| Design |
| This page is committed to explaining our site design, what
we did and why. Many sites completely ignore the fact that
web standards exist, are poorly concieved and even more poorly
implemented. Hopefully this will explain why we are not part
of this conglomerate. On a sidenote - feel free to use any
part of our html/css for yourself, the only thing we ask is
that you don't steal our images. |
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| Structure |
There is a real problem arranging content in such a way that it will look presentable from browser to browser and from resolution to resolution. For this reason the basic structure of our pages follows several guidelines...
- Our basic content is always less than 600 pixels
wide. Firstly, this allows users with fairly minimal
resolutions to view our pages without having to
scroll across 5 screen widths. Secondly, users with
"normal" resolutions will invariably have
ICQ and other applications hogging up their screenspace.
It would be selfish and naive to assume our site will be
viewed in it's fullscreen splendor.
- Basic content is centered. Having content bunched
with a left align will nearly always look poor on
abnormally high resolutions, immediately the user
would know we weren't thinking when we designed
the site.
- No iframes, nothing fancy. Pages just have a
logically organised menu at the top followed by content. Content is categorically separated such that no page is excessive or unreasonable in its length.
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| Styles and color |
Colors and styles really set a page off and define
its features. Most structural designs turn out looking
quite similar so color was a big issue. Several other
issues arise with the use of color and stylesheets...
- We resisted coloring scrollbars for IE 5 and
above users. The CSS required to change IE scrollbar
colors is not standards compliant. Why on earth
Microsoft have developed such an utterly useless
gimmick for their browsers is incomprehensible...
the fact that people actually use it is just as
bad.
- Bright white screens hurt. It happens all too
often... you're sitting in a dark room looking for
muffin recipes on the web, you click a link and
... ^&*%!!! White background! Your pupils contract
as quickly as possible, but it's just too bright.
In keeping a fairly dark color scheme we hope to
have avoided emulating the intensity of the sun.
- No flash, no blinking test, no scrolling text,
just some simple rollover effects. Very few things
are more annoying than flash sites (and their load
times), but one definite contender is scrolling/blinking
text.
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| Images |
- Minimal image use and size. I'm sure we can agree
that being on dialup is pretty horrible. Being on
dialup and having some cretinous prick webmaster
lace a page with images shouldn't need to be tolerated.
Our largest standard images are around 1.5kb. Ingame
hero pictures are a little larger (approx 4kb each).
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