Is anyone in the community a web developer who is good at making pretty web pages? I think if we have a nicer layout for the main page more people will check us out. Sorry Glyph, not meant to be mean. I have no artistic skills myself. I don’t know what Glyphs hosting costs are, but to keep his costs down, I’d keep the images to a minimum if not at all, just enhance the layout.
I also think that the ‘stable release’ and ‘experimental release’ download links may be confusing to some people. I think we should explain them a little better on the main page.
I know this is not a priority for the developers, so I am asking is anyone good at making pretty websites? Its often a different skill set from a hardcore coder?
I can agree, we’ve evolved as a community, and the Main Page should be friendly to changes.
Now,
Is anyone in the community a web developer who is good at making pretty web pages? I think if we have a nicer layout for the main page more people will check us out. Sorry Glyph, not meant to be mean. I have no artistic skills myself. I don't know what Glyphs hosting costs are, but to keep his costs down, I'd keep the images to a minimum if not at all, just enhance the layout.
The main page [b]should[/b] be appealing, but verbose most of the part. It should have the body with announcements and feature descriptions related to the latest news, and the frames to support the viewer's interest.
I also think that the 'stable release' and 'experimental release' download links may be confusing to some people. I think we should explain them a little better on the main page.
I think you're mistaking. The better part of the roguelike crowd knows what's that "Build #xxx" all about.
I know this is not a priority for the developers, so I am asking is anyone good at making pretty websites? Its often a different skill set from a hardcore coder?
That's not that big of a trouble no matter what you're thinking, the only concern is of GlyphGryph's taste and such. Other thing, portable graphics are very lightweight if put to a straight use. The real deal here are the javascript items ([b]whether[/b] we need them) and frames that affect overall visibility. Right now, I'm having these two ideas - a cascadable button that's in the form of the latest forum topic title, and interacting with it gives us latest topics of each and every one of the subforums. The other one is having some sort of self-promotion, with a few links to the game's appearance on other (media) sites and such plus, of course, a twitter or a FB link, if applicable.
This is a nice example, but kinda heavy on the loading due to images: [url=http://crystalshard.net/index.php]Crystal Shard[/url]
Do tell what you think of it, and finger GG for that matter.
When I first sent a friend of mine to the site to DL it to play from he wound up DLing the Experimental build by accident XDD (Though it made my life easier, so that’s not too big of a concern of mine XDD)
I’ve looked a bit into this and saw a great, great lot of PHP examples. So in lamers terms, Style Sheets aren’t that hard to wrap up, but the choice of .php examples is mindblowing. GlyphGryph’s idea is what matters, because most of the solutions out there are versatile, portable, and updated often so to imply deployment side of the issue here. I liked Xoops a lot, mainly because it could work with php 5.2 and later (though 5.3 is really an installment to go for) but also because it was so darn small and easy to maintain.
This game certainly deserves fansites and boards, so go for it if you own some ten megs or so of spare web space. As for our admin, the tip with Xoops is with its features, they are very easy to import or simply remove.
The only reason the site doesn’t look better is because designing a legitimately better looking website (instead of just a different one) is pretty hard. I actually am a web developer - but my limited time available to spend on the website has primarily been towards getting it working functionally, providing the multi-language support, dynamic page generation, use support and development areas that, etc. and so on.
I really should do a visual update at some point, but honestly it already looks quite a bit better than many “professional” sites that paid big bucks for their designs, and while it certainly looks and flows worse than others and can use a rework it’s not a huge priority.
The site is fine. It is clear and concise, functional and minimalist (not unlike the game itself). It doesn’t need to do a whole lot, and bells and whistles can distract quite a bit.
Actually the only thing that bothers me right now is that there’s no general link on the forum that leads back to the webpage. I’ve seen a lot of forums use the ‘Home’ button in the top left to return you to the actual website rather than to the root forum.
Right now there are three links that are displayed at all times at the top of the page that take you back to the root forum: the header, the Home Button, and at the beginning of the line that links to each section of the forum that you are in at any given time.
I get that redundancy is very Web 2.0, but surely we can sacrifice the Home button to take people to the webpage where they actually download the game.
