Shadow Posted March 26, 2011 Share Posted March 26, 2011 So this is more or less my first site I started working on and 'finished' in January. I was hoping for some opinions and ways to make it better design wise and feedback on the current design.I do know that the Menu doesn't verify and I need to get around to fixing that but it works for now.http://www.rpgcompendium.com/Someone had suggested a CMS-based website (Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress) but I haven't messed around with those yet and not sure if you can get a similar/same look and layout to what I already have or not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cousineaug Posted March 27, 2011 Share Posted March 27, 2011 So this is more or less my first site I started working on and 'finished' in January. I was hoping for some opinions and ways to make it better design wise and feedback on the current design.I do know that the Menu doesn't verify and I need to get around to fixing that but it works for now.http://www.rpgcompendium.com/Someone had suggested a CMS-based website (Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress) but I haven't messed around with those yet and not sure if you can get a similar/same look and layout to what I already have or not.1-stick with what you have. Unless you have TONS of material, you may lose control with CMS. I much prefer t control all my pages2-validate your code. There are hundreds of errors like uncoded "&"3-I wonder why the background texture is blue and then black across the top and under the menus. It seems to detract from the general appeal of the site4-the combination of font, font-size, and background in your second level menus makes it hard to read on my screen. I use 1280*1024 on a 21 inch monitor and my old eyes have problems with it :-)5-not being a gamer I can't comment on organization and presentation - perhaps someone else here will.6-if the main content div scrolls (overflow), then why not make it closer to 100% on an AVERAGE type screen? Perhaps a height closer to 500? then it is not as far to scroll to get back to the menu bar.still a nice looking site/.....Guy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shadow Posted March 31, 2011 Author Share Posted March 31, 2011 1-stick with what you have. Unless you have TONS of material, you may lose control with CMS. I much prefer t control all my pages2-validate your code. There are hundreds of errors like uncoded "&"3-I wonder why the background texture is blue and then black across the top and under the menus. It seems to detract from the general appeal of the site4-the combination of font, font-size, and background in your second level menus makes it hard to read on my screen. I use 1280*1024 on a 21 inch monitor and my old eyes have problems with it :-)5-not being a gamer I can't comment on organization and presentation - perhaps someone else here will.6-if the main content div scrolls (overflow), then why not make it closer to 100% on an AVERAGE type screen? Perhaps a height closer to 500? then it is not as far to scroll to get back to the menu bar.still a nice looking site/.....GuyThanks for the feedback.2.Those validation errors are all in the menu as far as I can tell (which needs to be redone anyways). 3.As for the blue.. there shouldn't be any blue there at all. I have the background set up as Red so that it highlights the outside of the selected button in red but I did notice when I was messing around with it the other day that if I remove all the color codes it defaults to blue...4.Redid my buttons so that the font size is considerably larger and easier to see but had to make the yellow a brighter one to show up a lot better on that background.6.Odd, testing it out on 1280*1024 screen it doesn't scroll down that much, the only thing cut off on the scroll down is the banner and the menu is still visible. Though I can see where having it set height wise to fit a more normal sized screen would be good. I'll have to think about that as when I figured the size up I took into account future ad-spaces for artists/writers and such. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cousineaug Posted March 31, 2011 Share Posted March 31, 2011 3.As for the blue.. there shouldn't be any blue there at all. ...4.Redid my buttons so that the font size is considerably larger...6.Odd, testing it out on 1280*1024 screen it doesn't scroll down that much,...count future ad-spaces for artists/writers and such.Yes it looks much better today.there is no blue in the background - perhaps I was seeing pink elephants the other day as well :-)Buttons are definitely easier to read I did not realize they were images. It mush have been a lot of work to redo them. Have you tried using your texture as a background underneath real text?As for the scrolling, My screen is 1280x1024 and my Google Chrome is usually 1024x768....give or take a bit. So when I look at the home page, i get 3 lines of the site news and I can see all the menu and banner. My observation is: if only the main content DIV scrolls farther down and if there is nothing more to see on the sidebar, why does the main content not stop here? I can use the div SCROLLBAR to get farther down but I cannot see all the content without scrolling the main window.Guy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zipster1967 Posted May 13, 2011 Share Posted May 13, 2011 So this is more or less my first site I started working on and 'finished' in January. I was hoping for some opinions and ways to make it better design wise and feedback on the current design.I do know that the Menu doesn't verify and I need to get around to fixing that but it works for now.http://www.rpgcompendium.com/Someone had suggested a CMS-based website (Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress) but I haven't messed around with those yet and not sure if you can get a similar/same look and layout to what I already have or not.It looks good to me. Still a few broken links from what I clicked into. You might consider using some sort of catch-all for broken links that drop the browser into a better looking poage than the dreaded 404 error page. I would make up your own 404 error page that looks more professional If your considering a CMS I might recommend Joomla since it will allow you to do everything that you have done here but once the main template is built you can manage updates and user submitted stuff a lot easier But if you only want your limitations to be what you can imagine then keep with your originakl stuff and just keep plugging away. So far so good. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jeffman Posted May 13, 2011 Share Posted May 13, 2011 I question the wisdom of the internal scrolling div. My experience is that average users get very confused by them, e.g. "Something's wrong with the page. Sometimes it scrolls and sometimes it doesn't."A container width of 1020px worries me too. 20% of users still are limited to 1024px wide. Add padding and scrollbars, etc, and the page is scrolling off to the right. Needlessly, too, since that's all empty space.Maybe a fixed div for navigation would help? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neelam Posted May 19, 2011 Share Posted May 19, 2011 Like above posts, I would also suggest not to jump to any different technology which you are not conversant with right now.Though I would like to suggest that the presentation is not justifying the content of your work. It would have been suitable if you have build it simply without scrollbars, using tables and images as borders. I could not extensively suggest. Here are few suggestions.1. Use some web service such as Twitter, RSS feed to provide Site News.2. Use some workable website structure. Look around web for examples. Here is one http://www.3dworldmag.com/2011/03/16/learn...tereo-3d-games/3. Use some images and colors to make reading your work interesting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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