Topic: Help make this site better: www.1up.com

I've recently moved from working for a big, relatively stable company (ebay) to a 5 person team working on create a dynamic, creative site for gamers: http://www.1up.com

We're using lots of tech, flash, iframes, etc. and I'm basically inheriting the html from some contracting firm. What I want to do is make this site fast, standards compliant, and just really cool.

Hit me with your ideas, suggestions, etc. Please be a bit more constructive than "you have too many ads" or "the flash takes forever to load"... those are already issues being looked into. I'm hoping for more down and dirty site optimization, technique style things. (Gee, asking alot for free , arent I?)

Anyway, have a look around - and dont hold back on the comments

--- RPG Fan ---

Well you could always start out by doing something like this.

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A//www.1up.com/do/home

I was goin to add more but my gf is calling me upstairs to take care of our son. Sorry.

I get this wonderful add on the first page with a small little link to the site. If this site weren't asking for a review I would have closed the site immediately, wouldn't have wasted my time with it, there are plenty of other sites with content that I would be interested in that don't assult me with a crap full page banner. But, since this site was posted here, I hunted and found the link into the site. Boy was I happy I pressed the link, because I got a blank white screen, and when I scrolled down I was greeted by a blank gray screen. No content no nothing. Just solid color. So, maybe you should test that your page works when a user doesn't have the standard browser that you use.

I am using FireFox 0.9 on FreeBSD. If your page doesn't work on FireFox/Mozilla (i.e. Geeko based render engine) you are in for some problems with people actually visiting your site.

All designers should take note, a whole huge chunk of people are using FireFox now.

Dan @ Code Town

Actually, the fact that you mentionned Standard Compliance, shows that you already know what to do. Personnally I'd put that at the top of my priorities, along with removing all unecessary Flash movies. In fact I would keep only ONE Flash movie, for the header thing in the middle. All the rest can be done with CSS only which would save a lot of bandwidth and ressources on the client side

IMHO you should also reconsider the Architecture of Information, and place the most important things on the top of the page. Reduce a bit that big Flash header.

Try to get the cleanest, most semantically correct, *insert other adjectives*, HTML markup you can. It'd help you in many ways.

As for the optimizations, AFAIR you mentionned a link on ALA in these walls. That's a really good starting point to get solid infos about Standards and good practices. Dive in web-graphics ( especially the ressources page ) and The Web Standards Project and you're done.

A last "advice" is to watch many Standards Compliants website and analyze their HTML markup and CSS. The CSS Vault and CSS Zen Garden makes a good source of knowledge and ideas.

Oh, the Flash movies takes a while to load

Concerning the "prestitial" (gag) I know the site's bursting with ads. I personally dislike having them, but its not something I have control over. You'd see the same thing with http://gamespot.com and http://www.ign.com which are basically our competitors in this area. I personally use firefox as my main browser. I worked at Netscape for over 6 years (3 on the browser team), so I'd say if there's anyone advocating having a site work with mozilla based browsers its me

Here's a thought. Try accessing the site from http://my.1up.com this would give you a less of a over the top experience in terms of ads and flash and stuff.

I really appreciate your comments! Everything I hear here I can use as ammo to help lighten the site and hopefully make it much more functional. Remember, I'm inheriting all this code, so this is basically a "try to rebuild a house from from the foundation up, without disturbing the paint" kinda thing

P.S. Thanks for subjecting yourselves to the ads

--- RPG Fan ---

Wow, I'm glad I decided to register at every good forum I could find. I've met some webmasters from high places.

I liked the previous design better.

Holy crap, you use way too much flash way too needlessly.

Your logo could be more squared IMHO. That would make it faster-loading, and would make it easy for transparency.

as opposed to

(if you would like me to remove these images, feel free to PM me)

I really don't like the boxes in the background. I'd personally prefer it if the center area was just pure white (or another color) bg, with the left and right edges being diagonally lined with grey vs darker grey.

For the big flash thing right below the logo and navigation, with blocks displaying--I think the latest added content, I think that should be a static image. If you must have rotation, use a script with the ability to have a static image. People don't really like flash in layouts very much, and either do search engines.

It doesn't even work at all without Flash.

Oh boy do I hate the squares used as headers for each small thing like whats up, release dates, featured blog...

I hate menus that expand like the buzzometer, and that bar below it showing 2 videos, top ten, and hands on. And how it expands when you mouseover the genres or platforms.

Quite frankly, the design doesn't seem suiting of a video game website. And it's really hard to navigate. It's overuse of flash makes it bloated and slow, and also hinders the navigation. I don't mind the ads, as long as they're well organized. I don't understand why those peoples faces who link to a page that doesn't work could be my friends or something... oh wait, none of your pages but the homepage do. Oh wait, it's just slow as hell. Your title tags could be better used.

Animated stuff is out, people don't like it, visibility accessibility and just plain good content is what the visitors will come for. Replace the links in your flash with text (possbily CSS styled) and image (you can use CSS to show an image to your visitors with 0px font, while Google unable to see CSS gets the text) links.

The site needs some information archetecture improvement. It seems about as organized as this post

You should go the way that Wired.com went and make it tableless. I think that Gamespot and IGN are virtually tableless.


The other other other other other white meat.

(Edited by tntcheats on 07-06-2004 05:11)

Yeah,
I agree with most everything stated above. do yourself a favor and loose 90% of the Flash on that page. It must be a pain in the arse to try and update just a single section. Alot of the action you have right now like menus and such can easily be done with JS and if you're crafty with CSS you could get the same effect with that too. Color scheme isn't bad, (can't mess too much up with grey) But your eyes do tend to wander with the square background. I'm afraid to click off the first page in fear that I might get lost

Everything lines up 'fairly' well but as to order of information and importance it just doesn't make sense.

Menu system is confusing. I was never one for acronyms. KWIM?? BYD.

I'm sure the advertisers love you cause thier ads are definatly drawing all my attention.

I will give you credit for sitting down and putting your efforts into making this site all it can be and I wish you the best of luck and look foward to seeing some improvements in the design and code.

Great comments! I look forward to being able to come back and talk about what's improved over the coming months.

--- RPG Fan ---