Web design comments and stuff

[Ranko]

Following chimera I'd like to offer my services as  a web designer to my gaminig equivalents from the Forge. If you are interested in what I can or could do for you just send me an e-mail mailto:ranko.marinic@inet.hr>ranko.marinic@inet.hr.

Also here are my takes on various suggestions that have poped up on earlyer posts.

Flash -the best usage for a .swf is to make an online add/preview like one made for Exalted. Gaming sites, both fan and company, are all about content, and shopping for the latter, and users want to get to it as soon as possible. Adding movies is just distracting the user, and slowing him down – and that might result in him going to another site.

PHP, ASP - are a must for the big guys and for (alomost) anyone who wants to make an online store and add a forum page. But all server siderers slow down page loading and with our www attention span that can lead to bad things mentioned abowe. For small press I'd try and look for other solutions or use both:
a) host "officiall" forums on other sites (like http://www.gamingoutpost.com">Gaming Outpost), use distributors (from what I heard http://www.wizards-attic>Wizzards Attic would be a good place to ask), etc.
b) combine .html pages (core content – the goodies you want us, the fans, to get our paws on ASAP) with server side scripting (for the shopping, forums etc.). Remember that this is the era of linking stuff.

CSS - style sheets requiere for you to think while designing them (if you encounter a site that doesn't allove you to resize it's font in the View>Text Size menu, blame the CSS designer who locked the font size). In general they rule.

Frames - can and will work, but as a person looking at a 800x600 15' screen I think that they waste space. On the other hand http://www.white-wolf.com">White Wolf was a good example of good frame usage, now the have FAQ and another link in the header that will just not fit on my screen.

General tips - links are blue, users like them that way, they are underlined and they should stay that way. Well not really, but changing them without a very, very, very good reason will just irk people (like black links on The Forge :smile: )

- odds are that your page will be both viewed in several resolutions and done with tables. Remember that table values allowe percentage values, and are thus addaptable.
- Browsers IE is doing 80% of all traffic on the web, check your pages in Netscape just for the rebbels, do not worry about Lynx as it is a web designers nightmare (as it displays only text)
- Research the web designers pages for articles on web pop culture, ther you will find tips like- users will revisit your page as often as they think they are updated = frequent updates, frequent hits.

That is all for now. Hope somebody found this usefull.
R

[Marco]

Our page did okay in Lynx (we checked!). IE is friendly and very, very forgiving but our web-designer uses Netscape under Linux so he made sure the page design came out well there.

We're pretty proud of our design (and the back-end content management system that allows us to change it around). It's not perfect but it was done all in-house.

(http://jagsgame.dyndns.org)
-Marco