Fairy-wings is a very brightly designed site that, from the start, looks like it won’t hold back any punches. Sure enough, after the splash page, the introduction text to the blog states, “You’ve stumbled onto my domain on the net, Fairy-wings. This is my personal site with very frequently updated cam shots, blog, and content. I can say whatever the hell I want and if you can’t deal with that, click that lovely x up in the corner!” I was hoping this would be the kind of weblog where opinions on everything from bean sprouts to world peace would be offered. On a side note, another positive first impression was that the layout features Stitch from Disney’s Lilo and Stitch, which I’m a big fan of. A disappointing first impression was that the header fonts make it very hard to read – I feel like it’s work to make out what the various sections are called.
Once I began reading the weblog at Fairy-wings, I found it a little hard to follow. It’s definitely a personal blog, but I’ve found that most of the really great personal weblogs comment at least occasionally on some issues of general interest – and you can always count on a few good links, right? Well, Fairy-wings is great for reading about the life of Monique, the author, but if you don’t know her, it’s a little hard to get what she’s talking about, and she uses relatively few links to other sites in her blog content. Some spelling problems threw me off, but overall, the text was clean and simple enough to read through.
I think the design at Fairy-wings works well with the personal focus of the site. Prominent features include a tagboard, a quick e-mailer and a webcam. As I said before, the header fonts were a little hard to make out at first glance, but they do look nice. (And have I mentioned I love Stitch?) The only detraction to the design was the color of the scrollbar – I like colored bars, but there has to be differentiation from the bar’s track to the scrolling section, or else you never know where the heck you are.
There are several “extra features” in Fairy-wings’ content, most by way of links to other sites, but I think my favorite was the “Boyfriend Application” that actually is part of Fairy-wings. I just wonder what she does with them… if it works, maybe it’s worth a shot on my own site!
Overall, this is a nice site. I’d say its appeal wouldn’t reach many people over, say, 20 or so, but it’s well-designed, consistently updated and you can tell it’s something that the author has put a considerable bit of work into. It’s worth a visit, and I may stop back, if for no other reason than to see if the boyfriend application nets any results.