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My Website [critisism wanted]

tai

Member

I was expecting much, much more based on my impression of your avatar and signature images. Now I doubt you did those yourself.

Very old school. I don't know if that's intended or not, I would imagine as a game designer you would have a website with design that matches those of your games. I certainly do hope your games are not of the same caliber as this website.

Issue #1: The Splash Page
I've never seen a website with a splash page that looks equally good or better than the website itself. Why? It's totally unnecessary. Just get to the content. Your emblem has a fuzzy white halo around it. Your language-by-country links just point to Google Translate of THE SAME SPLASH SCREEN. so what do I do after translating it? re-translate it to the same language from the same language? If you're not going to actually write the website in another language, best not to fool the visitor with such prominent choices in the beginning.

Issue #2: Placement and Adaptability of Layout.
I'm on a 1024x768 screen resolution. Is it because I have a super crappy CRT from the 1990s? no. It's because I have a 12.1" compact laptop. Lots of people are still using 1024x768. Design to that. If I shrink my window, elements start falling everywhere. Not pretty. Even when maximized the "add" space is like 80 pixels wide and the actual ad is at the bottom. Notice the spelling: Ad.

Issue #3: The Colour Scheme
Even if the bright red were to become blood red, it overall looks too 'default' like you picked it from a Geocities or Tripod preset. Try with colours you won't find in Microsoft Paint.

Issue #4: The Sidebar
There's too much variance in the unvisited/hover/visited colour state. It looked very different from before I visited any sub-page to when all the sub-pages were visited. I absolutely detest the way the button expands and pushes everything else down when you mouseover. And why is there a blank button that mouseovers and links to a 404 in and only in the Game Engines page? If the sidebar is in every page make sure it's in exactly the same position. Or just use an iframe.

Issue #5: The Seplling Mstakes
I understand that the occasional grammatical mistake may appear here and there and typos that are actual words may go unnoticed (like course and coarse), but I don't think there are excuses for things like 'finaly' and 'refferences' 'certaint', etc.

Yes, I am being very harsh. But when someone asks for a critique, I speak what is on my mind. A website should be a good representation of the information it contains, it is advertising (in your case) your development team and the games you are working on. After seeing a website like this, I would refuse to play your game unless you paid me to do so. Before you(generic you) post something for a crit, give it a quick look yourself and if there's something amiss just mention it and how you plan on fixing it, and we'll understand.
 
tai":11wr7c41 said:
I was expecting much, much more based on my impression of your avatar and signature images. Now I doubt you did those yourself.

Very old school. I don't know if that's intended or not, I would imagine as a game designer you would have a website with design that matches those of your games. I certainly do hope your games are not of the same caliber as this website.

Issue #1: The Splash Page
I've never seen a website with a splash page that looks equally good or better than the website itself. Why? It's totally unnecessary. Just get to the content. Your emblem has a fuzzy white halo around it. Your language-by-country links just point to Google Translate of THE SAME SPLASH SCREEN. so what do I do after translating it? re-translate it to the same language from the same language? If you're not going to actually write the website in another language, best not to fool the visitor with such prominent choices in the beginning.

Issue #2: Placement and Adaptability of Layout.
I'm on a 1024x768 screen resolution. Is it because I have a super crappy CRT from the 1990s? no. It's because I have a 12.1" compact laptop. Lots of people are still using 1024x768. Design to that. If I shrink my window, elements start falling everywhere. Not pretty. Even when maximized the "add" space is like 80 pixels wide and the actual ad is at the bottom. Notice the spelling: Ad.

Issue #3: The Colour Scheme
Even if the bright red were to become blood red, it overall looks too 'default' like you picked it from a Geocities or Tripod preset. Try with colours you won't find in Microsoft Paint.

Issue #4: The Sidebar
There's too much variance in the unvisited/hover/visited colour state. It looked very different from before I visited any sub-page to when all the sub-pages were visited. I absolutely detest the way the button expands and pushes everything else down when you mouseover. And why is there a blank button that mouseovers and links to a 404 in and only in the Game Engines page? If the sidebar is in every page make sure it's in exactly the same position. Or just use an iframe.

Issue #5: The Seplling Mstakes
I understand that the occasional grammatical mistake may appear here and there and typos that are actual words may go unnoticed (like course and coarse), but I don't think there are excuses for things like 'finaly' and 'refferences' 'certaint', etc.

Yes, I am being very harsh. But when someone asks for a critique, I speak what is on my mind. A website should be a good representation of the information it contains, it is advertising (in your case) your development team and the games you are working on. After seeing a website like this, I would refuse to play your game unless you paid me to do so. Before you(generic you) post something for a crit, give it a quick look yourself and if there's something amiss just mention it and how you plan on fixing it, and we'll understand.

Yah, I never did my Av or my Sig (well I assembled it), as for fixing my site, I'm currently working on a new CSS template to fix the site, along side of removing my splash page.  I've yet to get a lot of work done on it so far, because I'm getting out of school tomorrow, and have been busy working on my final flash project for the last month.
 

___

Sponsor

Concerning the issue with PNG transparency, there are quite a few reasons to not use the javascript hack and there are some really good workarounds if you want to keep the transparent PNG as part of the site.  Here's an article detailing the alternatives:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/03/ ... g8-images/
It cross links to some articles discussing the advantages and drawbacks of various other methods as well.
 

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