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Angel Dreams Forever is a dual-purpose anime site which does site reviews and contains information on various anime series. In the guestbook entry, the web author says she is looking for a place to improve and not sure of where to start. We shall hopefully helpfully assist. When the user first enters the site, he or she is met with a green splash screen, which does its duty...Hiya, this is my site, here are the screen requirements, with a nice anime pic at the top. Click on the anime pic to enter the site... The Christmas version of ADF features a nice anime pic with people gathered around a Christmas tree, wrapping presents and decorating the house. All of the sitey stuff is off to the right of this pic, and the web author has been quite creative in her code in having the site open up in a small browser window that fits the site content. On the one hand, this is pretty nice, but there are a couple problems as we shall note below... I decided to save the review of the WPR material for a bit later, as I have promised to review such sites, but I haven't started that yet... The anime related material are nice as far as they go. There isn't very much there...the obvious solution is to develop more anime content. What is there appears to be limited to Sailor Moon at the moment...again, this is solved by adding more content. There is a bit of dub/original mixing of information in the profiles, and the profiles don't tell me anything I don't already know... These are two really old problems that pop up time and again in webpages. Let's go over them in-depth: 1): DUB/ORIGINAL MIXING - The history of Sailor Moon is that originally it was a shoujo anime called "Bishoujo Senshi Sailormoon", released in Japan as a manga by Naoko Takeuchi in 1992, following the successful release of "Codename wa Sailor V" the year before. Like the majority of anime-style manga, the Sailor Moon series is very successful and is almost immediately pressed into animation production. The entire series of 200 episodes and three movies was produced and featured in Japan. At some time in the mid 1990s, DiC picked up the official liscense to produce an english translation of Sailormoon for audiences in the United States. (There was already a translation running in Canada.) Thus the NA dub of Sailor Moon was born. The original dub ran until DiC lost the liscensing rights, which were then picked up by Pioneer, who produced the last two seasons of the series to be translated, and all three of the movies. That's Sailor Moon history in a very short and abridged nutshell... The problem with dub/original mixing comes with the fact that in order to make the series attractive to young kids in America, the producers at DiC did what every producer of anime does to the product...introduce some American culturations into the mix to allow the audience to better undestand and relate to the characters. Thus Usagi became Serena, Ami became Amy, Rei became Raye, and so on. As the series progresses, some rather objectionable topics get raised, so Dic brought out the editing scissors and *VOILA* Zoisite, the male love interest for Kunzite becomes Zoycite, the female love interest for Malachite. And there are even worse instances of this sort of thing the further you go into the series... To the die-hard original fan, what DiC did to the series ranged from distasteful and stupid to something akin to blasphemy. At the heyday of the Sailor Moon community, the purists and the dub fans were very active and were always debating why the dub was not so bad, or why the dub was the work of Satan...I kid you not about the rhetoric that surrounded this issue. So, you can see why the mixing of the information is such a big thing to the purists. BUT... While the mixing of information can be confusing, and I would say that going with either the original or the dub exclusively would be the best thing to do, do not be afraid to go with the dub. The overall popularity of Sailor Moon has died down over the past couple years, and the rhetoric has died as well, so a page telling the American fan about the series would be better received than it would had this site started two years ago. 2): PROFILE INFORMATION - This is one topic that comes up over and over again in my reviews. I am not blaming anyone for the way profiles are done simply because each person in their own world, gets the profile information from somewhere and puts it on a webpage, thinking that they have done an in-depth job of dredging up information on the Sailors. This would not be bad if five out of every one-hundred people did this... The thing is, ninety of every one-hundred people do exactly the same thing, so the profiles have no staying power on a webpage. There is nothing there that makes me want to hang out and explore the page more, and in order to get people to thoroughly go through your page and participate in your online world, you have to give the user a reason to stay on your page and not click off to some other site... Now, this is the last time I am giving this information on an individual basis, because the next time, I will simply point to my tutorials and say GO THERE, because I have been doing this for three or four years now, and I know people who have been doing this for longer, and we all say the same things... In terms of profiles pages, what grabs people is something more than the simple information that can be found on almost every other Sailor Moon page in existence. I don't need blood type and birthdays. Heck, I have a book that tells me all of that. What I want is some of that information PLUS some insights from the author of the website. I would hope that in order to have done a website about Sailor Moon, you would have seen a few episodes, and perhaps formed an opinion or two about the series or some of the characters. Tell us, the viewer, about your opinions. Believe it or not, people want to know what the webmaster thinks about the characters of the series. End of lecture. There is only a minor problem on the main page with the top navigation sitting RIGHT on top of the picture below it, but other than that, the site looks good. Again, the best way to improve the site would be to add content, which should be an easy fix. Good luck and have fun with the site. :) Artemis' Score: 7.0 |
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