Help me make a new Charas design

[Ben]

i see your point.


Perhaps If I simplify things. In my mind it was much more basic...but as i tried to cram all the things on the main page in, it cluttered.


I just really liked the whole top navigation buttons being distinct. I may try again dude. thx for the input.

[Nightsrealm]

Heres an example of how i think it should be.

Lots of shades xD

[WarxePB]

I've just cobbled up some screens in Paint, so they don't look spectacular. But here's how I think C3 should look.

Portal:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/odinthegreat1/portal.png

The portal is directly linked to http://charas-project.net, so it's the first screen you see. Each button there leads you to a part of the site, and each section has a "Home" link that brings you back to this page. It's basically a quick navigation tool. The button order doesn't matter.

News and Updates:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/odinthegreat1/mainpage.png
Basically the Main Page now. From here, you can take a look at the newest content from each section of the site without having to go through each section.

Complete Resources:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/odinthegreat1/cr.png
The revamped CR. The toolbar in the middle has several options:
-View - Changes what or how you view the CR. Show Type changes the type of resource being displayed, List By includes several options to list the resources by (I'm thinking Alpha, Newest First, Oldest First, Highest-Ranked and Lowest-Ranked), and At a Time changes the number of resources being displayed.
To display the changes, the Go button has to be hit, allowing you to make multiple changes without having to reload every time.
-Search - Find specific resources. Name searches the resource's title, Member searches by username (instead of a drop-down list, the name is entered manually), Type searches certain categories, Keywords searches by keywords, and Ranking searches by ranking. Several options can be selected at once to narrow down the search, and again, the Go button executes it.
Submit is a separate page with a submission form similar to the one we have now. Report is similar, but instead of an upload field, you would have to put the link of the resource in.
The resources themselves are unaltered, but Keywords are added, and you can vote for resources if you're logged in. Pretty basic.

That's all the screens I have for now (more coming soon). Games would basically be a cross between N&U and the CR, and the Generators and Wiki would be unaltered. Forum would lead to the forum, which is whatever we decide to go with (PUB or PHPBB or whatever), and Your Profile would display uploaded resources, games, and wiki contributions, as well as your forum profile.

[Osmose]

Warxe brings up another point: Alex has decreed and I intend to follow his decree that everything on the Charas website be custom made and made for free for the website, AKA We're sticking with the PUB.

The wiki does not qualify due to it being hosted by someone else. We just link to it because a bunch of people liked it (At one point at least).

[WarxePB]

Regardless, Moose, what do you think of my layout so far? Does it seem feasible to do?

[Osmose]

The whole portal idea doesn't really work. It adds another step in the process for no reason. Everything it's trying to do could be accomplished by a good navigation bar included in the site-wide header.

News and Updates, as you said, is no real change.

I kind've like how you laid out the CR (It's a lot more easy on the eyes in layout than what I lumped together for the revamp). I may take some ideas from that.

[Moosetroop11]

You could have a box showing the week's most poular CR resource. That'd be cool :p

[Moosetroop11]

I'm not a big fan of gradients, to be honest.

Especially if they're done like in Nightsrealm's example. No offense.

[Osmose]

Gradients gradients gradients. They are not the magic cure-all to design.

"I positively see the trend on using vertical gradients to indicate that the page goes further down, and changes into a solid color" - First comment on this blog entry.

I like that idea a whole lot, but there's got to be more to web design than simply gradients.

One thing that I noticed is that Charas seems empty of content simply because it is all contained in the center. A lot of websites stretch to the width of the page even though they may still be optimized for an 800x600 display. Covering the edges makes it seem more filling, more visually pleasing.

Here's a question for all of you: How would you utilize the basis of stretching to fill the entire page? What kind of choices would you make given this limitation?

[Ben]

uhhh.... various rpg related images.
duh.

[SaiKar]

Don't bother trying to help Moose on graphic-related stuff. He'll tell you to change this and to change that and never be happy.

*terrible, terrible flashbacks to that battle character set...*

[Osmose]

Wah wah, it was all 10 second edits that, though at the time I couldn't do, I cold now do easily.

[Shady Ultima]

Originally posted by Moosetroop11
You could have a box showing the week's most poular CR resource. That'd be cool :p

Well, an interesting Idea I think would be a rating system.

When a resource gets uploaded, it can be rated 1 - 5. Then you can see the highest ranked CRs.

I like your idea MT, and I think there should be a most popular over all. One that shows the resources that are downloaded the most.

Also, there should be an option to only show 2k/3 or XP resources, for the people that don't have one or the other.

[Osmose]

Originally posted by Shady Ultima

Originally posted by Moosetroop11
You could have a box showing the week's most poular CR resource. That'd be cool :p

Well, an interesting Idea I think would be a rating system.

When a resource gets uploaded, it can be rated 1 - 5. Then you can see the highest ranked CRs.

I like your idea MT, and I think there should be a most popular over all. One that shows the resources that are downloaded the most.

Also, there should be an option to only show 2k/3 or XP resources, for the people that don't have one or the other.[/B]

Every single one of those features is already implemented in the new CR except for viewing the most downloaded. People can vote for or against resources depending on whether they are good or not and resources can be sorted by how many votes they have. Normal resources and XP resources are also split into sections.

But that's shifting away from design and into functionality. I'm starting to get an idea of what I might design, more ideas are welcome.

[Osmose]

Whee, a prototype!

It's not as shiny as it possibly will be - the idea is more to get a type of layout down and make it amazing once the basics are set down. But as for the layout and concept, do you like it?