Uranus

Welcome back, my friends, to another exciting installment of Sailor Uranus's review. Tonight, we look at Sailor Aurora's Sailormoon Webpage, which begins with a fairly nice background, sadly spoiled by the FortuneCity's ad banner. And then we scroll down to. . . Senshi profiles! Oh, good, I'm jumping for joy. :| <--See my smiling face?

Sadly, they're just the dollbox stats, not even a funny writeup for me to laugh at the innacuracy of. It doesn't help either theat all of the profile pages have tiled pictures of the respective senshi on them, and the text is in that senshi's color. Move along, folks, nothing to see here. . .

There's an archive of SM wavs here. These sound files are quite useful. . . if you're on a 386! Back when it was a novelty to hear the same sounds that came out of your TV come out of your computer. Now, unless you want to have Sailor Mars screaming "Mars Flame Sniper!" every time you empty your Recycle Bin, there's simply no use for them. Not when we have full-episeode video clips out there.

Lastly (Yay!) we have a fanfic. While not quite as omnipresent as the senshi profiles, the fanfic is a staple of the slapped-together webpage. Reading these fics makes me want to get a fake e-mail address and send messages to the authors saying, "We think your writing style is the wave of the future and want to offer you a cash advance on a novel." Just to screw with 'em. Sailor Aurora's is a poorly written attempt to make a fic seem like an episode, which, you know, it isn't. Screenwriting ain't easy, kids; let's leave it to the professionals.

So we have here a page that's Just Like All The Rest. Snore, stamp, move along. But I do like that background.

Neptune

Oi Oi what do we have here?! Only nice thing I see is the drawing of "Sailor Aurora". Everything else is just like all the other sites I've seen so far. The background is blah. The senshi repeating and repeating. This is getting boring.

Links: Looks like another site with Senshi profiles. However, this site has all of the Senshi including the Starlights. First up is Pluto.

Again poor choice for a background. Same image of Pluto from an artbook repeating and repeating..Something different here. The image being used for the profile is from the Manga. Nice change. The profile is that of the Japanese version. Again that's a plus from other sites.

For Uranus it's the same as before minus the manga picture of Uranus for the profile. This also goes for Neptune, Mercury, ChibiMoon, Jupiter, Moon, Mars, Venus, StarFighter. Saturn is like Pluto's page. The other Starlights have nothing on them other then a background. One page isn't even titled (says "Untitled Doc"). Also the backgrounds for all profiles repeat.

Media section: All that's here are various WAVs from the series. Mainly the Japanese version. No credit I see as to where she got them from. If she did them herself she should state so.

She is also starting a fanfiction but since I'm not an avid fanfiction reader I'm not going to bother with it.

All that's left are links to webrings.

Something that should be on here is a credits page. If she didn't make the WAV files then she needs to state were she got them. Most sites I see here don't have a single credits page. What's up with that?

Not a bad site but everything repeats. And I do mean everything!

Pluto

Breakdown of site 15/100

Welcome and site Identity 2
It's a shame a lovely picture is spoiled by the tiled background. The information should be the focus, not the background, no matter how lovely the pictures.

Navigation 1.5
Not very easy to follow, the links are tiny and hard to read.

Content of Interest 2
Nothing that isn't found on better, easy to read websites. The backgrounds again, are overshadowing the information and there isn't enough contrast between the text and background to actually be able to read it.

Advertising and sponsorship 1.5
too many advertisements, even for a free site.

Self-promotion 1.5
Too many webrings, presumably owned by the person or his/her friends. The site is not really worth being in a webring as it stands.

Filler 2
The site doesn't have much to recommend it, there are a few images scattered around, a few wav files and a fanfiction story.

White-space 2
Space too full of the background which is very hard on the eyes.

Other 0
Some design tips:

The background should never overshadow the information. Fade it until you can barely see it, and NEVER use a tiled background. Tis just too tacky for words.

Put interesting information on your website. Basic stuff will only get you so far. You need to make your site worth visiting over and over, and from what I can see, it's not even worth visiting once.

Learn html code and do your own websites. It looks like a tacky attempt at a premade or something like it and it just doesn't work. To have a really classy site, you need to code it yourself, ideally by hand, but even a program like Dreamweaver can help if you know how to use it properly. There are tons of websites out there with amazing tips on how to design and code your own websites, and if I can do it, you can.

Saturn

What is in this page.... Ok, well thank you once again for not blinding me upon first inspection. The background is a badly tiled one, but it is faded so that upon initial viewing your eyes don't want to bleed. THANK YOU FOR THIS!

The first thing on this page is a fanart drawing of what appears to be a fanfiction soldier. The drawing is nice but it looks like you could have brightened it up a bit. She looks dirty in comparison to the page as if she was smudged or something. The title is to the left of the character, and I will admit whereas I have seen a lot of bad, good, and sometimes weird stuff in this area, this one is not bad. Though if you are on a smaller resolution, it will appear to look a bit like a splash page. I am curious however as to what happened to Sailor Aurora's feet? They are abruptly cut off a bit higher then the ankle.... I am not a art critic, but having done a bit of web designing in my time, I can ask this... why didn't this web author think to blend it at all? Make it look like it trails off instead of coming to an abrupt end.... oh well, like how many licks it takes for a Tootsy Pop, "the world may never know".

Followed vertically down the page there is a broken image and some links but above the broken image, it says "Click on a Senshi to see her profile." Well I am guessing that there was some image map here at one time, so lemme look....source code reveals as such, but man do I feel sorry for whatever program generated that.... wow... that was a long set of coordinates!

Well thankfully this person was kind enough to put text links along with the image map so that underneath you can click your link as the image is broken. However I am curious a to the order of the links. Unless they were going with the order in the image, there is no reason to put them in this order. But I have seen stranger things, so this doesn't really surprise me.

Underneath these profiles are links for "Sailor Moon Wavs" and "Introduction to my Fanfic". Luckily this person is spared of my review of fanfiction as I won't do it, but Sailor Moon Wavs I HAVE to look at eventually. I will be getting to that in a few minutes.

Lets finish off what seems to be the front page before I assess content.

This person goes on to include some html code for a link banner.... ok....but being on Fortunecity for a host translates into little bandwidth, so why in the hell would you allow them to direct link the image?! Oh wait, nobody would want to link to this mess of a site! So you don't care about bandwidth.... MOVING ON!

Below this is your standard guestbook (guess what I will do! No really! Guess!) There is an email link to comment about their fanfic. I am pondering the point of having this other then for a shameless reason to put your email address on this miserable site. The biggest thing that I see that bothers me is below all of this....

You can count them yourself if you are brave enough to waste your time with this site, but there are FIVE webrings that this person either belongs to or is advertising for. I can understand being a part of a webring. I can understand starting one, but not being on FIVE of them. That just says that you can't get hits any other way! Also, be honest people (Maybe I will set up a poll on this...), how many of you actually view the other sites in a webring? I know that to this day I never have.... not even once. Why you might ask? Well frankly it is because of fear... fear that I might run into one of the many sites that blinds me on a regular basis....

Alright, the last line by this person on the website is "Take any image you want from my pages, I got them from other webpages and they aren't technically mine. But, any references to or images of Sailor Aurora ARE; I created her, I drew her, I scanned her- she's MINE! So I don't wanna see her on any of your pages, got it?!..Unless you give me credit and have a link to my page! ;p" Ok, folks, I doubt anybody on those other pages that took the time to do imaging or what not gave her permission to take those images, but it wouldn't kill her to credit her sources instead of just saying "I got them for other websites" Once again people, it leads back to the fact that just because it is on the internet, does not mean that you can just take it. It is like going into a grocery store and you see something you like, you don't just take it and walk out now do you? So why do it online? Point taken? Good!

I will make one more comment about this line. I have seen more then one Sailor Aurora on the web, so any reference to her, does NOT belong to this girl, but every person that has created a Sailor Aurora. Hell just because I created Sailor Andromeda, Vega, Sirius, and Draco years ago in my fic doesn't mean that I own any rights to them! It just means that I put them into a story! Get over it web author! There are so many fanfiction soldiers out there that yours is NOTHING special.... REALLY!

Alright, onto content... Lemme get to one of these links I mentioned earlier...ACK! SON OF A *BEEP*! Alright, your page just went from tolerable to obnoxious! More badly tiled backgrounds... this time those "pillar" images of the soldiers. (Not sure if that is their "technical" name, but it is what I have come to call them over the years.) But the worst part is the black and white transparent gif of Pluto right in the middle *cringes* a grainy badly cut out gif at that.... Typical cookie cutter profile, and I am thankful at least for the back link that this person has provided at the bottom. But the background and bad image have me dreading clicking any more links, but I shall to check for consistancy and such.

Alright here is the problem, this person has used the "pillar" image series for backgrounds. Yes they are faded and that is nice, but I can't read the text on Neptune's page. I have to highlight it to read it! This doesn't bode well. I understand you wanted to be cute and have the text color the same as the soldier's uniform color, but damn, at least make it readable.... This is shaping up for a nasty side to my review... and I was doing so well!

Ok, most of the profiles are the same. Appearance wise, they are not friendly on the eyes, they all contain some wav or another of the character's attack, though why I have no idea, but upon entering the Moon page, I was officially blinded again! This web author didn't stick with the pillar image for Moon, but rather thought it would be fun to use an image that looks great as a normal image, but as a tiled background, it looks like somebody was eathing ambrosia salad and then threw up everywhere on the page....in fact after looking at this, I think I will go throw up.

I won't even get started on the Starlight pages.... lets just say if you want to be punished some more, go view them. I am wondering what the point of this page was really as there isn't much content. I mean there aren't any image galleries. No music. There are some wavs (That are poor quality for the most part.), and a fanfiction, but I am truly trying to figure out the point of this page.

It has earned its place in the bad column easily. But lemme say this to anybody thinking of building a page. Give us some content worthwhile! Most pages that I view seem to have all the same content with very little that is unique. I know you can do better then this people, now show me as such. This one is going to be sealed in "The Bad" column as I doubt the author is going to actually come back to this mess.