SITE REVIEW: DevImg.net (community screenshot site)

DevImg.net was, first of all, started in January so there is already plenty of content -- it's not a vacant shell I'm trying to get reviews of

Anyway it's a site for amateur game developers to upload screenshots of their projects, with information and comments. I don't want to say too much because I hope the site is intuitive enough that you can figure it out, and if not, then I need to change things.

The site has gone through many changes through its 9-month lifespan and there's still minor additions I'll be doing... but I'm really interested in hearing feedback on its design. If you want, you can post under the "Site Updates" thread whose link is in the top-right corner of the site.

No one has any comments, suggestions, complaints?

Hey,

I like the concept of the site. The colors you picked are okay until you get to the, "Recent Activity" table.

That background mixed with the red "new", the green comments, the blue links, and the black text are making my eyes hurt. Pick no more than 3 main colors for your site and stick with them. At the very minimum change the background color of that table to the same color as the rest of the site. Your visitors will still see it because of the other colors already present.

You might want to change, "Referrers" to, "Partners"

I also think you should get rid of the Expanding table. Don't use the 100% width attribute. The design of your site does not look quite right at a higher resolution. Compress the Top left and Top Right tables into the center and make one large table for the entire site. Width = 800 perhaps. You can keep it all centered and it will still look good too.


Otherwise, great site with a lot of good ideas!

-Jon Harrison

Thanks for your feedback. You know, this thread is 5 months old, but I happened to see it, so OK. Anyway I agree the Recent Activity table looks ugly and I've been meaning to pretty it up for a while, just haven't got around to it yet.

"Partners" is an OK word, but it makes it seem like the sites are affiliated, when it's merely a link-exchange thing. But I can't fit "Link Exchange" in the small titlebar.

I run my browser maximized in 1600x1200 resolution and I think the site looks fine. I definitely will not compress it (especially to a tiny 800-width) because I really hate sites that do that. People who run in high resolutions do so because they want to see a lot of stuff on the screen, not blank space, so tons of blank space on webpages is kinda dumb.

By the way, did you view any of the posts? You'll see they make good use of the screen space, especially with the comments on the side as they are.

Hey C! I'm Skybin! Cool to see ya here.

the page loads slowly...not sure if it has to do with image sizes or your hosting.....(im on broadband)

the colors dont look to shabby....the site looks drab. (too dark)

Yeah, I think it needs to be a bit brighter, or at least have brighter sections on it, more screenshots. Maybe a "Screenshot of the day" feature block or something.

Also, the navigation at the top took a lil time to register, I just thought it was a banner on first glance. Might want to make them a bit more obvious

Very nice. Simple, compatible, great concept.

Your colors are awful. No grey/blue/black, it makes me sleepy. Pick three colors and stick with them.

You have a great thing going, just make it pr33ty to look at.

Your source code is terrible. Terribly long. Takes forever to load. Other than that, it's about a 5/10.

Thanks for the feedback.

Regarding the colors, the site was originally written using a low-contrast LCD so the colors looked brighter on it, but now I can see it really is a bit too dark. I think the comment colors are good, right? It's just the main text that has a too-dark background.

It is a bit drab, too. Eventually I'll try to make it more "fun" to use, like how DeviantArt changes the background color for mouse-over. I won't do that exactly but I'll try to make it more interactive somehow.

There are lots of screenshots in the archives, but the Recent Activity list shows stuff only from the last week and the thumbnail bar shows only the last 5 or 10 images. But I do need to make navigation of the thumbnail bar more obvious, definitely. I used to have explanatory text but I removed it "temporarily" when I was rearranging things and I never added it back.

As for the source code... who cares? It's all generated by the PHP scripts and I didn't bother inserting linebreaks in most places. The JavaScript is better-formatted since that I just wrote directly, of course.

I really like the idea of the site, but as other people have said it could look a lot better. Colors are important, but moreover a good way to navigate the site is also important. There isn't a problem with the way you get around in your site, it just that it looks bad when doing it. Now I can say much because the site is made with a language I am trying to learn, but some love to the overall layout would be good!

Otherwise, great concept for a site! Hopefully some people look at the site, and gets some finding for these budding world makers!

If it slows down your download speeds YOU SHOULD. It's nasty source code. You could easily cut your speed (er, your wait) in half by using CSS and using CSS in replacement for a lot of your CSS. Even on a fast connection your website takes too long to load.

You asked for comments: there you have it.

Speed up your D/L time and spruce up the design and you'll have a good website.

Oh, I didn't realize that was what you meant. Well there are some places where I can use more CSS but alot of the tags are table-related and I have not seen any way in CSS to do the same thing, especially in a way that's compatible with many browsers. So I can try to trim down the size of each post slightly but I can't do anything major.

EDIT: The site loads quickly for me even on modem connections, but for repeat visits. That means the images are what slows things down. On a new computer, I find the menu seems to take the longest to load. It does use a lot of images (46 total just for the buttons!) so I should replace that with CSS... in other words, single-color backgrounds that I just change the color of. Or something to that effect. I really like the way the current menu looks but I realize it takes forever to load.

Which parts of CSS are you having trouble implementing in your tables. As far as I know, only cell-spacing isn't supported.

It's hard to name the specific parts, but when I tried removing tables, I just found I couldn't get things aligned the way they are with tables. And tables are far more widely supported of course.