This is an evaluation of angelnetcast.com, a website created and maintained by Angel Valentine.

Positives

I LOVE THIS SITE. I LOVE THIS SITE A LOT. Every time I open it I find something cool. Angel's site is seriously an inspiration for me. It's got a lot of features I'd like to implement on my own website.

Personality

The 3DS landing page. With slanted text. 3DS music. Come on. That's so cool.

The about page is so cool too. Looks to be Windows 7 inspired if I had to guess. It's a little too empty for my tastes but my own website is designed to look like Windows XP so I know how difficult getting those styles accurate is. She did a really good job with that part and it looks to me she didn't use images to accomplish it either. A few others did it like that and the result just isn't that good.

Most of the website is formatted pretty consistently, and since the palette is limited, it's very easy on my eyes.

Layout

The layout on the main page is well-designed and it doesn't feel crowded. The simple grid background is an excellent choice to keep something interesting without distracting from the main content. There's lots of neat little boxes with their own neat little things. It looks like she used "display: grid" to accomplish this, and that's something I really need to fiddle with sometime. Seems a lot simpler than what I've been doing, haha.

Like I said before, the formatting between most pages (aside from the about page, which is a purposeful outlier I think) is pretty consistent. The colors are harmonious and easy on my eyes.

Accessibility

It's been a little while since I checked in on this site, and it looks like Angel has decided to put her focus into making the website accessible! That's great! She noted in particular that she's using this website to check how accessible her site is, and notes that she hasn't tested for keyboard navigability or screenreader compatibility. She notes she wants to add a proper light theme (a very tricky thing to do! I saw some code for it in console), make a toggle for the moving background, and make gifs only play on hover.

Also, she noted she added alt text for all images, specified languages, and designated page areas. Good! Cool!!

Sources

Angel lists the resources and programs she used to make her site among other things. I just think that's nice, since a lot of artists can be a bit gatekeepy about what they use to make their stuff. It's nice, I think, to share information like this.

Negatives

Accessibility

It's not hard to tell that Angel has a few blindspots here, even her disclaimer about keyboard navigability and screenreader compatibility aside. The tab order is very strange. I understand why it jumps to navigation first, but I think if Angel wants navigation to appear first in the tab order, it should also be among the first things you see - not something you have to scroll down to find. The tab order also completely skips several boxes, in particular the one that says where to email her.

Layout

Although I do like the layout, on more text-heavy pages it can be... kind of a lot. Her links page is a somewhat egregious example. It's hard to figure out what I want to focus on because everything seems to take the same amount of priority. I think a more traditional organizational system might work better here.

Professionalism

Not that Angel's site isn't professional, but I think shhe could do a bit better. My main sticking point is the lack of capitalization, and the email she lists on the main page... isn't really an email? She writes it as "angelnetcast dot com" when a) that's the url of the website, b) it's, again, not formatted like an email, c) she lists a different bit of text as her email (angelnetcast.protonmail.com), and d) shows she knows how to format these types of contacts when she lists her Windows Live Messenger. It's inconsistent, annoying, and a lot of email things have a link you can open to directly email them. And nevermind the inconsistencies, none of these are tabbable.

Another problem is the wavy underline she uses to emphasise text. Maybe it's the color, maybe it's because it's wavy, but it makes it read like a lot of content on her page is misspelled or has incorrect grammar or something. That's usually where that underline pops up.

Gallery

I like the gallery. I like that I can scroll to zoom in and out. I don't like getting flashbanged by a blinding white lightbox on a dark-theme website.

Firefox Compatibility

Angel stresses, rightly I feel, that her website is designed for Firefox and might not look right on other browsers. It's also not designed for mobile. I feel like for the layout she's put together, a mobile layout shouldn't be horrific to implement, but then again, you could say the same to me and I'd say to shut up it's not that simple. Given all that she's implemented though, I think she could pull it off.