Hourences.com redesigned - need interviews with level people

[Hourences]

Hi,

After years of working on The Ball I finally found the time again to continue with my website. The site has been completely redesigned. Away with the 1990s design

http://www.hourences.com/

I will be posting news more reguarly in the future, rather than every half a year. Not just news about me, but also about random things that grab my attention. Games, photos, and so on. Anything people like me would find interesting

A new thing I am going to do is have weekly or bi weekly interviews with level designers and environment artists (and everyone alike). I am looking for people for this, that is where you guys come in. Anyone who has something to do with building environments/levels and works for a studio, freelances, or is a really experienced hobbyist -> me@hourences.com if you are interested!

[e-freak]

Mh, the new page looks much better than the old one! I find the menu hard to navigate though. Especially when going to Games and then trying to reach The Ball it often happens that I hover one of the other buttons and lose the menu!

Also: What about these interviews? I don't really understand these

[Furyo]

You should fix up the menu so once I click on the extra tabs, the first news one is no longer orange. That made me wait for a page to load although nothing was loading. I then understood that subcategories were showing up only after clicking on a third tab. It just makes the whole thing too confusing

[Froyok]

Personally, I preferred the old version, a little old-scool, but had much more charm and your own key. Currently it looks like any blog that can be found randomly on the internet. Nothing really stood out (and green in advertising on your books is really ugly with the orange/black).

[dux]

I like it a lot more than the old one. Only thing I don't like is the menu, as mentioned.

[Minos]

Personally, I preferred the old version, a little old-scool, but had much more charm and your own key. Currently it looks like any blog that can be found randomly on the internet. Nothing really stood out (and green in advertising on your books is really ugly with the orange/black).

I agree. The old version was a little convoluted but it had your style all around Hourences.

[Campaignjunkie]

The body column is soooo wide that it's really affecting readability. Half that width for text columns would be ideal, I think.

[Nurb]

I like it! I think the menu problems can be atleast partially solved if you load an expanded menu page when the user clicks one of the main categories. Since the cursor changes when I hover over Training for example I expect something to happen when I click it - but nothing happens. If you just make a page for each category with expanded descriptions of each subcategory I think it would be very useful. Other than that it looks alot more fresh than the old one, which granted had it's oldschool charm - but was surely due for an introduction into the new millenium

[Skjalg]

I gotta agree with everyone saying that this new site lacks soul compared to the old one, but you're also right when saying that the old one needed a new look =)

I'm not liking the font you've used on your front page, it doesn't look inviting enough that I want to read it. I think maybe the huge wall of text combined with the wide format that it is beeing displayed in makes me think back to the dreaded text books at school. You should do short pieces on your frontpage with "Read more..." buttons on them so that people first gets interested in the story first and THEN commit to reading the whole thing by clicking the button. I dont know why its more pleasing to read narrow columns rather than wide ones, maybe we feel like we're reading faster or that its easier to know where we are on the page when reading, but I do know that most sites these days have learned this and do use narrow columns. See kotaku or any other popoular news site as an example.

I also think its a little weird that this all makes perfect sense to me and is something I'd think about if I designed web sites for a living, but your webdesigner guy dont have a clue...

edit;

oh, and I just thought of something else too, you should bullet your links (putting the

[*] or thing to the left of them) in the news post text. it makes them stand out more and you can drop the underline and make them look nicer. just colouring them and putting an underline is so the 90's.

[Warby]

although i do agree that the old one OOZED of your style visualy !

the new one looks alot more proffesional and i for one have no problem with the menu at all ( maybe you have fiddled with it by now i dont know)

so GO new design !

[Hourences]

You should do short pieces on your frontpage with "Read more..."

I hate clicking read mores. All info should be right there and require a minimum number of clicks. That also makes people read your news. If they have to undertake action to read it they won't do it and they'll just skim over.

but I do know that most sites these days have learned this and do use narrow columns. See kotaku or any other popoular news site as an example.

A website like kokatu focuses at the general public. I do not. The very very large majority of people who visit my website are developers with large monitors. In fact 95% of everyone who visits a website has a monitor that is at least 1280 width, if not a lot more. I know that I personally have not bought a mega monitor to then go read websites that cover not even half of my available screen real estate. That is just so super annoying. Plus, on top of that I need to have sufficient amount of space to display large screenshots in my tutorials. Plus, the old site stretched to match the window which made the text on that site a lot wider than this one on a big monitor. This is a big improvement over that, it strikes a good middle ground, and a very thought over decision. My web guy wanted to do it smaller by the way so please don't go blame him. He invested a lot of time into it. Oh, and this very forum in itself stretches as well by the way. My eyes have to cover more screen distance to read what is being written in this forum than I have to on my own website. Why is it ok to do this on a forum but not on a content rich website?

What about these interviews? I don't really understand these

What is there to understand?

The old site may have been recognizable but it did not made a good first impression. What would you have thought of the old site if you would have never visited it before, and then come across it at some point and the site tries to sell you products like my books? What would you have thought if you are a studio or an educational institution? Being unique and original is nice and all that, but not at the cost of your business. You can go to a fancy business dinner dressed up as a chicken, and you'll surely be noticed, but that won't really help you will it? My site represents a business, not a hobby. The design has to match that.

[AlexM]

looking good

[Vilham]

I think it looks far better than your old site. The only thing I think could use improvement is the logo.

[Skjalg]

Alright, you make some fair points. I can agree with the read more thing;

altho I dont hate on it when I see it, because it has a purpose; namely to filter away the stuff you dont want to read. But I guess on your site you'd want to read everything that is posted on the front page when there is something posted there. With news sites thats not always the case =)

When it comes to this forum I dont think its even okay here to use the full width, but its mostly not an issue because people seldomly write long posts. And when it happens you'll notice that its a very common fact to skip those posts. (tl;dr comes to mind) If the column of text had been thinner then you'd not notice the length of the post before you started reading, because the end of the text is out of your screen and by the time you realize your "mistake" you're already deep into the post you are reading and you might as well finish it... Just as a reference I think the unknownworlds site uses the maximum width available when posting their text, (its about 2/3s of hourences.com width). + they use a better font =)

On a side note I'd like to thank you for the hard work you've put into hourences.com. I remember when trying to learn to mod the unreal engine a few years back and your site was a great help

[BaRRaKID]

I really think you should reconsider your stance on the page width. Even if your target audience usually use large monitors, these days many people probably use netbooks or smartphones for browsing which have much lower resolutions, and the way it is now it's really frustrating to navigate your site.

That's the thing with web design, there are conventions that people are used to, and when you deviate too much from them you're sacrificing the user experience. Concerning the width, 960px is considered to be the ideal value for a fixed layout these days . If you don't enjoy that then consider changing to a liquid layout. But you probably knew this already, since the initial value for the width on the CSS is 960px, but it was intentionally changed to 1260px leaving a mess of unused style rules behind.

Also since your "content" column is so wide the sentences become too long making them harder too read (remember that people don't really read the content on a web site, they scan it). Another convention you should use here is that a content column width should be of about 2 or 3 alphabets, that means that given your font family and size, write the entire alphabet 3 times and you get the optimal width for your content. That means that no single line of text should have more than 80 characters, yours have around 150 now, which is almost twice the ideal value.

For more info check out Mark Boulton series of articles called Five Simple Steps.

If you're worried about the images size then just use a resize script, there are tons of them on the web and everyone is used to them by now anyway.