hey look, my post''s back up!!!

anyhows..

if a fancy websites dont impress people, i wonder why companies still spend huge $$$ in their development??? a professional website, gives the impression of a professional team.. and people who look professional, in my opinion are going to be taken more seriously..

quote:

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Original post by mentalstatement
hey look, my post''s back up!!!

anyhows..

if a fancy websites dont impress people, i wonder why companies still spend huge $$$ in their development??? a professional website, gives the impression of a professional team.. and people who look professional, in my opinion are going to be taken more seriously..

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But are "professional" websites necessarily fancy? If the purpose of the website is to present information to the general public, then it should be designed in such a way that the information can be readily accessed.

Admittedly, there are some websites I''ve seen that are fancy, slow, hard to navigate and which I consider to have been well designed, but those are ones I''ve gone to for entertainment not information, and I wouldn''t buy anything from them even if they were selling.

A fancy website might not impress, but it at least shows that the developers actually have spent more than 30 seconds on the thing that is presenting their project to the world. If you can''t be bothered to make a website look halfway decent (or pay some kid 25$ to do it), I wouldn''t trust you to make an interesting-looking game either. You dont need to be some php wizard, or spend months designing an uber webinterface with flash all over the place, and fancy special effects. But at least make it look, well, interesting. I mean, I can knock up a decent website in 10 minutes, which doesnt use much more bandwidth than your basic "black text on white background site" does. If people can''t be bothered to do that, they''ve effectively told me that they dont care about presenting their project, and then I''m not interested in seeing it either.

I don''t normally plug, but I have to know whether this fits into the Good Crappy or the just-plain-bad category according to the folks here.

STIT

It''s mine, and it''s a mod rather than a full game, but mods, for those not in the know, are classic for having the ultimate bad cases of TooMuchWebsititis. In the Deus Ex community, in particular, folks were constantly putting up these gorgeous websites and never releasing anything. As someone mentioned earlier in the thread, this can be very frustrating if you''re joining with an eye to releasing a quality product.

Personally, I think text takes a different kind of mindset to enjoy, but then I don''t like random flash as a general rule. I enjoy it for the dedicated purpose of watching webtoons, but for a normal website I can only tolerate a limited number of very subtle (and small) effects.

thanks,
ld

The problem with making a fancy/professional/spent-more-than-1-minute website for a project is that most projects fail. If I'm going to work on a project a month or two and have it fall through, I'd rather lose that one month of work than it and another I spent making a very nice website. Also, most programmers (at least the ones I know IRL) have no sense of design. Every webpage made by a programmer that I've seen looked terrible. I know only one person that can make nice looking websites, and thats all he does. He knows VB fairly well, but he just makes utilities for himself (and he doesn't make those very often). He also knows PHP because it helps him do web design. He's also does photography (tho he hasn't a fancy camera yet, he plans on getting one soon) and draws 'anime style' (somebody made a point that it was incorrect to say that because every anime has a different style, but I'm gonna say it anyways, so I put it in quotes). It seems to me that most programmers don't have an eye for the visual arts not related directly to game making (sure we can appreciate a nice volumetric fire or a good particle explosion =-).

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Almost typo-ified using Extrarius' AUTOMATIC Typo Generator, but I decided to be nice =-)

[edited by - Extrarius on February 26, 2003 12:29:23 PM]

quote:

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Original post by liquiddark
I don''t normally plug, but I have to know whether this fits into the Good Crappy or the just-plain-bad category according to the folks here.

STIT

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I''ve got nothing against text heavy sites myself - I prefer content over style. However, I think you could do with rethinking the colour scheme a bit - I found the dark text on a black background almost unreadable.