Hey folks, talked with Geb a bit about the new website, and I'm taking a stab at it while I'm waiting for my WACOM to get delivered.

This is the first try. This is nothing official as it has yet to be seen by Gebboss, since he's off lord knowns where... probably flirting with pretty ladies and having a good time <.<

So here are some screenshots. Layout is not even html'd, its a pure illustrator screenie :

Gray and Red scheme
Gray blue scheme

Let me know what you all think, and give suggestions. Again, when Geb sees it, he might tell me to start over and crack a chair over my head, no matter who liked it. Its all about his taste :p

I likey. I'd ditch the rounded edges (just cause it sucks in HTML coding, if nothing else :p ) but it's a heck of a lot better than my hack together job of a site right now, methinks.

Heheh, I do agree round edges are always a pain in html, but it looks really flat and boring squared off

It can be done, I'll just hate you for it :p

Oh, and I like the blue version more, btw.

Well I can cut it up and html it up... but I use... *gasp* dreamweaver

The corners should be less rounded (but still rounded). You're using a fixed width so you should have no trouble with rounded corners at all.

I don't like the header/banner image at all.

i agree with detty, the rounded corners throw off from the squareness of the comic image, find the middleground

A'ight, time to tear it to shreds

First off, between the two, I actually like the one with the red in it. The variety is nice.

OK, from top to bottom:

I actually think the banner is pretty cool (the formal aesthetics in this application are nice), but I don't think it's what I'd personally would want for the site. For one thing, we got the "cool" Geb in there, which is SO out of character. The words of the title are a BIT hard to read (mostly the letter "A"), as it blends in a little with the background, but it's relatively minor. For once, I'm actually one to say that the font for it is a bit bland (and you can ask CoolMatty how much I love bland/old-fashioned fonts too, seriously). The picture DOES include my personal favorite colors (brown and blue). The motto-thing is hard to read due to size as well, though its size could actually be a good thing.

A note on the banner-stuff: originally, we had been hoping to use a random cycle program-thing for the motto and for the little character-heads currently on the main page. You know, like how Massassi's logo has the random cycle-thing for the holiday logos? The idea would be that the heads could show 2 of any of the current cast at a time, and you could click them and it could take you to their bios, and as for the motto, it would just say different random funny things like "best webcomic ever" and "more fun than...er...funny" and things like that. Obviously, we never got around to it, and I dunno if we'll ever try implementing something like that in the future... *shrug*

As for the navigation bar: I actually like it being a horizontal line like that. The only downside to it is that it limits how many things you can put on it without creating side-scrolling. I hate side-scrolling. I believe that's why we made it vertical like we did, but really, if there ever gets to be too many options, there could just be two rows instead of one. Mebbe. The white text is also a little hard to read against the grey background of the nav. bar. I'm not entirely sure "NeSi database" is necessary. I'm also not sure what the "quick tab" thing on the right side is. Also, I agree with everyone else -- rounded corners are bad. I think an ideal solution would be to "round off" the edges with hard diagonals, similar to what's around the motto-thing. Again, though, I like old-school look <_<

A'ight, now for my big beefs. First off, I notice you're breakin' the width thing (at least I'm pretty sure you are -- I'm on someone else's computer right now). No good. Side-scrolling BAAAD. I don't care if no one else views browsers that small anymore, just like I don't care if no one else uses Internet Explorer. It seems however that it's mostly the archive-thing on the side that's breaking it, which isn't too bad. I actually don't mind you merging the archives and the comic sections together, if you really want, but you should organize the archive-stuff on the bottom instead of the side.

Side-note: The archives were made seperate because there were hopes of making multiple means of organizing/viewing the archives, just like we were hoping to do with the junkyard section. In the archive case, organization by date, "original page/post" and the traditional chapter-stuff is what we had in mind. Also, a lot of other comics seperate their archives anyway. *shrug*

As for the comic space itself -- you're totally destroying the whole feel of the "floating panels" by boxing them in from the background with other stuff. If you think you have a better aesthetic idea/theme to work with, lemme know, but it will likely mean going back and re-doing the past comics to do so. The whole idea of the floating panels feel was an aesthetic decision to give the comic a unique feel not present in most webcomics, something I really liked. Hopefully you understand what I mean by this.

As for the general color scheme, I don't think the predominant grey color works well for this. Don't get me wrong, I think you've made a pretty professional website design here, it's just not what I think should be used for NeSi. Also, in general, I think the site design is slightly bordering on being too visually cluttery-like. Keep in mind that this IS coming from me, who likes simple, boring, old-fashioned aesthetics in my web design. I'll try and talk to you about some themes that you might be able to work with... we'll see.

On a closing note, my opinion is not the only one that matters in this case. I will certainly be turning to CoolMatty at least for opinions on the webdesign, since he's the webmaster and whatnot. I'll also likely be turning to other NeS writers for their opinions, and of course, if all the rest of the random people are like "this is freakin' awesome" or whatever, I'm gonna try not to be TOO stupid and ignore their input. They'll be the ones reading the comic after all, so if it helps grab their interest, then I'd lean in favor of it.

Go Jepman!

Quick and to teh point review by mb:


Logo = teh sux. Not really the image so much as the title. It can look a lot cooler than just dropping "ILLUSTRATED" on top of it.


Side Issue navigation = lame. unless you were just lazy and copy and pasted the same thing, its pretty difficult to get to the page you want with taht.

Actually, I like the fact that the ILLUSTRATED has the dropped feel to it. Though Jep could probably take a little more liberty in making it look more like a stamp mark or something like that... *shrug*

As for the archive navigation repeating the same thing, I'm pretty sure Jep was just using that as filler space, to give the feeling of what it would look like, rather than actually type all the things.

OH YEAH! I forgot! The comics really need a "back/forward/first/last" clickies, and the comic strip title and date should be visible too, preferably in a fashion like it's currently in (though if you wish to redesign the hand-clickies, by all means, give it a shot. I just like how it's not simply "back/forward/first/last" like most webcomics... *shrug*

Did I mention this was a 15 minutes layout. :p

First off, thanks for the comments. This is exactly the criticism I was looking for, and it hit my own suspicions as well.

For breaking the sidescrolling, this is a 1600pixel wide image, not the actual website, of course I would never be so stupid as to force side scrolling. The actual website is 800 pixel wide and will not break width unless you are running at 640x400 in which case I will personally drive down to Maryland and smack you around with your PC. :p

The side issue panel is of course me being lazy. The issues would never copy over and over again like that. That would definatly be extremely pathetic and that would force lord mighty Jesus to murder a kitten every minute if I left it like that. I like kittens.

Concerning the top banner, I most definatly agree about the text and that bothered me all night last night. What I really meant to display was the actual idea and shape of it, rather than a finished version. On I have my WACOM, I'll probably draw a different background image, possibly featuring more characters, or perhaps an alternating version. That said, I will definatly change the banner. About the subtitle not being all too visible, I made it that way because right now, I don't think we can claim that we are the best webcomic on the intaweb when in the past we've updated every few months or so.

The comic will obviously have back, forward, and beginning/end buttons, but those will most likely be beneath the actual comic, not displayed in this example.

About putting diagonal lines instead of rounded corners, that is just plain crazy. Diagonal lines, at least in my opinion, lack dynamic impact, and look as awesome as it gets. I'd remove round corners all-together if you really can't live with rounded edges. THAT SAID, I agree that they are perhaps all too rounded, except for the menubar perhaps.

Concerning the menubar being horizontal. While I agree that it DOES limit the amoun of stuff we put in there, I think there is plenty of space, and just about everything we'll ever need on a webcomic website is on there. Remember its not a news broadcast website, but a simple webcomic. Even if we wanted to add a "Storyboard" section where we displayed the text version of the story, that would fit. If worste comes worste and a year down the road we realize we want to move another way and want to add more stuff to the menu, a website takes a day to redesign, and sometimes, a change is refreshing if its needed.

About the color scheme, its not final, I can definatly do a lot of more tests, these were two off the top of my head.

Finaly, I don't think the floating panel feel was quite right in my eye anyways, but you know how much I dispised the former site.

Through and through, this was more of a basic design that I wiped up in 15 minutes to show Geb how I wanted the design the feel. I know how difficult this mister is, he's stressed it enough on MSN/AIM so I knew going out of my way wasting an evening of getting wasted to design a website that could easily be torn to shreds ([palpatine]I had foreseen it. [/palapatine]

I actually like the idea / feel of the banner a lot, it's just the "ILLUSTRATED" seems out of place, slapped on, and .. out of place. It'd be better if it were better blended in or had some slight tweaking so it doesnt look like someone typed it on there as an afterthought.

The rest is good. Though, for the side navigation thing, it'd probably be better to have a scroll (iframe? drop-down box?) based thing that's dynamically generated.

Yionks. New website design, after some friction between Geb and I, I think we found something we both liked in color scheme and layout.

I don't like the font for "A NEVER-ENDING STORY", it's also not vertically centered in its little strip thingy

the text for the sub-title looks awkward too.

You know, a few suggestions wouldn't hurt :p

I think the sub-titles look fine, but I agree that the main title is lacking. If it's a graphic, why not use a fancier, more elaborate (or even custom) text? Something that doesn't have to be uber easy to read, but is striking and shouts "COMIC STRIP!"

I like the font. I don't think it would be any better if it were "fancier" :p It's fine as it is

Damn I love the brown!

Translation: Winner!

I should probably start rewriting my phpComic script to not suck, since I've gained many not-sucking PHP skills since then.