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Land of Orcs ContestFollow

#1 Sep 21 2010 at 6:50 PM Rating: Excellent
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I am hosting a contest for my blog Land of Orcs. This is to help create a template that fits the name Land of Orcs. You can find the details here.

This is your chance to win a 3 month premium subscription and a 30 Day World of Warcraft Digital Game Card.

If you have any questions you can send me a pm or email me.

(This has been approved by Darqflame)
#2 Sep 27 2010 at 12:48 PM Rating: Excellent
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Fun stuff, hope you get good submissions!
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#3 Sep 27 2010 at 12:52 PM Rating: Good
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Thanks a lot, I do too.

Looking at the html file it doesn't seem pretty tough. The owner of the file has pretty much set everything up already. The main thing would be just changing the images and the fonts to match.

People are probably wondering why I can't do that myself. Well I suck at photoshop so I decided that a contest would be a lot better and should bring in some good quality submissions.
#4 Sep 27 2010 at 4:14 PM Rating: Excellent
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I'd do it in a heartbeat, if alcohol, herbal medicine and time hadn't caused me to forget everything I learned back in the days.

To all the guys out there who hasn't forgotten how to create a website, please keep some things in mind:

1. MY EYES!

White on black is easier to read than black on white, especially on a monitor and especially when reading a lot. That said, don't go bright white on a totally dark background (0/0/0 against a 255/255/255 or w/e the codes are these days). Try a "smoke" text color on a dark brown background for comfortable reading, but anything is better than the standard black text on white background. Even worse is a bright text color on an even brighter background.

The reason is that while reading black text on white paper is great, on a monitor the brightness is higher, and having to block out the background radiance in order to focus on the text causes eyestrain in the long run.

Examples:

Bad.
Good.

Links are going to malfunction because the site remembers your current layout. So if you normally browse this with the 'http://wow.zam.com' layout, you'll be using the same layout when you click the links. Edit the 'wow' part of the URL to 'www' and 'war' respectively to see the examples.

2. Frame size.

The days of 640x480 screen resolutions are over. Don't be afraid to widen up your layout. Watching one of those "optimized" websites on a 24" monitor is just painful, because half your screen is basically just vomiting solid background color in your face while you're reading. Tunnel vision and stuff happens. Without bashing Hyolith's blog too much, it's an example of too much margin on each side.

3. Fonts.

Don't go for anything with serifs (Times New Roman, for instance). Go with a font that doesn't include serifs, such as Calibri or Arial. Personal favorite is Calibri because it's not as silly as Comic Sans and not as "serious" as Arial. The reason is that while serifs are great for printed text, it doesn't work well on a monitor.

For those who don't know, "serifs" are the small horizontal lines that Times New Roman, for instance, adds to the 'l', 'n', 'i' etc. It is used heavily in printed material because the serifs create the illusion of lines, but on a monitor the effect is counter-productive.

4. 8-second-rule.

Any website is said to have eight seconds to "win over" the reader. It's a sort of average thing, so it's not like everyone will go "eight seconds, I'm out!", but it's a good pointer. Basically, you need to put the interesting stuff on the first page the reader encounters. An easily accessible menu system that the reader can navigate without having to go through dozens of sub-menus, etc. The point is to present everything that might be of interest on the front page, but in a neat way. Don't just toss a million font size 48 links all over the screen, since that makes the site look crappy.

Examples:

Bad.
Good. (except for the whole dark text on bright white background - but I used this site because I'm shamelessly advertising)

5. Hyperlinking.

While adding a neat image of an arrow and hyperlinking that image into a "back" button might seem snazzy, make sure the reader is aware of the hyperlink. Likewise, hyperlinking images is a bad idea if you do not add a small on-hover description. Believe me, what might seem intuitive to you is not the case with the majority of internet surfers out there. They need to be handheld and carried through the site, otherwise they'll give up before the eight seconds are up.


Anyway, I'm sure you know all this, but considering ZAM didn't, I figured I might as well post it here, in case anyone with some website design skills reads it and decides to have a got at your site. If you have a solid fanbase, the only point you really need to worry about is the first one. It's the most important one, especially with a blog or forum site, because the user is going to read a lot of text, preferably for extended periods of time. Giving your "customer" a migraine in 10 minutes is a bad way to keep them.

That last one is for you ZAM. Get a designer on your www.zam.com layout, 'cause it's horrible. The colors are fancy and all, but it's pure poison for the eyes.

Note: Examples might have been exaggerated for effect.

Edited, Sep 28th 2010 12:22am by Mazra
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#5 Sep 27 2010 at 4:22 PM Rating: Excellent
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I actually like the black/dark blue text on tan background that the wow skin offers. The dark text on the white background that you linked I don't like though. I find white text on dark background more annoying to read then the tan skin, but nicer then the www skin.

Edited, Sep 27th 2010 5:24pm by Xsarus
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#6 Sep 27 2010 at 4:28 PM Rating: Good
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Sir Xsarus wrote:
I actually like the black/dark blue text on tan background. I find white text on dark background more annoying to read.


We all have our preferences. I prefer websites that scale depending on screen resolution while others prefer the 50% usage of 24" monitor style. The scaling thing is harder to maintain, especially with pictures and crap, and the fixed style looks more "modern". It's a personal taste thing.

My comments were purely based on the year of website design and development I took some years ago. It wasn't a one-year course, but I left after one year, partly because I realized it wasn't the job for me after all, but also due to issues after we merged with another school (travel distance got tripled, available equipment went from two computers per student to one per five students, etc.).

Basically it's a "how to hit the broadest audience" guide. There'll always be some people who prefer Times New Roman over a sans serif font, and so on, but with those five steps you'll be statistically sure not to **** off the majority of internet lurkers.

As for background/text coloring, it's one of my pet peeves, because a lot of designers nowadays like to go overboard in either direction. What it boils down to is basically to ensure that the contrast between the background and text color is there, but not in-your-face, burn-out-your-eyes kind of way. Dark text on dark background is just as painful to read as a dark text on bright background, it's just that by inverting the dark on white, you solve 90% of all the issues in one hit. You can go for a dark on white no problem. Just tone down the white (go for a tan or beige or even smoke coloring) and select a brighter dark tone for your text. The main thing is to make sure the contrast doesn't tip, because then the text starts to blur, which is when your reader starts to get tired eyes, headaches and such.

A great example of a horrible font and color layout is actually the text editor here. I believe it's using either Times New Roman or Courier (New?), with a black font color on a white background. If you write a wall of text here and stare at it in the post editor for a bit, the entire thing just turns into a blur really fast.

Edited, Sep 28th 2010 12:36am by Mazra
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#7 Sep 27 2010 at 7:11 PM Rating: Good
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Thanks a lot guys for helpful tips if people are looking to get involved. I will say that I do not like the white background of ZAM, so I prefer to use wow.allakhazam. I do like darker colors, like the war.allakhazam.

One thing I wish I could change about my current layout is the color of the mouse over links. I don't know if those links act like links that have been clicked so I could change those colors because I tried to change the link color but that didn't really appear to work.

As for how the layout looks in different resolutions, I don't know how the current one works. I expect most people will probably tinker with the current layout so they might not have to worry about all of that.
#8 Oct 07 2010 at 10:30 AM Rating: Good
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The site could really use a new template. The one I use keeps running out of bandwidth on photo bucket so please take a look!
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