Review Request : Coder Playground

My suggestion is to search the Internet and see if you can find something to inspire you.

Peter

Here is a clickable link for your site:
http://coder.eracreations.com/

Welcome to the forums TuUzis4u.

We do ask that you review several other web sites while you are here. Looking over the work of others and offering an opinion of their sites will encourage others to look at your site. Just helps everyone all the way around.

If this is your very first site I think you are off to a good start. Needs work but gee, that can be expected right? It's loads better than a lot of the "first sites" we see here (including my own)

Getting started here.

Banner: Definately re-do the banner. Its background is blurry and the text part of the image is pixely. You should consider adding height, width and alt tags to your images.

I notice that your home page is actually the "news" page. What you may want to do is make a seperate news page and reserve your home page for an introduction to your site. You know, tell folks what the site is about, what you offer there, maybe special items, etc. Generally, people aren't really interested in a daily report of the happenings that go on in the background. Use that home page to spark your visitors interest. Keep their attention.

Menu: Well, hate to say it but the menu is a little blah. The links don't really look like links. However, anyone with half a brain will discover that they are. Looking at your css file you have all of the links for the menu class set to black. Give those boogers some color. Me just thinks they should be more obvious.

You could add some padding to your table that holds the main text part to get the text away from the edge.

Off to a great start.

Sonia

I agree with most of what Sonia said. You don't need to give users a play-by-play of site development. They don't need (or want) to know this. However, I think that in many case it's perfectly reasonable for a home page to double as a news page. It depends on your target audience - if you're expecting a lot of regular visitors you may think that they'd be more interested in news items about the topic you're covering (not about the site, per se).

I think that first of all you'll need to re-do that header graphic. You may want to consider getting a good graphics person to do this for you in exchange for programming or coding skills that you could provide (ask in our Market Place forum). THe problem with this one is, as Sonia said, the background image is really stretched out. It's not a good idea to expand an image from it's original dimensions - you can go smaller with no problems, but never bigger. You'll have to find a large enough picture to work from. Also learn how to anti-alias in your graphics program. It will make your text graphics look much smoother.

I also agree about the menu. Try to find a way to make it look like a navbar and not just plain text. Style the links differenty somehow using bold or colouring to separate them from plain text.

Otherwise it's not a bad start. YOu've got a nice layout going and a good colour scheme. That's a good base to work from.

I don't have much more to add but you say your friend is doing you a new logo, I fond that my designs come together once the logo/header is done as this lends to the colour scheme and a layout flows from that.

Good luck with the site

The blue/green you have in your navigation make a great pair but *not* on top of each other. Try to utilize this theme throughout the site with graphic headings, link hovers, etc.

Not much content to comment on. Being an RPG fan myself, I'm hoping that you'll include screenshots, etc to that section as they become available.

Bah! I apologize for not reading the bit about re-doing the logo! I know I hate it when people don't read the questions, so my sincere apologies for commenting on that

I dont fancy the green you have used on your links, menu heading and on your logo. I think you should try a few other shades of green and see how they look. Other than that you are off to a great start.

looks ok to me, top banner/image not look good, maybe colours could be improved, otherwise i feel that this is a good site

Well, I'm extremely flattered by the comments and grateful for suggestions. Thank my friend for referring me here, very helpful. I will take all into consideration. I promise the new logo will be cool

I haven't read the thread. I just wanted to make an observation....

Programmers have little contact with circuit boards (in the logo).

ugh, I know I know. I only used it to have something there. I NEVER made a banner b4, so cut me a little slack puuulease .

Hey,
Nice colors, uncluttered. Only issue I have might be with the font of the nav buttons. Kinda hard to read. Other than that, looking good!

Heh, looks a lot like the second site I built. Can I ask if you got the design / idea from some other site or if you made it up off the top of your head?

But I really am a huge fan of the left hand navigation menu the way you have it.

My suggestions..

There should not be a break between the "News" link and the rest of that section's links.

There should be a lot less white space between the end of links on the left and the next section. A way to do this is to use CSS for your paragraph or br tags. Or you can img src="" height="10" width="1" then br right after it to fully customize white space like this.

The main section should not align right up to the divider. I would suggest using table cellpadding="15" and then put the main content inside that table.

And finally, there should be way more on the main panel. Images, background color and so on. Otherwise its too white / bland.

Good work so far though!

I have since updated Coder Playground, with forums, new banner and other things. Please tell me how I'm doing, and what I can do better. I know the color scheme is a little funky, but I kinda like it.

Coder Playground

You have a nice starting point. Just build on what you have already. I think the layout is fine.

As a fellow not-really-a-webmaster I empathize with the time and effort it takes to build your first site. Six years after my first site (and still never took a class) I'm just now finding out easy, basic things that would have made my life easier a long time ago

1) I agree with everything Rebies said.

2) I also agree with findng inspiration from other sites. Whether it's layout, color scheme, graphics, whatever. Don't copy, but if you like somebody's "look" than try to give your site a similar "look". (the ultimate goal is "branding")

3) Everybody's been talking about the header graphic so I'll try to make this part brief. I suggest not using an animated gif. For one it takes more time to load. Second, the blur makes me dizzy (just my viewpoint). If you like the green/yellow theme and gray font that's fine, but I do suggest adding a border to pop it out more and make it easier to read.

Good luck. Keep it up. A website is never 100% done