Gamepad Dojo
 

Gamepad Dojo!

Obviously, the site needs a lot of work, including a way to leave real comments for the news posts and whatnot, which will start to appear eventually.* However, since the site is not even a week old, I feel it is pretty good, given it's age. Anyways, give me your thoughts on the layout, what it's missing, the few things that are there, and anything you think it needs.

My first thing is that you need a logo. I whipped one up for you, but I by no means expect you to use it just because I did.

http://i41.tinypic.com/f2jw3s.png

But it should at least give you an idea. It needs to be flashy enough to be memorable.


Second, I'd watch your color scheme. It's pretty dark, and while the pictures are cool and you chose a good blue to put the text on, it overall looks like a cave, and not a particularly edgy one. Just sorta StarCraft generic. Having a good logo might help both the brightness and to give you a better feel of life for the pages.

You also need to be sure to keep the colors consistent. Blue on a different blue like with Mac's banner doesn't look very good. Also, you have Paint.NET, so it's important to use its tools to make your banners look professional. There's no reason your text shouldn't be anti-aliased and your banner pictures not crisp. PNG format is your friend, and Paint.NET has some good options for them. It also helps to have transparency like with the logo above. That way, you're not trapped by one layout.



Remember LC's game shop site? It had a lot of the same issues. The logo was too dark, the entire thing looked like a cave, and there wasn't a whole lot of spice to the layout. I'd suggest putting at least dates by each review and maybe some teaser text or a brief synopsis. Like the Sonic review could be better served by:

You also have what I keep thinking of as "console buttons" for your links. It would be great, again, for StarCraft, but only because StarCraft has incredibly generic sci-fi computers that have displays inspired by what they thought was futuristic in the 70s. You might be better served by putting up buttons with more interesting pictures in them, and even having them press down when they're clicked or something to add interest.



That's really the biggest issue with your site, actually. Interest. You seem to have a theme going with StarCraft Generic, but it's not catchy or memorable. You really need to spice things up if you want traffic.




Edit: Actually, Noncon, if you like the logo, but not the colors, I can easily change them. Still have the entire thing in layers.

Edit again: Actually, I can work with you on it. I'm told the G needs work.

For ease of use, I'd advise making an updater script, so you can prepare your updates ahead of time and post them- finding a premade one can be pretty easy, and they can allow comments.

Actually, Comikaze works better for making newsposts then it does for comics themselves.

Yeah, I didn't really like the theme, but it was one of the better ones available with the do-it-yourself thing the site hosting it had, and with me going to college in a couple weeks and working full time, I didn't really have time to learn HTML stuff, and I have that comikaze thing, I just have no idea how to do it.

Also, blue, that's actually a really good logo, if you made the G itself bigger, while keeping the controller part the same size, it would look pretty much perfect. I'll need a logo. I also put some more work into brightening the site up.

http://i40.tinypic.com/jfhox0.png

Like so?

Indeed, and I now very much have a logo for the site!

It'll look a little crappier, because the Do-It-Yourself tool doesn't like PNG format for reasons that are both ambiguous and stupid. So it'll be in .gif, but thanks very much. I also did a new logo for the Sonic Review...

http://i41.tinypic.com/24qu96x.png

EDIT: Took more effort than it should have or than you would think, but I got the logo on the site now without it messing stuff up. Do-It-Yourself tool sucks and I despise being dependent on the thing.

I'd suggest against using "Neko" anywhere. NonCon works out nicely or Noncontradictory if you need something longer.

So, as the site is short some actual reviews, are there any games you'd like to see reviewed by me? Anything is good, though if a game is bad I will drop it and review it to the point that I couldn't take the suck anymore. I feel it's more than fair.

Depends. Which systems are you familiar with?

If you say Saturn I may have a few that were pretty good but largely ignored.

I have a Sega Genesis, a DS, a 360, a PSX and PS2, a PSP, a Wii, and a SNES all at my disposal. If it plays on one of those, recommend away