Neptune

Ok it looks like this site is dedicated to Sailor Moon links and that's it. That wouldn't be a problem by itself but the way the site looks is a different story.

Background: An embordered (?-not sure if that's the word) image of Usagi looking into the distance. Again pictures don't really work for backgrounds and although this background doesn't hurt my eyes nor does it make me highlight the text, it's a bad choice simply because it's a pictured background.

Content: Well since this site seems to be dedicated to links to other Sailor Moon sites there isn't much to disect here. But let's look anyways. *Gasp* I was soooooooo wrong. This isn't a site dedicated to OTHER Sailor Moon sites but other Sailor Moon sites OWNED by them! Looks like these are information pages. Let's start with Moons.

Sailor Moon Page: An "eh" type background. It's not a picture background so I am not going to pick it apart. At first glance there's an image of Sailor Moon and underneath it there's information about the character. The information is based off the English adaptation (i.e. "scout", "Serena") as well as the Japanese version. It's a pretty basic information page on Usagi but reading it makes me think that the information came from a different site. A lot of sites have this problem though.

Sailor Mercury Page: Not much information on Ami/Mercury as there was for Usagi/Moon. The background is a simple blue and two images are shown. The first is Ami with her star shaped henshin stick. Underneath that is an image of Mercury. Underneath this image is a brief profile.

Same type of webpages for Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Luna and Tuxedo Kamen.

For the villians page we have a very brief description of the Dark Kingdom clan. Funny the picture I click on had Rubious...

The friends page takes us to just that. Brief info about three characters...Molly, "Reni" and Melvin (Naru, ChibiUsa, and Umino). I like the spelling of "Reni"..*snorts* I do however like the description of her...LOL "brat"...so fits her character. And no information for Melvin (Umino) so that makes me wonder as it says "Last Updated Jan. 17th, 97"....

The other links takes me to a page that repeats links I've already visited on the home page. Not smart...Having a links page is to let your visitors choose were they want to go. Downgrade!

The site hasn't been updated in quite awhile so that would explain the lack of information as well as everything else a site needs.

Pluto

Breakdown of site 10/100

Welcome and site Identity 1
There's not much to the site at all. A few links to about pages, and the various senshi. The fact that the site has not been updated since before my son was born fills me with foreboding.

Navigation 1
Links work ok, but they are not set up very well. The idea is to have a proper navigational structure rather than just a bunch of pictures strewn across the screen.

Content of Interest 2
There's nothing that really stands out, the spelling is atrocious for people who are at university (or were at the time the website was started), and the information is not entirely accurate. For example, Sailor Moon was NOT the first senshi found. Maybe by Luna, but that is not stated clearly. The info is basic and doesn't really stand out as anything to make it worth visiting.

Advertising and sponsorship 1
A couple of links at the end of each page. Not accepted design practice.

Self-promotion 1
None that I can see. There is no promotion of any kind, just a bunch of pictures that lead to basic pages.

Filler 0
None.

White-space 1
Far too much white space. The visitor doesn't find anything to hold interest whatsoever. Just a bunch of space...

Other 1
This site is amongst the worst sites I have seen. There is little information at all, the spelling is atrocious (as mentioned) and the overall design is poor.

Tips:

Offer some information of interest on the opening page. Just a few staggered pictures as links are not enough to hold the visitor's interest. The idea is to have something that nobody else does. This site does, but it's the fact that it is so bad, rather than for anything good.

Saturn

Lemme get a view of this.... Alright, well I will say this as a plus. It was nice to not go to a page and be blinded first thing. Thank you for at least having a background that doesn't make your viewers want to pluck their eyeballs out and put them in a bottle of healing juice.

However as nice as that might be for a change, it is STILL a badly tiled background. It is your typical "I used an embossing filter on an image, doesn't it look kewl?!" background... Whereas there was a time when it did look "kewl", it is now very old, outdated and just plain crappy looking.

The opening statement on the page is "Welcome to the Arctic Era's Sailor Moon home page, here you will find some of the information about Sailor Moon (and soon Ranma 1/2)." I thought this was a Sailor Moon site, so why is there going to be Ranma on here as well? Let me give this person a few hints... STICK WITH ONE THEME! If you are going to have Sailor Moon, then have Sailor Moon. If you are going to have an anime page in general, THEN you throw in Ranma, but do not combine the two and call it a Sailor Moon page. It just makes you look like an ass.

I am not sure if the banner below this is added by Geocities or the person themselves, but as Geocities tends to only add that annoying corner banner, I am guessing that this was added by them as it is a banner for "Promoting your site for free".... ahhh... no. It doesn't promote your site, nor is it free. Some of you are prolly scratching your heads, but really, is it free if you have to give out your friends email addresses or if you get horrid amounts of spam in your inbox everyday because of it? Do you consider that free? I know I surely don't.

Onto what appears to be content of this page...

Well it looks like this person used a page builder as there is a list here which was obviously not needed. By the way, link buttons/banners/images tend to be much better then bland old blue link text... It only takes two seconds to code in that extra line.... This person has also taken the liberties of putting a picture of Sailor Moon justified to the right of the page in this line for some reason.... though unless it is to practice some obscene mental warfare on us to think that this page might have some merit.... well I don't know what the hell it is for!

This line however is really weird in itself as the links that I mentioned above are for pictures of what appears to be normal every day people.... doesn't say if it is an "About Me" page or anything like that, just says "picture of ..." Really odd, but lemme click them to find out...uhm.... what the hell is this? What appears to be a school picture of some chick and then another picture of some guy in a tux..... weird people....

Moving on! The page now goes into some horrible set up where the "designer/pagebuilder user" has alternated between putting the "scout" links either justified to the left or the right. This is unreal. I mean imagine for somebody on a 1600x1200 resolution.... the images are going to be over 1000 pixels apart! This person obviously didn't think to.... well they just didn't think. That is obvious.... Not to mention that each picture has a link embedded in it (why didn't they use this earlier on the page?) but each of course has to have some text with it as well... The person's own comments at that.... Somebody remind me why somebody would do this again? Oh wait! No real web author would do any such thing as it is atrocious and annoying to say the least.

Ok, after clicking the "Moon" link, I don't really want to click anymore.... I mean that... Why you might ask? Well first off, the background on this page is nauseating to say the least.... They have used a "profile" that mixes the dub information with the sub, they have a damn scrolling browser bar that says "She is the one, Sailor Moon" (gets out the gun to stick in her own mouth for that one), and on top of that, they have done the one thing that I hate most about websites... they have added music to the site.... It is because of sites like these that I usually keep my speakers turned off these days or muted so that I only turn them on when needed....Thank you for proving what I do to be right as I don't want to hear a stupid midi playing on your profile... and I am willing to bet that it is that way for EVERY profile, but lets look.... shall we?

Ok, you know what? Just skip over the profile as they will hurt your brain, let alone your ears! I want to personally find this person and wring their neck!!! I loved clicking on Mercury and almost going deaf! If you ARE going to put music on individual pages, then please make sure that all of them are of the same calibur... and by that I mean that if you switch from page to page you don't have to change the volume! Also there is another bar here and this one is the worst one I have to say.... it says "Sailor Mercury RULES!" *fires the gun that was already in her mouth only to desperately find that it is jammed and she has to stay in this hell of a website for longer*

You know, I am not even going to guess what it says about my favorite Kings, but lemme look at this to make sure that I view at least a couple different things on the page....

GAH!!! DO NOT BRANDISH THE "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" SIGN EVER!!! Man, the only place I see more under construction signs then on Geocities pages is on a Michigan highway in the middle of summer... but both do have something in common... and that is that nobody is ever working on them! As is the case with this site *cringes*

Ok, so the villains page sucks, but I have seen worse. At least this page has a plain color background.... but what the hell are the rainbow bars for? I mean if you were promoting the relationship in the anime between Zoisite and Kunzite, I could understand but the fact that in the same sentence you refer to Zoisite as Zoicite, and the fact that "(s)he" is the third commander of the "negaverse" shows that you need to be hurt horribly. I am confused as to what you thought you would accomplish by this piece of garbage that you are considering information. And pleaes, if you are going to refer to the dub, then stick with the dub! Do NOT mix the sub information with the dub crap! Did I mention that the images on this page are horrible? I would think that in this day and age of computers you would be able to come up with something better then this!!!

The worst part of the villains page is that this person thought that we needed to be told that "Alan's flute is playing in the background, can you hear it?" Gee, lemme think... if my speakers were still turned on I would most likely here it, so why the hell did you need to take the time to ask me such a dumb question? Or are you THAT pathetic that you had to attention whore like that?

Uhm, excuse me, but I just clicked on the link for the "Sailor friends" and there is information on "Reni" (remember folks, the internet can teach one to spell something properly if you give a damn to look for it!) and "Molly", and pictures, yes JUST pictures of "Melvin". Where did HIS information go? Bar is moving once again... did I mention how much that bugs the hell outta me?

I am getting down to the bottom of this page and it has a link for "Our Sailor Moon and Other Anime Links Page".... well considering this page is based on the dub of SM, this isn't really an anime page now is it? That might be getting a bit too technical, but well, I am a purist I guess, so sue me.

OOOOOOOOHHHH!!! A broken image and an invitation to join some old ass Sailor Moon web ring..... point of advice, if the image doesn't work, most likely the pages affiliated with it don't work either.

(Move on Saturn.... you are just torturing yourself by spending more time on this....)

Email links, hosted by, guestbook (of course I will sign it!), and whoa... just whoa!

You know, I didn't look at this first off, but apparently this page was last updated in 1997. I commend you for keeping it up this long, but why make it if you aren't going to update it? I love the "Best viewed in Netscpe 3.0" bit. I haven't used Netscape since version 3.0 and I think back then I was also on AOL, what does THAT say?

Call the Arctic Era BBS? Since when do you have to call into a BBS? I am confused here folks.... severely confused... and I have been on the internet for many years....

Alright lemme sum this up... This website is bad, but by far, I have seen a lot worse (check "The Ugly" column if you don't believe me). I think the biggest problem with this page is that it is horribly outdated and it seems like the author has abandoned it for good. So sad, because I would love to pick apart a revised and up to date version *snicker* This one earned its way into "The Bad" column, but for somebody who has only seen the dub, this page does present a bit of information that would appease their dubby mind. Good luck to the author in whatever endeavors of web designdom that they might have moved onto. I hope it is/was better then this mess.

Uranus

This site's on Geocities, and there's a reason people pronounce the c as "sh." It's a haven of bad webpages. And the Arctic Era's Sailor Moon Page is no exception.

This website was last updated in March of 1997, and it looks like it. To put it in perspective, there's a button for Netscape 3.0. Ever find a moldy sandwich in a bag you forgot about seven years ago? Webpages age about as well. Maybe in '97 this was a tenable site, but now, it's here only for nostalgia value. The whole site is about as long as this review, and looks like it was slapped together in about 20 minutes.

Going from top to bottom, we start off with pictures of the site owners. Ah, this sends me back to my youthful days, when I thought "How cool is it that I can just click on the text and a picture pops up!" Now, it just seems egotistical. Many parts of this site are listed as "under construction." Geez, even highways don't take that long to build! (well, some of them)

Of course, we have the mandatory senshi profiles, complete with dollbox statistics. They don't have any glaring inaccuracies-the writers have obviously seen the show-but they do mix the North American dub with the original. And that's not a good thing. The site seems to want to teach people who have only seen the dub a little something about the real series, which might have been noble back then, but everyone knows this now. After that there's a webring link, and mention of a BBS (I'm quite sure dialing the number for it would not get me anything other than a long distance charge) and thankfully the page ends before I decide to bash my head through the monitor.

Close your eyes. Imagine you're a tiny piece of plastic, and you've just been magnetically charged, and housed in a nice case, and you're all set to roll off the assembly line. And you get sold to Geocities, and they write this piece of crap to your media. And then they force you to keep it for 7 and a half YEARS! Maybe we need a group called PETD-People for the Ethical Treatment of Diskspace-to campaign for the deletion of stuff like this. Let's be merciful and clean away this little abortion of a site so we stop wasting time and server space.

There is, I say, one good thing about every site, and for this one. . . well, at least they didn't spell it "artic."