Review My Gaming Community Site, Please, :)

Hey all, just wondering if anyone can help out with some input about my current gaming community site.(http://www.clantakeover.co.cc)

To start off with, the goals. Right now we are based on just Warhammer Online, but I am wanting to over time expand it into other games as well. The information that will be found about various games are things such as general information, tips and tricks(no cheats/codes), walkthroughs, etc.

Right now I think it will be based on just MMORPG's, but that could always change.

In terms of the layout, that is my biggest issue. I'm just really not that creative. What I'm looking for is to make it very easy to navigate, with multiple navigation bars, or one nav bar that will work for everything. As of right now, depending on what part of the site you're on, you will see a different bar. For example, if you go to Warhammer Online you will see that nav bar, if you go into Reviews you will see a different one, etc. etc.

Along with this, I would love to make it more graphical, but honestly my graphics editing abilities are...Well, I don't have any,


Anyways, any input would be much appreciated, whether it's things you would change, things you like, or even things you hate.

Thanks in advance.

 

 

 

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As for the forums, not much you can do since it is a forum for people to communicate, as for the website I would suggest looking into free templates from sites like www.oswd.org or www.opendesigns.org/, and that will help you to get a better how you want to set up your website. My suggestion would be to use colors that match your forum to make it look clean and like they fit together, but check out the templates there and that might give you a better idea on how to set up your website.

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I can't comment much on actual website design since im not very experienced in it myself, but I do know about useability and attractiveness for a gaming community. Things that attract members to a website are stats, communication, and easy to access media. The ventrilo stats was a great idea, but I'd recommend
adding a picture and/or video page (pictures upload them to any image hosting site and link with HTML) (just upload videos to youtube and embed the player in your site). Stats required that you give incentive and an easy way for your members to submit new articles for different games. I suggest adding a section in forums for users to submit articles just like in trap17's tutorial forum. The only particular problem with the site that I see is the banner at the top. For some reason
I just always notice if an image is resized by a browser, it tends to distort it horribly. I'd recommend going into your code and figuring out what is resizing the banner and fixing it.

 

 

 

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Thanks for the input, to both of you.

As for the site colors, my biggest issue with that is that it most likely will not match the forums in the future. I plan to add different forum themes for each game, so everyone can choose which one they wish to use. So in terms of the site, I am thinking about just leaving it as a generic color.

Another plan that I had for it is to just set up different page looks depending on what game you go to. So let's say you're looking in Warhammer, you would see a look like warhammer. If you went into CSS it would look like CSS, etc.

The pictures I am planning on doing via like event pages, rather than a "here are all of our pictures" page, however that may change.

I'll definitely be checking out those template sites though, and thanks again to both of you!

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