SITE REVIEW: Magicana

I've got a site up for my magic shows (I'm a magician) and would like to know what everyone thinks of the current layout. There is a very good site coming up in July that will be replacing this one, but I'd like to make everything as perfect as possible.

I tried to go for a simple, yet professional layout. Also, check out the videos if you have a chance. Some are for magicians only, but you should enjoy the others.

Visit Magicana

The site looks quite clean, and pretty well laid out, however some images wouldnt go a miss (thats just my personal preference). If the next site is better like you say, then it should be pretty good.

Steve

nice job with the site
looks good and serves it purpose.

here is what i recommend.

The top sort of bar, with the magician stuff on it, i think it would look better if it matched the rest of the site, or it was removed

The spot where you have the navigation, I would suggest making it thinner, or the text larger

Where the header and the navbar meet, the section/arch could do with a little antialaising.

The main header saying 'Magicana' seems to be pretty low quality, and the 'A' at the end seems to be further away from the rest of the word. intentionally?

oh well, thats all i got to say
nice web, crisp and clean, i give it 7/10 !

I like it. I don't have time to look at the vids at the mo - maybe in the morn.

First impressions, clean and clear, not over-done. Easy navigation, well laid out. Nucleo's right about the images. Best bet is to slice that top image, and create a mixture of pngs/gifs and jpegs (the text in paritcular is a perfect candidate for a png or gif). That way you can improve quality without bloating your filesize (9kB is a good size for that kind of element)

I have one question for ya: Did you use a template? I think i have seen that layout before. Anyway site looks good, Im not sure about that bar at the top it looks really out of place. I agree with the other guys about the images. Bu otherwise its not bad for an information site.

That is only a partial template. I found that logo header on a website for websites, and grabbed that, and further down the road found that checkered background. I thought they went pretty well together.

On the logo, I will re work that. The A was partially intentional, but really not supposed to have gone that far out. Just slightly more than the rest.

Now, the magician bar at the top, I cannot help that. I'm using a Magic service to host my material (a free one) until I get the newer site. Then I'm going with Pow Web.

Two things that I don't recomend using are:
1. Guestbooks
2. White text when mouseover URLS on light background

good point about the links ccb, they just kinda dissapear lol, I hadn't noticed that before. In fact I hadn't even noticed they were links on the body of the page!

a few rules for links
1) make it clear it's not just some more text - underline, different colour (preferably not different font though)
2) Make them legible both before and during hover state.
3) It helps to make them stand out more on hoverstate than normal.

I say rules but they're not - I just made them up - ignore them if you want....

thats a good resource site. I like the vids; I use to be into magic/illusions my self. I inf it quite facinating. but if you are tryin to go professional, then you should probally purchase a domain name other than a .tk

My first impressions upon entering are....Wow how nice. I love the colors and I love the images and backgrounds you have used for your top and side bar. Very color co-ordinated.

Although the top and side look effective for a magical kind of site, I would go with flashier buttons. Instead of the normal text links, create some fancy buttons to match the rest of your site. The very top bar about magic is effective and I like the part that says "Click here for a free magic trick", something different from other sites about.

Your About page is very informative and gives visitors a "feel" for who you are. The Media center is a very effective part of your website and shows what you can do and what people are likely to expect if they hire you. More reviews on yourself on the Magician Review page would be good to see so visitors can view your reputation and a reason as to why they should hire you for their parties. Great contact form on the Contact us page, very simple and not alot to fill out (as many of us hate filling out forms, well I do anyway LOL).
On your affiliates page, when you hover your cursor over the links, the link turns white and is hard to see, maybe changing the hover color to something else, maybe the blue you have in your top section would be more effective.
Simple yet effective guestbook also. As soon as you get the problem fixed I am sure you will have many lovely comments about your site.

Overall I would say maybe change the color co-ordination on each page you have to the same effect and same layout but a variation so people can see an amusing anf effective magicians site.

Well done and I look forward to seeing what more you have to offer!!

Thanks guys! I will be purchasing a domain once I get my new site running agian.

As for the links on the body of the page, how could I go about change ONLY the liks in the body, so the text in the menu to the left stays white? As for better looking buttons, I'm playing with the idea now.

Thanks for taking time to help me out!

you have all of your body text in a td:



it already has a class, which seems to do nothing. Rather than worry about conflicts I would give that TD an ID:



you then go to the top of the page where you have your stylesheets and add this:




You might want to change the code as that will give you links that are a lovely shade of purple, changing to bright pink on hover

Thank you for the codes and feedback. I appreciate. I'm getting to work.............NOW.

Also, I'd like to know if you guys think the videos are good enough for the time being to show I am a capable magician. Thanks.

Really good work for a 15 years old. I think that colors, layout, overall style and content are adequate for site's purpose.


Some problems:

There are some problems with font sizes in Mozilla browser; for example, headings ("Welcome to Magicana!" and "Updates" on main page, etc.) are much smaller than ordinary text. This is because some of the text has size set to "x-small", while some text has no text size defined.

(The reason why it looks normal in Internet Explorer probably is because it displays your page in quirks mode (where font sizes are handled differently) because of missing DOCTYPE. One solution would be adding <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> at the very beginning of your HTML file and adjusting the font sizes, but I'm sure there can be other solutions)

On the "Media" page, it is impossible to read the black text written over the video thumbnails. Also you might want to make those thumbnails act as links to the actual videos, because most people will try to click them.

And yes, I agree with others that you should format your hyperlinks differently from the rest of the text, so that people can see where they are.

Where does it say Zach is 15?