Princess Serenity's Palace

Princess Serenity's Palace is a general multimedia site dedicated to the anime series Sailor Moon. This site has the makings of a pretty good art archive, and the author shows some creativity in the site's material. As with all new sites, PSP does need a bit of work to smooth out the rough edges.

When you first reach the site, you are greeted by a splash page that shows the main strengths of the site. The author got some graphics from a couple of good graphics shops and the selection was pretty good. The pink Usagi background makes more than one appearance throughout the site, and it's probably one of the better ones used in the site. The site overall is not hard on the eyes and it loads quickly, which is a plus in website design.

The potential problems don't show up until after you enter the site itself. Sometimes, good graphics authors figure that they can use as much space for a background as they want. Or perhaps the background is not quite suited to actual use. This is the case with the background used on the main page. This is a problem if you are using 800x600 resolution. At 1024x768, the problem is still there...basically, the navigation area and its graphic background clashes with the webpage background. My suggestion would be to use a background that doesn't simply fade into the white of the rest of the page. It may look good by itself, but the proper place for a background is in the background, not competing for attention from your material.

Some people like comet cursors, but a lot of people do not. They may need to be dropped.

Also, a big negative in any webpage is embedding a sound without putting something somewhere on the site that allows the user to turn the sound off.

While having a link to something may entice the user, it becomes an annoyance if the user clicks into an empty page. With that in mind, something should be done about the link to the fanfic area...either put some stuff there to keep the user's attention, or at least temporarily take out the link.

Those are the major problems that I saw when looking through the site. The author has taken the time to put some Sailor Moon music to video, which is something I don't think I've seen before, and she has demonstrated some graphics talent in the making of several collages.

One tip that might help on renovating the graphics so they fit better... Just because you get a line or a background from a graphics archive does not mean that you MUST use it in the form that you got it. A lot of those lines run right into the background image. Taking a look at the source code, I see that the material is set up to display in the left border of the cells of a table, so, I'd change that to a center alignment for the graphics, and if things still clash, then you can see about chopping part of the line out.

Other than that, I enjoyed my visit to PSP, and I think the site shows a lot of promise.

Artemis' Score: 6.6