Layouts

I think that a good way to start is to look at other sites. http://www.coolhomepages.com lists some of the best sites on the 'net. Browse around and really look in detail at what they're doing. What colours look good? Where do people put the navigation? What else do they use to fill up the page? What kind of fonts are popular?

One thing you'll notice is that every well designed sites have a logo of some sort. Big businesses will spend a lot of money on these things (usually...) to come up with something that appropriately represents their topic, but it's still fairly easy to make a decent one yourself.

I mentioned there that a logo should be appropriate to the site topic. It should get the message across. This is what design is all about I think. You want to create a look and feel that is suitable to your site and helps to create an atmosphere and get your message across to your visitors. The Webmaster Forums logo, for example, uses a casual rounded font which conveys a fun, friendly atmosphere (I hope!). The two circular arrows in the background symbolize the give and take of information that goes on here.

This site was recently posted in the critiques section. The orange and grey on black give it kind of a cutting edge look, let the logo font is simple and straightforward. The numbers and karate cartoons used for navigation are fun and kind of light hearted. Notice the visual impression that different elements can make on the viewer.

As for colour schemes, start by thinking of a colour you associate with your site topic. Then try matching it up against others until you find something you like. Here are a couple of good utilities:

http://www.paletteman.com/
http://www.visibone.com/colorlab/

If you're stuck, an idea is to borrow from a sports team - they usually have good combinations, and I find that the newer teams are coming up with particularly interesting combinations. As with all aspects of design, there's nothing wrong with borrowing ideas from other sites. If you see a colour scheme you like go ahead and borrow it. Just don't copy the whole design

Hope that helps...

This isnt so much as a tip as an idea, your site is about 3 graphic intense games (i think pokemon is), so anyway, and people on here that know me are goin freak, but i reckon do it with flash. using the 3 topics and a game like background you could create some very intersting naviagtion and a interesting way to get your contents across, but if you do, dont do like most flasher do, dont over do it, limit your animations, limit your annoying beeps and pings, sure use animations when mouseover links but set a 5-10 sec limit so it stops while the person would be reading or whatever, there is a very fine line between exciting and annoying, look at how the marquee, blink and animated gifs are seen these days, strange that these same things that people hate are being reused in flash.

whatever you do it in flash, html or other, the world is your jellybean, your only limited to your imagination, good luck

I think I'll add a few things. I don't have Flash or anything like that. I am also trying to make my site as fast-loading as possible. It loads pretty darn fast right now, especially compared to other sites. Graphics are something I'd love to have, especially as they don't slow down loading of the tables and stuff too much if you use HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes.

BTW, I came from a message board with many people who did more unconstructive criticism then anything, and I'm glad to see that this board appears to have a lot of helpful users, nothing like the other one.

Welcome to TWF Jshadias, we do aim to be as helpful and constructive here as possible, I hope you will enjoy being a part of our family!

Megan, as normal, has summed everything up nicely. You seem to have a good idea of what you want this site to acheive and to a certain extent you have already done a lot of the work, now you just need to make it look more professional. I would think about things in this order:

Choose a colour scheme - greens are very hard to match different shades of. A white background is good, so choose another colour to accent the green.

Create a logo - get a graphics program, download some fonts, type out your site name and find a font it looks good in then play around with colours until you get a unique look which will serve as the identity of the site.

Have a look around at other sites and see how things are laid out, noticing things like the navigation boxes are all the same size, use rollover effects to add interest, etc.

Get some graphical images to spice your pages up. Images from the games or something.

Get some meta tags on the pages, especially if you plan to submit to the search engines.

I assume you have to have the banners on the site because of the free space?? If you can't get rid of them can you move them to the bottom of the pages? But if you can loose them altogether, they detract badly from the site content.

Good start.

One more thing - definitely get some sort of a graphics program and start learning how to use it. It's not going to be a short or easy process but your site will look 100x better in the long run. You might want to start out with Macromedia's Fireworks or Paint Shop Pro by Jasc. Adobe's Photoshop is the industry standard but it is very expensive.

I need the ads to pay for the hosting. The hosting's not free. My old host (Brinkster) won't let me do everything I want in ASP. Plus, I want my site to make money so my parents will let me get on the computer more. If they see it's money-making, why wouldn't they? I'm expecting I'll lose a lot of money at first though. I might try to make a way to present the ad well, like in other sites I've seen. I just don't know how to make graphics. It's like a really difficult principle I just can't get. You know you've almost got it, but you don't. Oh well, I'll try to make something. I've got Photoshop. I can get screenshots from Age of Kings and possibly Pokemon, but I don't know about Tib Sun. AOK has a built in screen-shot taker, and Tib Sun might *seems to remember reading in the manual*, and I think I can get some from Pokemon with a cheating device (my brother's, I hate cheaters, especially when you're competing against them) that can take screenshots. I'm not sure if he'll let me use it though. And I'm glad to hear that you think I have a good idea of what I want it to be like and just need to make it look professional. Most people assume kids don't know anything (not that you knew it until now). I'm only 13 years old, but the way I see it, that just means I have more years in my life to be a webmaster! I've been making sites for about 3 years now. I started off learning HTML and then used Homestead *ouch!* for quite a while. Yeah, learned HTML and use Homestead |o| Then I got sick of it and used Geocities, then Dreamwater, then Brinkster, and now Pikacenter.com's server, my first payed server (which I was barely able to afford, don't know how I will continue too).
I'll see what I can whip up in the area of graphics.

Oh, this is so frustrating... I just added a banner and it looks horrible with the advertisement there. This stinks...
EDIT: I stuck the ads at the bottom of the page and now it looks better.

you might wanna make the lil boxes at the left the same size.

Just keep trying Jshadias It takes a lot of trial and error to get good at this.

I had to put the ads back at the top because I read that I have to have the ads in view without scrolling down. I'll make the menu tables the same size, I was already thinking of it.

Who says kids can't program ASP! Noone,apparently Anyways, if someone ever did, I just proved them wrong! No more errors when posting news! Now I just need to do that with the rest of the pages So anyways, I programmed an ASP script to handle posting news, and need to do that with the rest of the pages, but I don't think I will today. Making sites was becoming a chore, so what I do now is either finish a small project or run into errors I can't find out, and then play Tiberian Sun! Watch out, Hammerfest!