REVIEW REQUEST www.movie-guru.com

Totally different to your last layout.

The text being black is to hard to make out, maybe white or light grey text, also your links (dark blue) are hard to see.
your mouse overs take a while to load, cause there are so many of them, an easier way to do them the way you are is to have one image for the mouseover one for all your letters, make a transparent gif (outside the lines of the box with transparent inside) and use this image for the mouse over so the letter and outline display together - have the letter as a background in the td cell, this way it only has to load half the amount of images.

The movie guru banner could also be lighten a lil, the words "movie guru" blend in to much

off to a good start

Howdy guru,

I don't remember the other site so I can't compair the two but I will give you my thoughts on this one.

Took a bit to load on my dial-up. You might consider reducing the size of the three images. I believe that you could cut their file sizes in half and still have them look good. Slim down your logo too.

It looks like the image, Momento, is actually 120 X 175 pixels and you have used the width/height tags to resize it to 101 X 150 instead of using a graphics program to manually resize it. I know that isn't much but when you are counting calories (file size) every little bit helps.

I see you are using images for the alphabet at the bottom. You could get a nice effect using just plain text and add a mouseover color change. All those letters add up to about the same files size as a large photo. That would help to reduce load time also.

As for the logo....it isn't bad, but with the dark background colors that you have, (which i like) I think that a crisp white title for the site would look great. Maybe use a more decorative font for the title and incorporate the film strip into the title similar to the way you have it now. Yes, white would really stand out.

Your text needs to have a font besides default. I'd do Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif and make it white but the choice is yours. The black text is a tad hard to read on that dark colored background.

Not too crazy about the rounded corners. Something is needed here but I am not sure what. Maybe someone else will have an idea.

Where do you get the reviews from? Just curious. That may be something that you could include on the home page...not sure about this though. That may help with the creditability of your review. I am reading the book Black Hawk Down now. I read your review and think I will most definatley go see it on the big screen.

Toodles
~DM

Better but still a lot of wasted space at the top. I agree with the others that the colours are very dull and don't work together. I would have white text and introduce maybe an orange for rollovers, instead of the goldy colour you have now. The logo is better but the Movie Guru needs to be a different colour to stand out - maybe the same as the rollover colour you choose. The corners are better than you had but I was wondering about maybe creating a frame for the page using the film reel kind of thing as you have in the logo, so that it looks like the page content is within one frame of the reel of film.

This is much better but I agree that the colours are very dull. There should be more contrast in here and it is very hard to read the black text against that dark blue background. I also feel like there should be a navbar here somewhere.

The logo is much improved here. What you could do is get rid of the rounded corners there and have the filmstrip effect stretch the entire width of the the table. Give the content area a white background and make the page background black. Or maybe another bright colour like red. Make sure your margins are the same on boths sides (I'm not sure if this is the same for all of them but on the "Beautiful Mind" review there's a huge indent on the left and no indent on the right)

Again, spelling and grammar need work:

Quote: Not to many actors have this talent or just have this talent say one film and then it seems to diapers(!) but Crowe has not have it disappear

I really don't think you mean to say diapers here There are also several other mistakes in this sentence ("too" not "to" at the beginning for example, "have" should be "had" at the end). It should read more like this:

"Not too many actors have this kind of talent or just have it, say, for one film and then it seems to disappear. Crowe, on the other hand, has had fantastic performances in his last (X number) of films."

As I said before - content is important and your writing really needs a lot of work.

Change the red font on your first page and get rid of the pop up box when you first sign on. I didn't go in any further because the pop up box annoyed me.
dave
http://www.supplychaintoday.com

You could probably extend the filmstrip idea into the rest of the layout, not just the logo. Use that wasted space and come up with a better title (image).

I don't think I need to mention colors.

I read your review of Black Hawk Down and, personally, I think that you give away too much of the storyline. If I were going to see the movie I'd rather see the events unfold then and not now. Your other comments on the movie are good - stick to just that in your reviews.

If you're really serious about the site then you will benefit if you enlisted or hired someone to copyedit your work.

Compared to the last version, I think you're now heading down the right track.

I think you are now heading down the right track, but the site has a long way to go before it compels me to listen to what you have to say. Sorry....

Cant really add any more than what has already been said, but I would check out imdb.com which IMO is the best movie site out there. If you compared the two sites, which one would you trust?

I actually think that the background colours have potential as a scheme, depending on what you do with the foreground. As has been mentioned, the font colour and face really needs to change.

The postioning of your text within the inner table could use some tweaking.

It seems clear that you are attempting to check your spelling via a spellchecker. Every error I've caught is something that a spell check would miss - I haven't seen an outright mispelled word yet. You need to find yourself a proofreader.

You need to find yourself a proofreader

pick me, pick me - NOT

I think a lot of the spellcheckers etc are country based, and since so many words have different spellings and meaning no one spell checker can handle them all.
and problem with dictionaries is if you dont know how to spell the word you cant find it (or is that just me )

But spelling is a big thing in websites, I found what I first thought was a great tutorial site, but going through it I found many basic typos (things like sotp instead of stop, hmtl instead of html etc) and then after running first code example which didnt work gave up on the site cause it was obvious they hadnt taken time to fix any errors.

**I always check my code but am guilty of not checking grammer and spaelling**

thanks for all of your help i am trying to find my self a spell checker/proofreader but well you know no one wants to do it
detox
you cant campar me to a site that has had time, money, and alot of programers to a site that has had about a mounth, no money and 1 man running it (which cant spell at all).
Abhishek Reddy
i will make sure to change that on black hawk downs review
again thanks for all your help

You can use either of these two to do a free spell check. The second one will also point out any HTML mistakes.

http://www.jimtools.com/spell.html
http://www.netmechanic.com/maintain.htm

its good i like the HTTP 404 bit

The page cannot be found
The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please try the following:

If you typed the page address in the Address bar, make sure that it is spelled correctly.

Open the movieguru.mega.net.kg home page, and then look for links to the information you want.
Click the Back button to try another link.
Click Search to look for information on the Internet.

HTTP 404 - File not found
Internet Explorer

I'm getting that too right now...

The easiest way to check your spelling is to type up your text into a word processor before putting it into your HTML page. Run a spelling and grammar check in there - it won't catch everything but at least will get rid of the obvious problems. Also be sure to read it over carefuly, and have someone else take a look at it before you post just to be sure. Here are some common errors in english that you should be aware of.

I also think that the best thing you can do to improve your writing style is to read. Read a lot - particularly articles relating to your chosen type of writing (ie. you're trying to write movie reviews, so go around and read as many movie reviews as you can to get an idea of the writing style commonly used in that genre. If you were writing news articles, you'd read news, and so on.)

nice link Megan, and your right about the reading, I hated it when i was a kid, and still dont really enjoy reading but i am living proof that not reading books creates a bad speller and grammerer (see that didnt even make sense - dont become like me, read books everyone

**nice link, but wheres all the pictures :D**

still plenty 'a readin' time available - hey, you've got 1001 posts!

:sunny:

here is a new version of my movie review site. please tell me what you think
movie-guru.com
thanks

ARG!!! I clicked the "Join The Staff" link at the bottom and was unable to close it. Maybe I'm dumb but I had to do CTRL ALT DELETE to close that window. That isn't nice.

ok....on with the rest.
The site really doesn't look any different than it did before beside the links at the bottom that you have added, a framed page and all the pop up windows that you have added through out the site. Speaking of pop up windows and frames. I think your site would be better without those. Especially the pop up windows.

I still like the background color that you are using but the text colors and link colors do not go well with that blue. *that has been brought up before so I suppose you are set on using the black and red* Also you are using Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif for the paragraph on the home page. I don't what kinda jazz that is you have in your code for your links at the bottom but they are defaulting to times new roman.

There are no navigation links on the archive page.

the mouseover links at the bottom go black on mouseover in IE, change your a:hover tag to light grey or something so it will show thru. doesnt work in NS4.7 so is readable.

the link in your archive are all different colors, some are blue, some are white, some are default, also a couple of broken images (f page has one) and cant read the black text at bottom (copyright)

has javascript errors in NS4.7, lines 100, 112, 73, 77, 54, 19, 35, 37, 54 document.nowplaying has no properties., MM_preloadImages is not defined. and a end comment tag ( --> ) seem to be the cause

Don't like the pop up windows, just have them as new pages within the site set up. I'm still fining it too dark and think that the logo seems to appear just plonked where it is and ovcerall I think the sites needs some colour.

I agree that it still is too dark. What I would like to see is the content area on a white background with the filmstrip logo area stretching all the way across. Add in another brighter colour too - orange might work.

I still think that the opening paragraph needs work. Definitely take out that price reference - I don't know about you but where I come from movie prices vary a lot depending on where and when you go. The big new stadium-style theatres are up to about $12 or $13 now, but Tuesday is chap night so it's only about $8 or so, same with matinees. The older theatres are around $6 and there's also a few cheap theatres with $2 admission for movies that have already been through the other threatres. The writing style is still very stilted and ackward in that paragraph.

Watch your fonts on the front page as well. The opening paragraph is black arial (?) on a dark background which makes it hard to read. Then the rest of it is white Times which is easier to read but doesn't look too good. I clicked on the "Time Machine" review and the text here is black serif. Make it all white sans-serif if you're going to keep that dark background. The writing style is okay in this review BTW.

The links along the bottom aren't working for me at all. I guess you must be putting those in a pop-up? I keep pop-ups disabled most of the time. Just keep those in a regular window.