Game Publishing/Business

Re: Help test my new website!

UberGeekGames — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:23:20 GMT

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! :-)

Re: Help test my new website!

Moni7or — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:11:32 GMT

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

Re: Help test my new website!

UberGeekGames — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:27:58 GMT

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.

Re: Help test my new website!

UberGeekGames — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:30:54 GMT

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.

Re: Help test my new website!

Xzeleous — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 04:54:42 GMT

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

Re: Help test my new website!

UberGeekGames — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:56:35 GMT

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...

Re: Help test my new website!

UberGeekGames — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 13:53:09 GMT

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!

Re: Help test my new website!

SquigglyFrog Studios — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:07:23 GMT

Well.. thats a whole nother subject.. lol

<div>'s are a big part of css based design.. a lot of the scripts use those for positioning elements of the webpage..

man this is so much easier said than done.. lol.. basically in the middle of the div's, Ill just add something like this:

all left hand column content here

</td>

<td>

All right hand content here

</td></tr></table>

Then in your css, you can style your table using normal css like:

#mystyle {

border: 1px dotted #ffffff;

padding: 5px;

background-color: #ff0000;

font-family: arial, helvetica;

}

etc etc..

If you havent done much html and css programming its sometimes a lot easier to find yourself a visual editor to design your sites in. All CSS layouts like the one you got from freecsstemplates.org are great, but still relatively new and they are dependant on each browser and how it renders it, therefore instead of the familiar

#if XBOX360

// code

#endif

your inserting a

<!--[if lt IE 7]>

<![endif]-->

Tables on the other hand are pretty much 100% standardized across all of them. Its a learning thing and a **LOT** of experimentation. Play with the css file on your site.. change things.. look up tags.. etc.. then look at the html portion, change it.. remove entire sections and recode them in a table..

if anyone on a html / css design forum saw me saying this Im sure they would scream out that im the antichrist, and tables are evil, and blah blah blah but.. you do what you gotta do to make it work.. plus, when your site looks identical in every browser version, its a nice feeling of acomplishment..

This post might not have been a whole lot of help, but hopefully it will give you some ideas as to how to proceed.

Re: Help test my new website!

UberGeekGames — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:30:22 GMT

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! ;-) )

Re: Help test my new website!

SquigglyFrog Studios — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:40:24 GMT

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!

Re: Help test my new website!

claudy27 — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:01:10 GMT

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

Re: Help test my new website!

UberGeekGames — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:10:32 GMT

@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...

Re: Help test my new website!

SquigglyFrog Studios — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:41:56 GMT

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!

Re: Help test my new website!

Excalibur Studios — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:50:00 GMT

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:

    
            #sidebar h2 { 
        
                height: 33px; 
        
                margin: 0 0 20px 0px; 
        
                padding: 15px 0px 0px 20px; 
        
                background: url(images/img06.jpg) repeat-x left top; 
        
                text-transform: uppercase; 
        
                font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; 
        
                font-size: 14px; 
        
                font-weight: bold; 
        
                color: #FFFFFF; 
        
            }

To something with a little more hue:

    
            #sidebar h2 { 
        
                height: 33px; 
        
                margin: 0 0 20px 0px; 
        
                padding: 15px 0px 0px 20px; 
        
                background-color: #243245; 
        
                text-transform: uppercase; 
        
                font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; 
        
                font-size: 14px; 
        
                font-weight: bold; 
        
                color: #FFFFFF; 
        
            }

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

Re: Help test my new website!

UberGeekGames — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:45:51 GMT

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. :-)