Hi all,

I've recently made significant changes to my website. I found a great site that has free CSS templates that are perfect for my use, since I'm not a web designer at all. ;-)

Anyway, I've tested it with several browsers but it's not coming up correctly on all of them. Specifically, on IE 6.0 the side bars are screwed up and some of the links are invisible until you mouse over them. I think IE is pretty much obsolete at this point, but do I need to support it? (if so, how??)

So, if you're interested, please check out my site and post if there are any problems with your browser. Any feedback on how it looks and is laid out would be much appreciated as well.

The site is here: www.ubergeekgames.com

Thanks!

Don't see any layout errors here (Firefox 3.x), but since you asked for additional feedback:

I will caution you regarding the (almost) completely black color scheme. Darker colors can work fine on a web site, but a broader palette could really add a lot to the general feel of the pages. Check out ColourLovers for a variety of palettes that are used in great-looking sites.

Looks nice.  I like it.  Works fine for me, I am viewing it in Google Chrome.

Thanks. So far I've only tested it with FF 3.0.10 and IE 6, the latter of which has problems... I'll get a friend to test it on the latest IE later.

That's a good site, I've bookmarked it. This was one of the best designs I could find though, and I really have no clue how to change or edit CSS. Are there any reasons why darker colors are bad for websites?

I wouldn't worry about IE6 support unless you're working in a corporate environment where users have to use IE6 (I'm not sure anyone else does at this point, or at least very few do). Normally I develop for IE7+ and FireFox. Anything else that happens to work is gravy IMO.

Social Loner Studios:

Looks nice.  I like it.  Works fine for me, I am viewing it in Google Chrome.

Thanks! Good to know that's safe.

Social Loner Studios:

I think you should support IE, if the problem is only in IE 6, then it isn't too bad, since 7 & 8 are out now.  Most of the general population (non techies) still uses IE.

Sadly, that's true (sorry MS!). I'll try it on the latest IE later. I had a similar problem with the old design and had to work around it, but I'm fairly certain it's a problem only on the older version (hopefully).

Social Loner Studios:

Ahhh, ASCII art, I love it.  I will have to give Dungeon Adventure a go when it comes out.

Thanks again! I get that a lot about DA - I should have time to pick it up again once I'm finished with GameFinder. :-)

UberGeekGames:

Are there any reasons why darker colors are bad for websites?

Sorry, I should have been a little clearer. It's not that darker colors are bad, it just that when all you have a totally black background and all of the (non-text) visual elements like borders, header backgrounds, etc., are near-black or darker shades of gray, the eye naturally has to strain a little bit in order to differentiate the separate elements of the page. (You'd have the same problem if the page were entirely made up of light colors.)

Basically, a dark color scheme is fine, but for optimal readability, it's best to have a few other matching colors. Take a look at the way these palettes are used, for instance:
http://www.colourlovers.com/trend/websitecolors/10331/2008/04/16/Superawesome_-_design_for_Web
and
http://www.colourlovers.com/trend/websitecolors/10265/2008/04/16/evaneckard.com

That backgrounds on the above samples are pretty dark, but the other colors on the page still keep the darkness from being overwhelming. Notice that it's also easy to visually separate the links, headers, and text from each other.

Anyway, I think the main issue is just the heavy use of black and gray.

I checked out the CSS on your site and it looks like modifying it would be a little more involved than just changing the color codes, since some of the elements use .JPG backgrounds instead of solid colors. But, I think just changing your sidebar header:


To something with a little more hue:


... could go a fair way toward making the page look a little more snazzy.

Definately support IE.. Im at work right now, so its the only browser I have and it still has a majority userbase.. since I work for an ISP that covers a 14 state region here in the US, well, I can tell you there are a **LOT** of people still running IE6 too.. The layout is broke in IE7 as well.

The left hand column on your games pages, "Praise for ###" is not displaying correct, it displays on the left, but starts at the bottom of the right column.

In IE7 at least, your mouseovers on your menus dont show properly initially. I thought it was odd you had headings for released games and in development and no links.. then as soon as I mouse-overed them the links appeared.

I thought the entire page though was just solid black except for the header image until I actually sat up.. Once I sat up, because of the lcd here, i noticed the less-dark boxes for released games, etc.. slouching like normal looking up at the lcd, i never noticed them.

Other than a few minor things, and they really are minor, it looks good. I really would use some different images or get a lighter theme overall..

gotta love http://www.freecsstemplates.org/ though.. thats where I pick up most of mine, even though a lot of the times I modify em until they aren't recognizable anymore.. my http://www.squigglyfrogstudios.net/ was one of their layouts.. originally...

Good job though!

@Excalibur Studios: Thanks, that does look better! I think I'll change that.

@SquigglyFrog Studios: Yeah, that sounds exactly like what I'm seeing in IE6 too. :-( No idea how to get it working in there. I guess I'll be reading up on HTML and CSS now...

Looks good in IE8.  The compatibility mode messes up the site, so it actually looks better in regular mode.

claudy27:

Looks good in IE8.  The compatibility mode messes up the site, so it actually looks better in regular mode.

Simple reason for that. IE8 is more "standards compliant" than 6 or 7 was. MS was treating css differently and had issues on 6 & 7 when it worked fine on others.. so there were a lot of "hacks" to make ie 6&7 display the same as the rest of the browsers out there.. 8 seems to have fixed it. But, since the majority are still running 6 or 7........

UberGeek:

For what its worth.. what I end up doing 90% of the time, and just because of that rendering issue.. is combine my css and tables both. Its not the best way and its more hack than anything, but at least I can make my sites all look the same across all browsers. I'll use tables for the primary layout and then use css for coloring, font sizes, table borders, etc etc. I just avoid using the css positioning.. so you might look into that!

SquigglyFrog Studios:

For what its worth.. what I end up doing 90% of the time, and just because of that rendering issue.. is combine my css and tables both. Its not the best way and its more hack than anything, but at least I can make my sites all look the same across all browsers. I'll use tables for the primary layout and then use css for coloring, font sizes, table borders, etc etc. I just avoid using the css positioning.. so you might look into that!

Sounds good. How exactly do you do that? (you can probably tell I spend much more time coding my games than my websites! ;-) )

Well.. thats a whole nother subject.. lol

Thanks a lot, that helps. I'll see what I can do with this. Hopefully the older browsers will be completely phased out eventually, so web designers won't have to worry about this!

I've just updated it again with some slight changes to the look of things, but sadly it still looks weird in IE6/7. Still working on that...

I really liked your website. It worked perfectly in Google Chrome, and I saw little difference in my verstion of IE 7.

Thanks! That's good to know. It's mainly IE6 that's giving me problems, but unfortunately that's still one of the most widely used browsers. I've been getting help elsewhere on this and am working to get it rendering better in IE6, so I'll post again when it's finished.

Drumroll please...

I'm happy to announce that UberGeekGames.com now renders correctly in IE6!

Took me nearly all afternoon, and involved playing around with the </div> tags as well as the width and height parameters in the CSS file. I'm pretty sure most of it amounted to blind luck, but hey, I'll take it! :-)

There's still a strange white band on the game links in the index page - it appeared after removing the "background: none;" tags in the CSS for the sidebars. But I'll gladly take off-color bands over not showing up at in IE6!

I've also added a blog; now that I've figured out how to move around the tags, it's a viable alternative to getting a blog with another site.

Works fine with Firefox on Linux. I'd recommend placing a notice on your front page, right along the top, that says "Page not displaying right? Click here to see supported browsers." so that if anyone with IE does come along, they're not out of luck.

On a side note, nice work on A Game of Tennis, I've played it before and thoroughly enjoyed it. (b^.^)b

Moni7or:

Works fine with Firefox on Linux. I'd recommend placing a notice on your front page, right along the top, that says "Page not displaying right? Click here to see supported browsers." so that if anyone with IE does come along, they're not out of luck.

Excellent! Good idea about the warning, but fortunately it's a non issue as I've finally gotten the IE problems sorted out. (why IE cares about a couple extra </div> tags and FF doesn't is beyond me...)

Moni7or:

On a side note, nice work on A Game of Tennis, I've played it before and thoroughly enjoyed it. (b^.^)b

Thanks, really glad you liked it! :-)