new retro gaming website design.. need feedback

[TisLord]

The collection link needs to stay in the same page and/or keep the same color scheme and design as the rest of the site...it feels like a different site for some cheap photo hosting or something....sorry not being mean....just honest

[ckendal]

The collection link needs to stay in the same page and/or keep the same color scheme and design as the rest of the site...it feels like a different site for some cheap photo hosting or something....sorry not being mean....just honest

I completely undestand, but have you ever used GALLERY? It has it's own skins and is scripted in PHP. I may try to figure out how to embed it inside the template, but the gallery is much larger than the current template and would stretch it.

Anyone have other ideas of photo software (that run under linux and apache) for websites that can be used?

Thanks,
Carl

[Melf]

a site about retro gaming shouldn't have the new Zelda character art in the banner. Also get the content up first, then fuck around with your design.

There's nothing wrong with it, since Link is a classic character. I have the same issue with people saying I shouldn't use images of modern Sonic for my Genesis site. The problem is, it's not easy to find quality art of the character from the period in question. Have you seen some of those early Link pics? Ouch!

[ckendal]

a site about retro gaming shouldn't have the new Zelda character art in the banner. Also get the content up first, then fuck around with your design.

There's nothing wrong with it, since Link is a classic character. I have the same issue with people saying I shouldn't use images of modern Sonic for my Genesis site. The problem is, it's not easy to find quality art of the character from the period in question. Have you seen some of those early Link pics? Ouch!

Thanks for agreeing. Atleast I used the retro shield and sword which gave him the retro look. I honestly think he looks pretty slick. But that is just my opinion.

[DaBargainHunta]

This looks fantastic so far. Very cool design. Keep us updated.

[InsaneDavid]

Also get the content up first, then fuck around with your design.

That can come back to bite you on the ass big time. I've spent the past two weeks repairing and normalizing the filenames of all my content - same with front end things like image sizes, resolutions, etc. Much of this was left over from eariler incarnations or just falling into inconsistant habits. If you can figure out a good design and uniformity system at the start you'll be way ahead of the game later on. Honestly things weren't that bad to begin with so I could only imagine how big a pain it would be if things were a mess to start with.

How about different skins so people can change the look of the site.

Sega skin
Nintendo skin
Atari skin
etc.

Personally I think stuff like that gets things too complicated, then you close some accessibility doors which in turn prevents people from visiting your site. (same with 60,000 flash ads and buggy applets - Myspace anyone?) Now if you're doing a multimedia page, I can understand that. Like my site, I have people that use their Dreamcast and the old MS WebTV units to browse it, works fine. My cutoff is my old 120MHz laptop with it's assortment of older browsers under dialup speed at 33.6k - I try to keep my stuff reasonable so that it will display decently on it. I figure no one will use anything more underpowered than that.

[lordnikon]

InsaneDavid touches on a very good point regarding simplicity. I am a webdesigner as my profession. Sites these days are getting WAY too convoluted. All of these blogs, link recipricators, uncessary flash applets, and piles of javascript are messing up the internet. Also people are becoming too reliant on stylesheets. Sure stylesheets in many instances can make your life a lot easier, but in a lot of instances they are not needed.

Lately I have been going back to simple html when coding some basic pages for my own personal use. Plus, since the sites that I work on are so high end, its nice to just make something quick, fast, and functional without much stress.

I kind of like oldschool websites now. I'm not talking "animated gifs" with flames all over the place and terrible neon fonts flying across the screen in a marquee. I just like pages that are simple and easy to access.

Basic background, some text, simple nav and regular images.

BTW, InsaneDavid, I spent an enormous amount of time getting an entire portal community site to fit on the screen while browsing via the Dreamcast. It was not easy... Basically I have a special template just for Dreamcast browsers, and the main template is for PC users. It is really cool to browse forums though and have everything conform to the resolution of the Dreamcast browsers and not have to scroll horizontally.

If anyone is interested I have a primer on coding Dreamcast websites. Basically you have to stick to HTML 3.2, but there are some other things that the Dreamcast browsers won't render.

[ckendal]

Thanks for all the suggestions and feedback. I have started to add content slowly. You can check out the site and its progess.

I have added some stuff to the news section and updated the contact page. I have also taken pictures of my SNES library and it has been added to the gallery. Check it out!