I would love some feedback..:)

Hey all!

I recently changed webhosters, since guildportal (believe it or not) is more expensive than the custom domain I have now. So I have to build our guild website from scratch and since that is a first for me (i know shame on me lol),
I would really like to get some feedback on my work in progress. It's still in an early stage, the only button that's working right now is the new forum,
but the earlier I find out the concept isn't working well, the better !!
I'm sure the experienced web designers among you might have some tips how I could improve things? I'm working with dreamweaver, flash and photoshop (trying at least lol).
Anyway, any and all feedback is greatly appreciated!
link:
ARES Website

Hi Aylin!

I just had a quick peek, and so far it looks good to me, scheme-wise.

A couple of suggestions (things I would do, not necessarily required design elements, so take with a grain of salt).

• Your resolution appears to be setup for full-screen browsing, so for folks on laptops or (like me) who have their window windowed to (approximately) 1024*768 there's a lot of scrolling --> the full page plus the iFrame element. (I assume that flash item is in an iFrame...)
  
• Your forum link opens in a new tab/window -> almost everyone uses pop-up blockers, you may want to change that.
  
• The forum is laid out so that there's a ~1 inch empty space at the top, with nothing in it. (more on this in a sec...)
  
• You have no master navigation that I saw, nor a masthead. So what I would do is skin your forum to emulate your flash element rather than embedding it inside, thereby giving full use of the page space (you can set that page background to static using the CSS, then use a 50%(or whatever) transparency as the tableBG to emulate the flash cover). This would remove that unused space at the top and eliminate double-scrolling problems on smaller/resized windows.
  *else* I would use that 1" space to insert a logo/masthead (linking back to main page) and a master breadcrumb (with root site as the first link), since the one in the forums gets scrolled out when you are in the middle/lower on the page.
  

Other than that, I really like your concept and your skin choices really work well.

The only other thing I would possibly do is to put the disclaimer under the flash element instead of within it, to allow you more usable space for your actual site, since that page seems to be constant.

Hope I didn't offend in any way... you're doing great work, keep it up!

Hey Velaxi!

Thanks alot for your feedback, I really appreciate it!! There's a lot of things you mentioned that I hadn't even realized, although I too make use of pop-up blockers alot, for example!
And yes indeed, that IFrame bugs me a little bit hehe. It seemed like a good idea at first (when I had a floated-in navigation bar to control the content of the IFrame, in the initial design idea).. but I hate scrolling, and scrolling inside a website is even worse

I think I will go with your suggestion and skin the forum to the website theme. I only installed the forum on thursday and have no Idea how that works yet, but I can't wait to learn that, too!!

But thanks again mate, really helps alot in moving forward with the site!!!

Quote :

... except my free webhost seems to have given up on trying to provide the service, so now I need to search elsewhere. Sad Everyone has banners, and I just refuse to allow that.

I hear ya! I first had guildportal, few years back for the old guild + I didn't want to deal with too much html/css/php/flash ... But I hated the banners and started to pay to remove them... until I realized that with less money I get a custom domain name (3 actually). But I haven't found a single provider that's free AND without banners yet...

Well TBH this is the first time I'm not actually paying for my hosting/domain name. But, as I'm not working atm it doesn't make a lot of sense to throw money at a site for a game that's not even out yet. :s

One day, I might get lucky and recruit some people that help with contributions lawl!
(or better yet, let me use a sub on theirs hehe)

hehehe yeah, there's always the option of a paypal donate button on a guild site lol.

Ay,

Guten Abend!

It looks great...similar to Vel', I am on a laptop, thus the same problems. I too am having the "pop-up" problems.

For our guild, Coldhart runs our site. We are on guild-portal, though.

Keep up the great work on the site!