RM Site Design

[Ellie]

This is a Wordpress site I've been working on for fun. It wasn't meant to be official, just something for boredom really, but I want to know what you think of it as an official site.

What would you add? What would you change? What do you think of the actual design and everything?

It's based on the Aqua theme by shadow (obviously) and is a hackup of the default Wordpress theme (though some aspects, such as the sidebar, are completely my own codins).

http://vengeance-rpg.com/hbgames/

There was an image gallery but I removed it as it wasn't what I wanted it to be.

Google ads are ripped from the site's code; affiliates and project of the month and well, pretty much everything, are just placeholders.

Random video is not random for now, though I'm hoping we could have a youtube channel and show a random video there. I'm not too experienced with youtube though.

 

[glorious caesar]

the first thing that stands out to me is that the logo looks like a dick. it's pretty hard to unsee, really. although i guess that's the hbgames logo and you can't do anything about that. who designed it? i like the touches that bring flair to the "HB" (the gears and stuff), but the extra stuff around the "GAMES" could just be dropped entirely. i think the end result would be a lot cleaner, easier to read, less cramped and less phallic. :fap:

consider this. obviously my version's horrible because i did it in five seconds in paint, but it gets the idea across. the recognizeable and interestingly-styled "HB" is the same, but the rest becomes less busy and more readable. it also makes it easier to separate the "HB" by itself and potentially use just those letters as a smaller logo for cases that might need it (like a small affiliate button, or it might fit in a favicon)

the positioning of the logo also seems really cramped vertically—like it's a few pixels too close to the top and bottom of the box that it's in. the space around it should be a bit bigger to better balance the ad on the right of the same box.

there definitely needs to be some sort of definition between the posts—there's a lot of whitespace as it is and things seem to run together in a confusing way. however this is most likely because your test posts have a weird formatting. i'd really suggest testing the layout with a few posts that use legitimate lorem ipsum paragraphs, and have each post the length that you would expect a real post to be. it would help a lot.

i'm not a fan of the footer information at the bottom being in the same box as the main content, though. i could see it at least with a different back ground color for the block, something more like this:

lastly the links in the "Categories" box seem really small. up the size of the text and reduce some of that padding. the positioning of them now looks awkward and unbalanced.

ultimately though it looks really good. it matches the forum theme well and looks nice on wordpress. wordpress is a very powerful software and i fully support the idea of using it to make a blog-based mainsite.

 

[Ellie]

Thanks for the help.

The logo was by Venetia, and afaik it wasn't intended to look like a cock. I think it's being redesigned idk, but for now I'm just trying to keep the site looking like the forums. I like your rendition though.

I've added better posts as you suggested. I also added a horizontal line between posts though obviously there's probably a better way of splitting them. I'm not sure atm, I'm not happy with it anyway. I did think about having a border round them like the forums but that just looked weird.

I changed the font size and spacing in the category box and added a background to the footer; but I wasn't too happy with it so I removed it from the box completely. (A large space has appeared between them that I don't know how to get rid of but I'll get there eventually. :shades: )