The website (yes, again)

[Beherith]

It does leave room for that wall of text thats on the main page now, and on the part where it says blahblahblah. Which is, imo the ideal spot for such info.

[Roflcopter]

Tearing the layout up has taken me more time than making the design. D:
The source files are right here.

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[AF]

Then that's my problem and you should be talking to me about it rather than devising your own variants. The colours in your version clash with all the rest of the artwork and are too saturated.

Your font and lettering is also nothing like those in my artwork.

[Roflcopter]

Well, I just wanted to give my opinion on the logo.
Nothing wrong with it, I think.

[Forboding Angel]

Should have left the logo alone tbh. Comparitively, the red one is bland.

[SwiftSpear]

I'd like a little bit of space for news. Not like 5-6 items, but just a little bit of space so the page looks like it's being updated regularly.

Also, is the intent of those screenshots to have them scrolling or something? It seems like a good idea.

The 3 major catagory boxes should be "Play Spring" "Engine and development" and "Comunity" The first link would link to our player mainpage with download links, getting started tutorials, and mod information, the second to our development center with information on the dev team, how the engine works, different aspects of content creation and what not, and "community" would basically be a link to the forum.

[Warlord Zsinj]

There does seem to be a little redundancy on the page. Given that you've got a group of 'screenshots' as well as a button saying "see the games".

What I recommend is that the big screenshot behind "Welcome to the Spring Website!" should be animated, and should slowly fade in and out through several screenshots displaying a number of mods and maps (ideally with each image being a modlink, though not strictly necessary). I can probably create a basic animating gif using flash if you guys don't know how to do that in a better way / don't want to embed flash.

Then, the handful of screenshots should be removed and replaced by a news area displaying both engine and community updates.

[hunterw]

I'd say make one of them "watch youtube vidoes of spring"

[Warlord Zsinj]

Youtube doesn't really put a professional face. A better option would be to have a number of hosted videos (say, one per mod), with high and low quality downloads available (and perhaps an embedded youtube clip of the video)

[AF]

If theyre in flv format you can just use a custom video player

[TradeMark]

What I recommend is that the big screenshot behind "Welcome to the Spring Website!" should be animated, and should slowly fade in and out through several screenshots displaying a number of mods and maps (ideally with each image being a modlink, though not strictly necessary). I can probably create a basic animating gif using flash if you guys don't know how to do that in a better way / don't want to embed flash.

I doubt you can make good looking gif animation which takes less than 2 megabytes.

IMO it doesnt need any animation. plain images can be better than uber cool flash animations with uber suber sounds and fun x2.
TBH i hate flash on any websites front page.

i have seen very practical and good looking simple made websites, like: http://www.tagap.net/

We totally need more space for news, a website without news section feels like some kind of spam site wanting me to buy shit.

[Stealth870]

You win.

[aegis]

If theyre in flv format you can just use a custom video player

I can write a custom flash player to play videos. Though, we won't be able to seek like with Youtube without a stream server or mad server-side script hax.

[lurker]

There are a couple nice GPL flash players you could use with little effort. And more just free ones.

Is flash incapable of making partial content requests or something? Or is it all about knowing the byte ranges for time ranges. I recall something about using the byte annotations you could have in flvs...

[Warlord Zsinj]

What I would probably do is have say 3 different image transitions, with 3-5 images in each. The page would randomly pick one of the transition files to load.

They'd probably still be getting up there in terms of size, but probably still under a meg (the image is only taking up a few hundred pixels).

To be honest, I think a megabyte is perfectly acceptable for a website that is specifically selling a package with it's visuals as one of it's main features. We aren't living in 56k days anymore, and most game websites are easily heavier then what I'm proposing. Hell, most of the ads on game websites are heavier then what I'm proposing we do as a centrepiece of the design.

[Roflcopter]

Quick update.


Don't look at the bottom or the new banner, they are fugly!
Oh, and the "See the games" thing is supposed to bring you to a page with detailed info of the games, not just screenshots... So it's not so redundant.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Well, I thought the screenshots needed to be removed, not the 'see the games' link
Do you intend for the background behind 'welcome to the spring project website' change at all?

[Roflcopter]

Yes, I want the banner, featured video and welcome image to change with every visit.

[Tilgor]

It looks much better than actually spring website layout but i think there should be button with text "How to start". There should be tutorials how play spring games. For new player, game with little ugly GUI and another gamestyle is hard to learn and play

[AF]

Can I make something clear?

The new website gets deployed when enough of the wiki is transferred over.

Nobody is working on transferring wiki pages or the restructuring.

Every time people start to get the idea its ok todo it we get a roflcopter design or some other website thread and all work on the new site immediately stops because people think its not safe and could be a waste of time.

People thus expend effort criticizing and praising the photoshop mockups

Repeat the above over and over again on a roughly 2 month cycle.

Now I have not got the time to transfer wiki pages over myself. I have battlehub, I have other projects, Ive got my website, and pretty soon event hose will need to be scaled back as Ill have a job what with it being a part of my degree course. You cannot rely on me to do the entire site for you. I cannot do the content, and my time is already stretched as it is.

But you as a community are wasting your time