Where to begin? I suppose at the beginning would be a good idea....

First off, I'd like to say that I'd like to admire anyone that likes Fushigi Yuugi enough to put the time and effort to put work into putting a Fushigi Yuugi page together. It is truly a lot of work.

However, when you put your page together by taking other people's hard work, that's when it begins to bug me. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

I have to admit that the actual page itself is rather complete, information wise. For the most part, the characters are covered well. Also, the CD information is rather well done, with the CD track listings and all.

Now... for what I think needs some improvement.

The load time is absolutely HORRIBLE. As an experiment, I tried loading this page several times. I might be one of the Four Gods, but unfortunately, my corner of the heavens doesn't have an ethernet connection. As far as the internet goes, I'm just the average user, with a 33.6 modem.

As an experiment, I've tried loading this page in it's entirety about 5 different times, at different times in the day to make sure it just wasn't Geocities server traffic (which does get pretty horrible.) I even tried loading it at a friend's house who had a 56.6 (yes, us gods have a real life as well.) No go. After 10 minutes each time, I decided to call it quits as far as loading the FIRST PAGE.

SUGGESTION

Cut down on the image sizes and get rid of the auto-loading background .wav files. Linking to them would be a viable option.

OH MY EYES. This page epitomizes one of my pet peeves about web pages... the text of the webpage cannot be read against the background image. UGH! It's not just on the main page either. What confounds me is the fact that the background image changed with each section of the web site, but yet the text remained unreadable!

When I went to the CD information pages, I thought Wow! I can read the text. And I was a fairly happy god. But then, the background finally loaded (again the big image disease comes into play,) and again, I was left squinting at the screen.

SUGGESTION

For the love of us Four Gods, either change the background or the text color... preferably both! I know it's so hard to not use a pretty image as the background, but it's not going to be all that great for your site if your visitors are unable to read the page!

Moving onto the character descriptions...

Wow. I didn't know Chichiri's real name was Kouji. I may not be all that familiar with that big chicken's Seishi, but I'm pretty sure his name is Houjun. That was the only discrepency I saw as far as the Suzaku descriptions. I actually liked the fact that the author had their own opinion as far as the Suzaku Seishi go. That's good... even though they're not my Seishi. (But what can I say? My Seishi are dead.)

My opinion on the Seiryuu Seishi descriptions... that's another story altogether.

But first, for some general HTML nipicking before I get on to the bigger stuff.

1. ALT and HEIGHT and WIDTH tags are NOT hard to put in a page! It's rather annoying to wait for the big images to load up as it is, but when there's not a description OR at least a height/width to it so I can go on reading the page without loading... it's very annoying.
2. TITLE tags are there for a reason. We already know where we are, so a title for the page would be cool. This isn't a captial offense, just irking.
3. You know, when you join webrings, replacing the YOUR_SITE_ID_HERE and YOUR_NAME_HERE is a good thing.

Now... for what I think is punishable by consumption...

"Borrowing without credit" is tantamount to STEALING. This is punishable by consumption. No one ever said it was easy putting together a web page about your favorite stuff, but when pages resort to cut/pasting other page's hard work and then not giving credit back to that page, that's a big NO NO. You're just asking to get consumed then.

This page takes from a lot of different sources, and that is BAD. For example, if you take a look at the character descriptions of Soi, Amiboshi, Tomo, Miboshi, and the Remaining Characters page (all accessible off the main page) and you're a moderate Fushigi Yuugi web surfer, you'll notice that the page looks AWFULLY familiar. You know why? It's cut/pasted directly from EX's article on Fushigi Yuugi.

My question is this: You cut/paste information DIRECTLY from another page, yet have the time/knowledge to still add a background, change the text color, and add a link back to your own main page? I may be a turtle, but am I missing something here?

I wish that's the only thing I can say was stolen for sure. Looking at the self proclaimed "HUGE image gallery" you see some familiar images. You know why? They are mainly from genesis, a huge web site. More than that, they are directly linked from genesis. A good number of the pictures are also from another site amber.mcs.kent.edu (a site I remember as one of the first Fushigi Yuugi image galleries, although it wasn't that large,) also directly linked.

That, in my eyes, is reason enough to get the author and swallow without any sense of remorse. Please understand, when you link directly from another page onto your page, that creates more server traffic that the original page is getting. That's not fair to the author of the original page!! Especially when the site is on a paid service (as Genesis is) where, if the traffic gets to be too much, they have to pay moreThat's wrong! In my experience, most authors of pages, (unless they specifically say DO NOT TAKE THESE IMAGES) don't mind if you take images from their image galleries and use them in your own if you ask as long as you upload it to your own server. (It's always a good idea to ask first.)

I can go on, and on, and ON about this page. But I think I'll just eat it.

Even so, it's rather tasteless.

On a scale of 1 to 10, this site gets a 2 for a good idea, and some good points, but a largely bad approach, bad load time, and bad design (design being the least of my concerns for this site.)

This page was archived on: August 28, 1998