitively know that the + sign is a link, despite absolutely no indications that would help you along with that conclusion.

Forging ahead, let's see what they actually review. Ah, apparently they review both "blogs" and "content", which are, for some utterly inexplicable reason, seperate entities. In the world of high-school "webmasters", you see, a blog is where you empty your vapid and trite mental bowels to tell everyone about what you had for lunch and where you went shopping after school, and have comments enabled so that your friends can all come gush about how great your new layout is, so much better than last week's, or the week before that. "Content", contrawise, involves those cut-and-pasted HTML tutorials, email forwards they've received, jokes they thought were clever, and other bits of garbage they've collected from near and far. At any rate, review-me.net will review your blog as well as your content. Amazing!

Let's turn our eye to what kind of critiques they offer, shall we?

Ah, here's one. The first thing you'll notice is that all the reviews open in new fucking windows, because for some reason that no one has yet been able to determine, it is imperative that all links open in tiny windows sized 20 pixels square, with no menus and no status bars. . Don't ask why, it just is. If this breaks your tabbed browsing session, well, too bad for you. You should use IE like everyone else!

I'd also like to note that the review itself contains absolutely no link to the site they're reviewing. You're expected to just type it in manually if you want to see what they're talking about. Have fun with that.

So their review for originally.org is laden with breathless praise and glowing laud for that site, despite the fact that even figuring out how to enter it is a mental feat that would challenge a Nobel physicist, reading it requires the eyes of a hawk since the text is about two pixels high, and once you do manage to get in, you'll find that it's the exact same as every other teenager's site out there: An iframe that imports their blog because they can't figure out how to use blogging software properly, tiny tiny text, silly cursor overrides, and zero material that would keep anyone entertained except for a list of oh-so-vital stats and facts about what music they're listening to now. Frankly, originally.org is an abomination, although I've seen much worse, but the jokers over at review-me.net just don't have enough good things to say about it. Let's take a look:
First Impression: 9/10
Wow, cute splash page! The text is a bit small, but I love the pop-out effects you have with each category.
The pop-out effects that serve absolutely no purpose except to distract, confuse, and make navigation difficult? Yeah, just wanted to be clear on that.
And it's great that you have an 800 by 600-friendly version for us huge resolution users.
What would be even greater is if the site was one-size-fits-all, functioning properly on any browser, at any window size, at any resolution, on any operating system. But these "reviewers" apparently can't figure that out, and the result is more and more legions of undead "webmistresses" and "webmasters" vomiting up crap like originally.org under the impression that since the reviewers said it was good and all their equally braindead friends left ten thousand comments about how great it is, it must be spectacular, so they'll keep making the same idiotic mistakes ad infinitum without ever being told that they suck.

(By the way, since when is 800x600 considered "huge resolution"? Hey, guys, 1995 called -- they want their monitor back.)

Now that we've seen what they consider a good site, let's see what they consider a mediocre site to be. Behold 8december.org. Now, to find this review, first I had to click on 80 and above, which gives you a drilldown of all the sites they're reviewed that earned such a score. Of course, the links there go to the actual site, not to the review. So to find the actual review, I had to go to finished reviews and run a manual text search for the phrase "8december". Apparently, it never dawned on the intellegentsia over at review-me.net that links are useful features.

Now, 8december looks like a more or less solid site, even to my critical eye. The text color contrasts with the background, so I can actually read it, and not only that, but it's a sane size, and it fills a good portion of the available window. Navigation is simple and easy to access, and it is immediately obvious to me what's a link and what isn't, thanks to the handy-dandy underlines. There's some decent content (by "content" I mean "things to read", not "bullshit HTML tutorials"), and the person writes fairly well about things slightly more interesting than her day at the mall. It's not exactly a gripping read, but it's something. No fancy-ass graphics distracting me from the writing, and what few graphics exist are tasteful and sedate. Overall, not too bad.

But let's see what review-me.net has to say:
First Impression: 6/10
My first impression was alright. Not great. The colors matched good except the scrollbar was just plain grey. So you need a css to fix that.
Oh, horror! A NORMAL SCROLLBAR? How awful!
I do suggest a little content for the visitor...
Once again, we can see that these braintrusts think words to read doesn't qualify as actual content. They want HTML tutorials, dammit, and they want them now!
Your site was ok. It didn't wow me, didn't really make me want to come back. The only thing I would come back to see is some more writings.
TRANSLATION: "It's great that you have meaningful stuff to say and all, but I only care about pretty pictures! Tee hee!" And here I thought the web was supposed to be about information and getting a message across. Silly me.

I didn't read beyond that. It was screamingly obvious that review-me.net's host of ne'er-do-well jackanapes have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, and it shows in each and every single one of their ridiculous sites that are all packed full of hideous graphics, don't work in anything except IE at a specific resolution and browser size, have low-contrast text that's impossible to read, especially when it's jammed unceremoniously into teeny-tiny iframes. And these are people who think they have what it takes to review a website and critique its flaws.

OVERALL GRADE: D-

A pathetic and inane attempt at web design, run by a bunch of morons who wouldn't know a properly designed site from a hole in the ground.

I'm your host, kitten. From Atlanta, good evening.