I imagine one of the things people often want to ask a WPR is "How do you go about reviewing webpages. People who aren't too keen on WPRs in the first place will often comment on a WPR's seeming lack of qualifications to review a webpage, as if there's a WPR college somewhere...

When you go into a restaurant and have a meal, or when you go to a movie, at the end of these events, you have an opinion on what happened. Was the meal worth the money you spent on it? Was the movie enjoyable?

WPRs are like restaurant or movie reviewers. The Amazoness Quartet says pretty much the same thing on their intro page. The only difference between the AQ and most of the other reviewers is their rather unique approach to reviewing. The AQ receives nominations from people who think this or that page needs to be hauled out behind the woodshed and given thirty lashes with a cattle whip. The AQ are the ones wielding the whip, and they do a good job of it. In defense of the AQ, let me say that the pages that get nominated generally deserve what they get. You don't think so? Well, go to their page and take a look at some of the "winners" that have made their reviews.

But I digress. The AQ reviews through nominations. For the most part, the rest of us are like Gene Siskel..we review whatever comes along. Every so often, I check the guestbooks and see who has made an entry. Then I send a note to the other members of The Three Cats and tell them we have such and such sites asking for a review.

The difference between WPRs and movie or restaurant reviewers is WPRs are not paid to do their jobs, which means that we do it because we like what we do. We like checking out other SM sites and we like giving constructive criticism. As soon as that becomes less than enjoyable, the page will stop updating...not that I see that happening in the near future, mind you...

OK then...to the point of my rant, I mean, article. How do I review pages? Well, rather than simply TELL you...let me show you... Let me find a site, and I'll do a review of it right here, and what I'll do is walk you through the process as I do it...

Checking my submit bin, I see that most of my entries have been done, so off I go to the LFHQ's links section and into the link lists area. What I am doing at this point is picking a semi-random page while giving the LFHQ a few plugs on various link lists. At Rini's Top SM Sites, I find a site called "Rini's Place", which has been plucked from the list and displayed as the "Site of the Moment". Sounds interesting, and the banner looks neat, so we have our site.

At this point, I get a sheet of paper and a pen. I write the name of the site at the top of the page, and then two areas are set aside for "Good" and "Bad" points of note. Then I am ready to review the page.

Ok, now we get to the entry page and disable the frame that the link list throws at the top of the page. The page appears to be new. Experienced people tend to stay away from collaged tiled backgrounds. Also, the counter appears to be newly-installed. However, all that this does is change my approach slightly. I am more inclined to give this author a bit more slack than if I see evidence of advanced HTML or script use.

Anyway, at this point, there is this collage background and a purple-colored text. There is a clipped picture that looks okay, and one possible problem at the bottom, an embedded MIDI with no controls for the user. According to the source, it will auto-start and loop. (The terminal I am at has it's sound card disabled.) The source says there is a sound control, but I don't see it on the page. So this is marked in the Bad column and we continue.

The picture of Chibusa and Pegasus is the entry gate, so I click into the main page. The main page looks basically like the splash...same background and purple colored font...and a bunch of CAPS talking about the schedule changes on the Cartoon Network. Perhaps this should be more organized. As it is right now, it seems that the author says hello, THEN STARTS SHOUTING AT YOU LIKE THIS!!! So, we'll put that in the Bad column along with a note to ask about perhaps modifying either the font or the background because it's beginning to look a bit "busy" and we continue.

At the bottom of the page, you have your standard newbie-like navigation. Make a note to ask about perhaps making the navigation a little neater and off we go into the links.

The picture gallery is a contrast. There are a lot of pics there (a good thing), but they look like they were simply thrown into the gallery on top of a background that is trying really hard to draw attention to itself, which is a no-no. Two minor Bads, and one Good here.

Next I check out the Links area, noting that the author has a lot of attractive link banners and buttons, which I throw into the Good column, and then I check out the Profiles area.

Ok, that I WANT ALL THE ATTENTION background is competing with the purple text, making it hard to read, a bad thing. The profile itself is a string of your common profile facts...blood type, favorite foods, attacks, that sort of thing. No personal opinions or insights at all...something that I note down in a new section called "Tips".

Oh COOL! They have a message board and a chat area. Giving users a chance to get together and yak is a good thing, and this is a section that is not having to compete with that rather brutish background.

There's another photo gallery, this time consisting of group pics. Not a bad idea, but perhaps the author can develop the galleries a bit more and then section them off into "rooms" instead of having two links to two galleries off from the main page. (another tip) Again the brutish background problem rears its head, this time with a background that renders the purple text almost totally unreadable. At that point, the background issue becomes the big thing to point out in the part of the review where I discuss what needs to be improved upon. However, this gallery, like the other one, has a pretty good selection of pics, and this fact will get a strong mention in the part of the review where I give credit to the author for doing a good job.

The "SM Dropping Story" is a link to an SOS short clip on the dropping of Sailor Moon from Toonami, so that's it for the content.

Ok, now we look at the paper and we see that there are more Bad points than Good points. At this point, the larger issues come into play. This is very possibly a newbie web author. And that brings up the fact that there was not an overload on the eyecandy or scripts, which would tend to drag down the page. Only one picture in the links area loaded slowly, and that really doesn't tell me that the page was slow-loading, so I make a note in the Good column to mention that.

Then we come to the score. The things in the bad column really detract from the page, but again, this is a newbie. I don't want to drive this person from the fun that coding a web page can be. So I pretty much settle on 6 as the first number in the score. The second number is a really good indicator of my outlook toward the page, since 6 and the low 7s are basically newbie territory, 7 and 8 are where you'll find people who have cut their teeth a bit on page design, and the 9s are for the people who have been around a long while and should know better than to make the mistakes that they used to make.

Here's a secret folks, I generally do not give out scores of 5.whatever or below. The only way a page will get such a score is if they not only do a lot of the things a newbie does, but also do a few more things...things that when combined will tick me off. And from the way I approach webpages, it takes quite alot to tick me off, and usually I will be unable to keep that from coloring my review.

This is not one of those times. The mistakes on this page are the mistakes of a person new to HTML who is expressing her support of Sailor Moon. So, I open up Notepad, and begin to write the review. The second number of the score will resolve itself as I write.

The finished review

And that in short, is how I do my reviews, and very little changes when I combine what I do with the work that the other members do. The only change there is that I get to read their reviews before they are posted and the reverse is not true, and what happens there is I find out what pages they reviewed, and I go visit. I go through the same process as I did for the review I did here and I write the review and assign the score. Then I go read the reviews that the other members did, and if I read something that I noticed before, I adjust my score up or down a few tenths of a point. In case you are thinking that I am easily swayed and that this has a major effect on my scores, in the case of the reviews for May, of the three that were done, I changed my score down .4 on ONE of them.

So, there you have it. That is how I review webpages. As you can see, I use my own ideas of what looks good and what does not. If I run into information, I check to make sure it's accurate. And unless my browser lets out howls of pain from loading the page, that's it.

What sets me and other WPRs apart from the average person in the SM community is that I (and we as reviewers in general) take the time each month to do a few reviews. My mission is two-fold: to show you websites that you may not normally go to and allow you to make the decision based on my observations on whether or not you want to invest your time to go there, and to give kudos to the author for the good things I find on their site, and advice on how to fix the things that could use fixing. While doing this, I use the "treat others as you would like to be treated" filter, and generally, I think my reviews, and the reviews of the Three Cats as a whole come out very nicely because we all follow pretty much that same motto.

Check out our reviews and see if this is not true.

Artemis

MAU Madness #1: John Rocker and Yam Head
MAU Madness #2: Summer and My Thoughts on the New Dub
MAU Madness #3: Professional Wrestling...or Daytime TV For Kids
MAU Madness #4: We've Been REVIEWED!
MAU Madness #5: In Tribute (A tribute to Small Lady)