May 12, 2007
Layout
A rather ambiguous and generic layout to what your site is based on. Perhaps you could use one of the images of the manga covers or game menu screenshots as the basis for a layout picture to make it not so bland and generic, so that visitors will know exactly what the topic of your site is. The rollover on the menu is a nice interactive addition, but the images are rather low quality and the fonts are mismatched. Having mismatched fonts and low quality images really brings down the quality of a site in general when a visitor visits. An issue that affects your navigation is the lack of distinction between your word links and bolded words. Yes, there is a distinction when you rollover the link, but when a visitor is browsing your site, it becomes really ambiguous which are just bolded words and which are actual links. You asked that I give suggestions on best ways to present your content: currently you use frames, which is an older technique. I would suggest you use PHP in combination with DIVs or Tables to showcase all the content you have to offer instead of having to rely on set frames (examples courtesy of Aethereality.net: here and here). If your visitor uses a resolution smaller than 800x600 they won't be able to navigate your site properly because your navigation frame will be overlapped by your content frame.

This is fine. I've always known the layout was bland. I hope that this isn't a negative view of frames, because frames are still a completely functional and reliable method for webdesign. (I used to do things in frames just to show people that I could replicate almost anything they had using it). The main problem is that the amount of content I have no longer fits well into a 800x600 resolution.
I was also wondering why the images were considered low quality. I use 2560 x 1600 resolution and they look fine to me. They don't look extremely blocky or blurry like low quality JPGs do. I popped it back into Photoshop and it actually looks like I put them on Medium quality. Here is an example between the difference of Low, Medium and High. The majority of my images are on Medium (because the filesize of High is also much larger). To say that they're low quality suggests that they're horribly blocky.
I'm considering the PHP and DIV layout, because even though I'm not crazy about DIVs I do use them for the translation part of the site. I have a few ideas that I'll need to figure out how to implement.
I'll also find a way to change the links and the bolded text.

Main
The first title is in Japanese. What if your visitor doesn't speak Japanese? Since this site is English based translation, you might want to start with an English greeting. If you prefer to start with a Japanese greeting try using katakana instead of the actual symbols so that if a visitor first enters your site and doesn't have the Japanese Character Encoding that they'll still understand your first greeting and/or first impression of your site. A good introduction paragraph on what your site is based on. To showcase what you're currently working on, completed (completed/translating) can be organized on a separate page so that your main page doesn't look so cluttered. A separate page or an actual link in your navigation column on things you need help on translating with and donations can also clean up your introduction page. By having the Help and Donate on your navigation column you will have the links on every single page that your visitor goes on, which makes your visitor more aware of those two important category links.

The title isn't in Japanese. It just says "Hello". There's something pretty important overlooked here that I'm not going to blame you for not knowing, but I'll explain it.
The site's main content is dedicated to BL games. It always has been. The only reason scanlations are up at all is because other sites wouldn't put them up. BL games are still a niche market; not a lot of people are familiar with them.
If you play BL games, you must have Japanese installed, up and running. BL games will not play if you don't have Japanese installed and set up. I do explain this at the bottom of the page. I may move the text down to go right above that paragraph.
Also, I don't think you quite understood what you said. You asked me to type it in Katakana, which would look like this "コンニチハ". I think what you meant was Roomaji. As a translator I really hate Roomaji and discourage its use; people who are learning any Japanese should learn the alphabet first. I can't tell you how much I hate it when people blab at me in Roomaji and expect me to translate it; they have no idea how much context is lost, not to mention how often they misspell things or leave out long vowels! It doesn't matter if they can read it or not; it just matters that they can see it so that they know their Japanese is installed. Originally I did this for myself. It was a very quick and easy way to check that I had my Japanese text by putting it on the front page. I didn't explain it until later, but I'll move the text over the explanation.
In other words, I know one thing about people who are playing BL games: They have Japanese set up. If they don't the game will crash and they can't play anyway. Someone who isn't going to the BL games section doesn't have to worry about this.
I don't think I'll move the stuff off the front page because I really don't see a need to. I don't feel like those things deserve their very own page. I may move things around a little and update some of the text, and remove things that aren't necessary anymore.

Silver Chaos Entering this section, I honestly felt that your sections were named incorrectly, misleading and/or ambiguous. A small summary of what each link was would be very helpful to a visitor i.e. Summary - an introduction to Silver Chaos the game; Menus - interactive screen-caps images of the game menu; Translations - entire translated storyline of the game Silver Chaos; etc. It would also be helpful if there was a small introduction on what Silver Chaos was about as in what you did for the other series pages.

I may switch this around and add the descriptions. I made the introduction to give people a brief overview, but I don't think I ever did a summary of the entire game. I'm going to weigh whether that'd actually be helpful or not (since there are so many variations on what can happen in the story, a summary would have to be vague).

Summary- This is really an interesting way to present the summary to the game. But is it an introduction rather than a summary of the game? I enjoyed how you used the actual images of the character that is talking. Are these actual and accurate translations? i.e.
Adonis - fugnuggets

I hope that's not accurate! You have a point about the title of the section.

Menus- What exactly is the point of this section? Is it just to show the visitor what the main menu of the game looks like?

I was a little confused about this question. I always thought it was obvious - The menus are translations of the menus. I could make a text-based list of what the menus say, but I don't think that'd be as effective as showing images of what the people will actually see and showing them the translations of each button. Especially when you look at the menus under Eternal Fantasia.

Translations- I liked how there was a layout transition for this section.

Silver Chaos: Eternal Fantasia- On the mini quiz page, to better organize each stage so that your visitors won't have to scroll so much, try putting them on different pages or you can also use an alink menu technique (how to use alinks/page anchors).

I use alinks all over the place for footnotes, so I don't really need the guide but I'll put them in there.

Silver Chaos Novel- A good section that shows the cover of the novel and tells us a little bit about the authors.

I have the beginning translations up, but I never finished it (translating a novel takes a long time!)

Game Options- Instead of using ?? to create circle bullets that will only appear if someone is using Japanese encoding use <ul type="circle"><li>link</li></ul> which will show up universally.

I have a good reason for not doing this. Firstly, as I said above, if you're playing a BL game you have Japanese. Secondly, the filesize of this document is enermous. Even after trimming it over and over it's still nearly 200KB, and it's a text file. Adding all of that text would not only take forever (even if I did do a "replace all", which could possibly stall several programs) but add a huge amount to the filesize. So I'm going to leave it as is, and trust that people who care about that section are actually trying to play the game.

Kyou Kara Maou
Because this section is linked differently than Silver Chaos, having your introduction of the different named series of Kyou Kara Maou would be helpful to the visitor if it was on the top of the page instead of at the bottom. Again I enjoyed how for your translation pages that the layout changes.

It's actually linked the same. Silver Chaos goes directly to the game. If you click on "Oresama Quest", you also be linked directly to a game with the same options. Kyou Kara Maou is mainly a novel series, so it doesn't have things like "Game Options" to put up. I'm going to leave the explanation at the bottom because those are only notes. They're not particularly important, and only refer to the book titles. I only put them on there because it's easier than putting it on all 17 pages for each and every book. It's not really an introduction of anything; it just explains why translations of the titles can be so weird.

Patalliro!
Again move your introduction to the top of the page, so that visitors have a bit of an insight on what you actually translated, or just a plain introduction to the page in general.

I think a lot of what I view as important and what you view as important are quite different. A lot of things you ask me to move up or give its own page I consider "notes" or "footnotes". I stick them at the bottom because I don't think they're very important at all and consider it more "If anyone happens to care". I may make some actual introductions or summaries, but what I stick at the bottom of the page isn't that.

Shinesman
Same as above.

Other Manga
To make this section more organized you can again use the alink/anchor page menu so that visitors can easily navigate around to the different manga you have translated, without scrolling so much. I enjoyed how you did include the covers to the manga as well as your own summary and thoughts about the manga.

I'm not too worried about this for right now. If I add a lot more things I might.

Extras
This is a really great section for aspiring translators. Great job. Again as I mentioned in the layout section the problem with your links looking exactly the same as your bolded words is somewhat a problem since a visitor won't know that it's a link until they roll over the actual words. The "Download IME for Japanese fonts" leads to an unavailable link. "Beautiful Soup" leads to a broken link.

This is probably my most disorganized section where I put almost anything that doesn't fit elsewhere. Unfortunately, the IME page seems to move a lot. I went through the trouble of finding it again and now it's moved. Well, I've updated it again.

Staff
By typing out your full email is a potential SPAM hazard. Instead you can just put Email instead of typing your full email. This is a good section if your visitors want to know about the person behind all the translation.

SPAM can be reported to ISPs, and I highly encourage it. If you show the full header of an e-mail and take the IP address, you can go to sites like APNIC and find out who their ISP is. Some ISPs are famous for being unreliable, and those IP addresses can be blocked.
I've always hated when I used a browser e-mail and people didn't have the e-mail typed out so that I could copy and paste it easily, so I'm going to leave it typed out. I'm fully capable of dealing with SPAM.

Overall
It's obvious that you put quite a lot of effort in translating all of these games, along with the exuberant amount of pages it takes up to post each part of the game. I thoroughly enjoyed not having found any grammar or spelling mistakes as well as finding links to all your credited sources/help. There are quite a few ways that you can organize the site better as I noted before with a better navigational layout, higher quality images, and simplified navigation with explanations. Good luck with your translations and I hope that this review was able to give some insights on how to make your site more functional and organized as you requested.

I think you give a lot of good suggestions in that there are things I'm going to follow and others that I'm considering. As a capable webauthor myself, I hope I was able to provide thorough explanations of things that I disagreed with, or simply my reasoning for why I valued a different solution. As anyone knows, webdesign is a balance of things like functionality, creativity and fundamentals like loading time, and some people may just prefer one over another and not necessarily be right or wrong. Not following a suggestion doesn't necessarily mean it was bad or wrong, but rather that I prefered something else.
Right now I have the challenge of designing a page that will look acceptable in 800 x 600 and still have a grace to it. When I see the size of 800 x 600 compared to my normal resolution, it's hard to believe people still use something so small! I can fit this window on my screen almost 16x over!

(Notes: The author e-mailed me about these comments. While it was a fair point that I didn't read "smaller than 800 x 600". She then made an odd note... "Yes I read you use a much higher resolution on your own computer, but currently 80-90% of visitors on the web still use 800x600.".
I did tell her that the statistics in 2004 showed that less than 20% used 800 x 600, and a little less than 60% used 1024 x 768, and that chances are even less people would use 800 x 600 these days. If you're still checking up on stuff, don't take things so overly serious. When you try so hard and quote things so incredibly far off like that, you lose some credibility. It's better to be more light-hearted about it. I didn't e-mail you commentary. I didn't shove it in anyone's face. I didn't even put the link to your site on this part of the page, so you came back and looked to see if I had made commentary. I left it there for if you wanted to see it; and since you came back looking for it you obviously did.

I must say that other than this particular author I have found that WPRs these days take it very seriously if you dare to suggest something other than what they say. I used to own a WPRR, and back then I would say all kinds of things about different WPRs. I think the only complaint I remember was that someone didn't think I was harsh enough on something (which I think they were right on that).
Nowadays if you go to a WPR and suggest something - no matter how simple - it's a huge drama. Why? It wasn't so dramatic before (well, it was, but not about that).
There is no reason to be offended by people commenting. I honestly don't understand why it's taken so personally. I'll provide an example:
Let's say that I'm with a friend, and we're going to go out to dinner. I know of a shirt that I think is a nice shirt.
I could make the simple suggestion of, "Hey, why don't you wear that blue shirt?"
I'd essentially expect one of two responses. Either they would respond along the lines of, "Oh, sure, that's a good idea", or they would provide me with some reasoning that they weren't taking my suggestion, such as, "Oh, that one doesn't fit me very well."
Nowhere in there is there an insult. There's no reason to get upset. There's nothing saying that anything was wrong with the original suggestion.
In my view, it's great as a designer to have many alternative ideas of how people think. That's exactly the reason why you ask for a review from a WPR; you want alternative views. So I think one of the nicest things to do is to provide feedback. It could be possible that the person didn't know or didn't think about you're response, and they could learn something they didn't know before.
I would hope that it's possible to do that these days without people taking it as an insult.


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