Wyrd Games website ...

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Frustrated Father

New member
Hi folks,

I\'ve gotten a couple of questions about the website of late as it was down for a bit but the backup site is still around and that people were wondering when I would update it.

I\'ve moved away from Moonfruit and don\'t have access to edit it right now, so hopefully the site will either be deleted or have a redirection in the next day or so.

In the mean time, critique on the site would be great. Things that I know about and will be fixing within the next few days are a \'Home\' link, the galleries (they are all \'down\' at the moment) and a java bug that I get when trying to do popups for IE but works on everything else (thus - killing the java - grrr).

As soon as the new website is finished and I\'ve got a couple of things out of the way on this end, I\'ll have the next contest announced. Likley within the next three or so weeks - that\'s my hope anyhow.

NEW WYRD GAMES WEBSITE
 
S

supervike

Super Moderator
I\'m a visual kind of guy...

I think it is a bit \'wordy\'...

things might look better if there were more pics/graphics to break things up.

Content wise, its right on.
 
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james9487

New member
In your miniatures gallery, you can only click on the picture of the first miniature to enlarge it, but the rest won\'t do anything. Are they supposed to?

-James
 
F

Frustrated Father

New member
Wordy ... hah! Yeah, that might describe me at times.

As for pictures and links in the galleries, I\'m still working on it, so in the next few days I imagine that I\'ll have all the galleries loaded up as well as the contest content.

@ Donna
Safari .. never heard of it, I\'ll have to go look that up now. :D
 
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provoke_me

Guest
safari is some browser you get with a macintosh operating system. or something like that. ok now i must go click the link!
 
wiccanpony

wiccanpony

Official Freak Bar Witch
Originally posted by provoke_me
safari is some browser you get with a macintosh operating system. or something like that. ok now i must go click the link!
Click to expand...

:) yep.......I have to go to Safari to play runescape :bouncy:
 
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MarkusTay

New member
I\'d have to agree with Vike\'s comments. Maybe if you just kept the words in bold type on the right hand column, then have the explanation on the link. Also, if you could put some kind of graphic effect behind the main body text that would be cool.

Maybe you could ask EricJ for help? I think he does graphic design for a living. Your content is good, you just need to \'jazz\' it up a little. - Mark
 
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ilynx2k4

New member
Tis quite wordy but then for a home page I expect a good thorough explanation of what im about to see within a site. A couple of pics of minis (you can have a random one each time a user visits the page) would certainly spice things up.

Also, your logo is pretty large, and even running at 1152 x 864, I still have to scroll a bit to see the bulk of the text and the menu.

Good points, I like the colour scheme, and your content is well written and laid out. I noticed that your with bravenet for your hit counter; maybe they have some kind of mailing list that you can set up on your site. That way we could all find out about your next competition by email.
 
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Jambot13

New member
You’d really benefit from making the logo name span across instead of stacking, and reducing its size too. It currently takes up far too much real estate and will force anyone who doesn’t have a very high monitor resolution to scroll down before they can even see the content.

I also agree that it’s rather wordy too, or perhaps it’s more a case that it’s just not terribly visually stimulating. Being wordy isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but you could display it differently, and thus clean up the page and gain more real estate space for pretty pictures without removing any information.

As an example, I don’t think the descriptions of the sections under the links are necessary. They are slightly useful when you first browse the site, but for any repeat visitors they are no longer going to be of use, so why not remove them from your navigation (you could always make the text appear in a pop up when you roll over the links) and put them as a brief description at the top of each actual section instead? This would make the pages look cleaner and also mean that you could have more page width to put your main content into.

Other things that may be worth altering:

Your logo should really link to your home page. This has become very common and web usability studies suggest that web savvy users expect it.
Why not add some pictures of miniatures to the home page? It will make it visually more enticing and also let people know roughly what to expect from the site before having to read a single thing.
Sort out your code! As a rule you shouldn’t put unfinished pages live unless you absolutely must. In their current state your galleries only serve to frustrate, so get them working. I want to investigate those thumbnail images further, because the content looks really cool, and not being able to because of your coding makes me slightly peeved!
I personally don’t like ‘coming soon’ style holding pages but I realise this isn’t a hard and fast rule (although some web specialists will argue it should be). Instead of offering people a chance to link to an empty page why not just leave the link to it out of your site nav until the section’s up?
Design wise your layout is almost there I think. As I said earlier, your logo could be smaller and the nav a little less wide, but these are rather easy alterations to make. To give the page the final bit of balance it needs I think that the borders surrounding your nav should be replicated around the main content. A 5 pixel cell to its left and a 10 pixel footer cell beneath it would tie everything together.

Sorry if this all sounds like doom and gloom, but in all honesty these are all rather easy and quick alterations to make and you’re close to having a really solid site. I’ve mentioned as much as I can so that you can make the changes now if you deem it necessary, as opposed to later. A few hours extra coding now to get the design complete is much better than many more hours further down the line to do the same things, simply because your content is much greater and makes it harder.

Hope you find this all useful (as is intended) rather than disheartening (which certainly is not intended. It’s a big step getting a site live in the first place so well done).
 
F

Frustrated Father

New member
Thanks for the input folks, I appreciate it. I\'m going to streamline it a bit as I can and see what trouble I can get into here soon enough when I delve into the \'meat\' of it.

I had intended to have everything done yesterday but between lawn work and the kids getting out of school for the summer, that has shot the last few days - so back at it I go now!

The logo I\'ll be making smaller, though not terribly so. I was going to put a \'home\' link but perhaps just linking the logo would be as well.

As for all the \'wordy\' bits, I plan on cutting that down after the first page - just need regular links through out the rest of the site and not a novel as stated (heh).

I am NOT a web savy fellow I have to admit, so if anyone is good with java in general and can help out, I would GREATLY appreciate it. I would love to be able to have a rotating image on the front of the site with a random miniature - but that\'s something that I\'m not too clued in on at the moment.

As for \'graphics\' - you know, I almost like it a bit bare as it is, as it will draw more attention to the miniatures in general instead of having all this \'flash\' all over the place. I might add a background image to some of the text boxes though - break it up a bit.

Mailing list will be going up as well - just another one of those \'things\' I\'ve got to get to. Ah well - off to edit - hopefully I\'ll have a good bit done by the end of the day.
 
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