review request: The STDN

Hey Katie,
A Trekkies heaven and I found it easy to navigate.I'm on dial-up and it loaded everything quickly.
Cheers Hoppy

I love Star Trek and this is certainly a great resource and for once I'm not going to complain about the black background!

What I will say is that it all seems a bit squashed up. The navigation links you have at the top there could be spaced out a bit more and they seem to site right on top of the time things there (are they really needed?)

The first page is very long and I think I would prefer it to be a quick overview of what the site offers with maybe some of the banners and then a separate page for the site news, or maybe the most recent news item then a separate page for the rest.

Where you have the iframe for the news at 800*600 you are getting a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom because of the images there I assume and with the whole load of black space between the last lot of news and the scrollbar it looks very odd. I would also say that some padding on the cells with the news in would be good as the text runs right up to the side at present.

You definitely need a back to the top link if you are going to keep the page so long as it's a pain having to scroll back up to the top to get to the navigation again.

I take it this site wasn't designed for 800*600 as on a couple of the other pages there is a horizontal scrollbar on the browser.

Whoah, there's a lot going on here. I'm sort of overwhelmed by all the different bright colours here. I personally tend to prefer a clean layout style, so maybe others don't feel this way, but I really feel that this needs to be toned down a bit or at least reorganized.

The first thing I would do is add a little more white space in the top part of the page. Right now the whole area seems a little too cramped. For example, that row of times shouldn't bump right up against the nav links above. There should aso be more of a separation between the two sets of links. Speaking of those links, it would look a lot neater if they were all aligned to the top, rather than having the second column start halfway down. I'm also thinking it would be better if this part was the only thing on the page (i.e. lose everything below that line of times)

Another thing I'm going to complain about is the colour scheme. Black background is okay, but I really don't like the combination of blue, pink, orange, red, and whatever else you've got going on here. I'm not a star trek fan, so I'm not sure what would be most appropriate here, but I'm thinking that some of those colours have got to go.

Great

The time displays seems to be a coomon thread along with the menu layout...i'll mess around with the layout and the colour scheme but usually black is the best to go with. Reason behind it is a lot of the visitors we get to the place are avid online gamers, they spend hours playing games online, so when they went into the old STCD 1 (the original site) which had a light background they were somewhat 'blinded' by the colour shceme of it all.

The menu and cramped looks though, i can do something about that...need to turn my res down to 800 x 600 first though

I used to be a hardcore gamer (40+ hours a week). And yes, gamers prefer darker sites. Games don't tend to be very bright, so when you switch to a browser, you appreciate dark backgrounds.

For a while, I had my EditPad (ASCII editor) configured with a dark gray background with a lighter gray text.

*Slightly off topic*

What do gamers do in the real world once they trun away from their black screens - wear dark sunglasses all day or just go out at night??

Quote: Originally posted by The Webmistress
*Slightly off topic*

What do gamers do in the real world once they trun away from their black screens - wear dark sunglasses all day or just go out at night??

No, we wear dark glasses all the time, and only go out at night. In our rooms, the windows and blinds are always shut, and the only light source is the moniter (which is why we need black backgrounds).

Actually that IS true in some cases.

The founder of the STCD (Victor) does a lot of freelance game review work for PC Gamer UK and 'The Net Bug' magazine in the UK. So when a new app comes out in the UK or a new games thats been chalked up as a possible big seller he gets them all in the same week. He then gets a few big bottles of cola, orders out a family size pizza and shuts the blinds.

Myself, Vic and Nikki then proceed to tear the game or app apart,looking for faults of any kind. That kind of thing can go on for a few days...or until vic completes the game. Usually takes him a 24 to 36 hour stint to finish a game off, if its longer it gets an even better review...

Anyway, i've altered the site around a bit, dropped the clocks down and seperated them with a bar and split the 2 menus in half AND i've re-organised the template table's so 800x600 res screens shouldnt get a horizontal scroll bar, well, it didnt on mine anyway

Better organisation at the top now but I'm not sure about the colours. The logo seems very bright and bubble gummy and the others very dark and the picture of the woman looks too grainy. I don't like blue links on black and I think the red bullets clash with the pink.

Yeah, I was thinking it would look good if those links were white, or the yellow on mouseover looks okay. I also think that the text in the logo should go over the space ships not under it. And I agree about the bubble gummy pink and blue. Another thing is that I think I liked the old background better - it didn't cut off so much around the edges.

Much better with the spacing and alignment though.

Yeah see what you mean about the bubble gum effect, i hate the way Adobe messes with eyecandy glass effects when its a .gif. I'm gonna try PNG or JPG later on, but we have the Trek Gamers memorial coming up and the network sites on my side are starting off the 911 memorial's so the banner has changed again...the new one will be uploaded on the 15th, its been fixed, a bit like this current one...

I'll get vic to do something about the links as well...we'll see what white looks like

Actually I prefer the blue & red you have there now as it matches more with the site and it's the lighter blue and pink that make it look bubble gummy. Keep it the new colours and change the logo under the times to match. The piture of the woman looks better now as well as she looks less grainy.

I peeked at it the other night but didn't have time to give you a critique. I do think it looks much better. However, isn't there anything that you can do to decrease the load time? I know that I have a crummy dial up connection (poor me )but it is taking the site several minutes to load.

Just my opinion here but I think you have a bit much for the home page. Or is this the home page? I don't see a "Home" link. This page is the Latest News page isn't it?

The image you have at the top of each section in the body part is too repetative. Not sure I would use it over and over like that. Other than those few things....nice job.

Sonia

Well, the site layout is the standard layout for most gaming sites, especially in Trek related sites. The gamers like something thats uniform in design and doesnt change from page to page, run a search for 'star trek game sites' in google or something and you'll see what i mean

As for the load time...what are you connecting at? At 56k (full 56k though) it takes from 10 to 20 seconds for the main page to load. Theres nothing i can do with the graphics, if you look at it there is barely any graphocs on the site at all, if i remove any more of it it will be nothing but text...which is good for me (dont have to update the hearder) but it will end up boring our visitors...

I'll see if i can compress the .jpg and convert the rest of the .gif files, but if i compress it anymore than it is i'll get that grainy effect that webmistress was talking about... :-/

Quote: Originally posted by Abhishek Reddy
No, we wear dark glasses all the time, and only go out at night. In our rooms, the windows and blinds are always shut, and the only light source is the moniter (which is why we need black backgrounds).

And don't forget our blacklights! I've got a 2ft and a 4ft fluorescent blacklight fixtures in my room. My room glows!

Load time isn't only graphics as most people think, your .html file adds to it, your .js, .css ... (if any) as well. (html file is 12.4kb)
nested tables (deep nested tables) can slow it down heaps, maybe break your main page in half or three quarters the length. much of the stuff on there isn't needed, a link to them would work. consider using SSI or something to include sections on choosing or like a msn/yahoo style where you can set whats displayed and whats not.
I'm not a gamer but when I do play them I always click thru all the intros as fast as I can so I can play it, pretty sure this would be the norm for die hard gamers too.
I counted 6 tag sets and a few font tags, use CSS for fonts etc, use one tag in the head (should be ) ,your coding tidied up will gain some load speed