FTW-Hosting, get flamed before you go public.

[Flyberius]

Hi there. My name is Haydn. Over the past few months I have been leaving comments in this forum (usually not realizing that they were to ancient threads) in order to get the 15 required posts to advertise in here. This isnt so much of an advert as of yet as we are not open for business for at least a week or so (order forms to design and Cisco Pix to configure, ya know), but what I do want to do is get an Idea for what people think of the site, and whether the designer we hired is just wasting our time. No offence to him as this is his first professional site and he has no portfolio, but being an old clan mate of mine I hope he has a better Idea of what a gaming site should be like than some of these e-comerce site designers (charges alot less too). Anyway here is a screeny of the site as I wont be giving you a URL until all the bottomless pits have been filled in.
Anyone who has constructive critisism and tips please tip away. Anyone I have insulted, insult away. And anyone whos thread I revived, come back in 6 months and post something.



Peace out and good gaming. Ah yes and there are alot of gramatical errors in that welcome message. There is a JCB in the banner and the two dudes are wearing crash hats cos its a hard hat area. These will be gone when the site goes live.

[Drocona]

Hey there,

Being a webhosting and design company owner myself I have some tips about the website. As these websites should have more of a clansite and futuristic look instead of the good old standard buisiness template with boring flat out pieces.

One thing that I noticed immediately when I looked at your picture was the "flat" look of the site, the pictures of the Mods and stuff on the right are very good, they have multiple layers, however the buttons for example on top of the page are just 1 layer and text on top of it. I can tell you that all you have to do is make it a few more layers or get that 3D look.

Here's an example of what I mean (I took your game hosting button from your website and edited it a bit):

  game servers.JPG (Size: 1.67 KB / Downloads: 12)

As you can see all I did was add 2 boxes at the edges of the button (all white with different opacity), things so small like this will actually get your website alive.

Also try to do something with the textspace add a simple background with a figure in it on 30% opacity or so. One good background would be that wave with stars from your logo only make it fit with colors on the white part to keep the text viewable.

Well I think you will get an eye for it, my compliments to the designer on the colors cause they fit together, trust me that's the most hard part there is (especially when using any other color than black and white)

Here are some websites of my designer, check them out maybe they will give you some idea's of how you want it to be.

http://black-sky.nl/main (new website for my company)
http://black-sky.nl/cygnuskt (website of a client going up soon)

[Flyberius]

Thanks a bunch for the advice. Can I post updated pics of the site in this thread without being accused of bumping. It wont be like, SPAM SPAM SPAM posting just when I want it rejudged.

[Drocona]

Sure go ahead, I wont mind.

[skeletor]

yea theres nothing wrong with asking for some constructive criticism

[Flyberius]

Ok. We (the company) have decided that the web designer is and always has been a waste of space. Even basic features such as scaling margines (for low resolutions or just minimised pages) he said was impossible. What I want to know is if there is anyone out there willing to design a page for £750. All the artwork would be done by me. ie. I will draw the site, you must then break it up and tile it. The online ordering also has to be set up, this means payment by credit card or paypal, but it must be instantanious. The designer must have a portfolio, anything to prove they can do this. If there is no previous experience with web pages then we cant have you. You must be available by phone and you must be prompt on replies. Payment will be sent on completion of the job. We already have webspace and all the relevant details for email and contact.
You must impress us. If you cant do this please let us know as we wont be nice if we get 3 weeks in and you suddenly hit a wall.
I am posting this because this forum is the be all and end all of SRCDS
and if I cant find help here, where can I?

Oh and this is the new look.

[skeletor]

as far as webdesign, that up top looks like it would be a pretty simple site to layout. Even with some basic html no how it wouldn't be to hard to crank something like that out. Even if you don't know much about html dreamweaver is your friend, lol.

Hell I could get a site out like that pretty easily in html. As far as check out, paypal makes that super easy.

[Flyberius]

No we are quite adament that we want full on Credit card purchasing on our GSP. The last guy thought that a simple email to us that someone wanted a game server was good enough. To be honest, by the time we got back to them with payment details they would have gone to Jolt.co.uk.
Also we want a much nicer layout. I am going to draw the site with all the text fields, buttons and what not. A good HTML artist will be able to break that down and rebuild it for the website. However I also want Forums and a game order page that can be edited from an admin page. We have alot of the original specifications that we gave to the original designer and for the most part they still hold true.

As I say anyone who is sure they can do this (within 4 weeks) let me know and I will arrange a meeting where you have to convince my boss that its worth all the money.

[skeletor]

you know you could look into something like Joomla or Xoops and then just use like an oscommerce add in. That would set up everything for you, and xoops I know is real easy to design a template and makes it really easy to change the look of the entire site without re-entering any information. Both of them front ends have tons of add ons already built in, and support for them all as well. you can also integrate forums. Just a though, if it was me I would rather save a couple bucks and do it myself. It would be easier to update and maintain in my opinion.

Without that though its still pretty easy to set up a pay now button on the website. Paypal even gives you step by step instructions on how to have buttons like that.

[Drocona]

Flyberius, how can I contact you, I would like to talk about this with you.

If you can supply a drawing of how you like the website to be I'll see if our designers are up to the task and come together to build your site.

I'm eager to see what you want, please contact me on Matts[at]Black-Sky[dot]nl with some infor or add me on MSN at that same address.

EDIT: I just read your post a little better, you will supply the graphics, no problem, we can cut any website and make it fit, also the payment system will not be a problem we can even set up an instant account script so they pay and can get to work immediately (WHM/Cpanel hosts, I'm sure we can work somethign out on other panels).