Shaders For Games - Website Feedback Plz

I've just about finished putting together the basis of the Shaders For Games website. There are lots more things I'd like to do including finishing the DB Pro tutorial ( which currently is mostly a copy of the TV3D tutorial ) and creating some binary demos for people to play with, but that's going to have to wait.

For now I'm just interested in website feedback issues. Colors, design, layout, placement of buttons, images, and anything like that. Broken links, typos and security flaws ( eg like when guests were able to post in the GG forums, which should not be possible in the SFG forums ) are particularly appreciated.

http://www.shadersforgames.com

Thanks!

Good idea!

Are you planning to put these into other shader languages such as CG or GLSL, as well?

The web site looks good. It looks a lot like other web sites of the sort, which is definietly not a bad thing!
Unlike some others, though, yours is extremely easy to navigate. If I wanted to buy some HLSL shaders, I could do it in 10 seconds :)

One thing:
The thumbnail images for the effects information things on the front page.
I tend to click the thumbnails expecting to be brought to the more information, but instead I am given a bigger image.
I see why this is, but maybe change the thumbnail to also link to the article and have another option to see a larger image?
Also, those bigger images are just popping up in new windows in the simplest way, and are sized by the browser. I suggest you use Javascript windows (javascript.open, I believe) so you can size them to fit the image precisely. I think it looks a lot cleaner that way.

One other thing: The forum is... yellow! Shouldn't it be more orangish? It doesn't integrate very smoothly with the rest of the site. This isn't horrible, since most sites have their forum looking completely out of place (whereas your fits in pretty well), but some tweaking may make it fit better.

Hopefully, yes. I'm not familiar with CG or GLSL but I'm prepared to work with others to achieve that, and when I have time I'm sure I'll get around to learning them myself.


I'll see how I can manage that. I do want to keep the images, and I thought the more info buttons down below the text would suffice, but I'll see if I can put a text link at the top as well, perhaps with the text used to create a bigger version instead.


Good idea. I'll have to figure out how to do that.


Ideally, yes. It was the nearest available skin I could find to match my site design. I don't know much about forum skinning, so I'm not sure how much work it will be, but ideally I would like to make it more orangey and match the site better, yeah.

Thanks for the useful feedback!

BTW, there's a fantastic 3dsmax plugin called ShaderFX for making shaders for games that was released recently. Don't know if that woudl be of any use to you.




Video that show you how it works



http://www.lumonix.net/ShaderFX_BasicShaderCreation.avi

There's more info in the artist tools forums.

Thanks Evak. When/if it gets support for GLSL that might be very useful to help me figure out the conversion process between HLSL and GLSL.

yeah GLSL and CG support are in the works for upcoming versions :)

On their forum the author suggested trying the open source HLSL to GLSL tool avaliable here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/hlsl2glsl

Thanks for reminding me about this, as I totaly forgot.

Info

HLSL2GLSL is a command-line tool and library that translates HLSL shaders into GLSL. HLSL2GLSL can be used as a stand-alone command-line tool to directly translate shader source from HLSL to GLSL. In addition, HLSL2GLSL is a DLL (with full source-code included) that can be used directly by a developer in an application. The library is designed to work with HLSL shaders up to Shader Model 3.0. The tool generates either GLSL v1.10.59 desktop OpenGL shaders or ES SL v1.00 embedded OpenGL ES shaders.

Nice website... tho I would like to see a number of larger screenshots and closeups.

looks good Gabriel..

one thing I noticed in the licence though, is this line:
Should that be "..that no one who uses.."?

Ideally you want buttons and links to change when you rollover them. Lots of people won't notice the the FAQ tag is a link. And many won't think the nav is links either, as sad as that sounds.

Also. While I dig what you are trying to do. This is over-designed. The design elements are obfuscating the interface and the content. It looks cool, but it is very hard to read, it is very cluttered, and it is all around troublesome. Web-sites should always lean towards minimalism, unless the site is exclusivly for show/fun. If you are trying to send out information. Clearity is more important.

for example. www.williambralldesign.com/?style=_cool is a lot like what you did (With different colors and much more minimal) and is far easier to read.


You have to balance Interface Design, Graphic Design, and Typography to make a good, useable website. Just because most websites are designed by graphic-designers who don't care about how the user will use the page, doesn't mean that is how it should be.

That said. The interface design of your site isn't bad. It is simple and clean, it is just obfuscated by all this over-design and complexity that muddles the utility of the interface. Also, your color choices make for hard to read text. Generally, the closer the text and background colors are together, the bigger the text has to be.

You can either make the text brighter, the background darker, or the text bigger... or you can leave it the same and lots of people won't be able to read it. With some fooling you can make the font a few sizes bigger at least.


Also. On the contact page. You should have a contact form. They are easy to set up with PHP (e-mail me if you want some help with that) and you can use it to keep your e-mail address private or so people with web-based e-mail can still contact you with ease. Not to mention those who are just lazy... And you can mine them for more data by asking them better questions.

The only other thing I would do is prevent the forum from loading in a new page off the nav. Have that link go to another page, which has a clear link that says you are moveing to a new site. This will prevent people from doing the "Oh crap hit back" move when a new page loads after hitting forum.... or worse the "Oh crap hit X" move.

LarsG: Oops, thanks for that. Good spot.

AngelDaniel: I'm trying to ensure it doesn't turn into a gallery and detract from the business purpose, but I'll see what I can do.

Dampe ( cross posted with you the first time ) : Thanks for the extensive feedback. I'll have a good look at the ( I assume your? ) site and see what lessons I can learn. Web design is not something I particularly enjoy, nor do I have much experience, so I always appreciate hints and tips.

If you want to e-mail me I can give you even more extensive feedback graphic by graphic. It looks great, just looks aren't really what matter the most.

your site is -almost- as cramped and over-designed as www.bungie.com which should give you an idea about how obfuscated your interface is. Seeing another site like yours will help you get it.

You are familiar with your own work. You instantly recognise what is what and what does what. Your visitors will not and many will just pass your site over. Specially with the white on black. I included a white on black design in my site www.williambralldesign.com because clients want things like that sometimes. But as you see the main page is very different (Although, I really need to re-design it and make it more professional)

I can help you a bunch outside the forum.. of course free, unless you want me to make you a site. But you seem to have the skills to do the graphics yourself. And the interface is nice and simple. You just need to pull back on all the doodads and such and work towards what works best, not what looks best.

Thanks for the offer, but i think I have it. I've just about finished cobbling together a little PHP contact form. It's not spectacular but it does the job.

I'll have to do the rest tomorrow now, as it's getting late.

I would give you 2 suggestions,

1.Give the website a proper header name, (in the blue bar at the top of the I.E. web browser)
In the taskbar it just says "http://" which looks amatuerish.
2.I couldnt find any screenshots and it took too many clicks to get to the page with the most information on the particular shader pack I was looking at.
Just shove all the information on the page as soon as the user clicks on the shader pack.

Other than that it looks very professional and pleasing to the eye

oh yeah, you need some videos of the effects

Good suggestions. Thanks, Slunkar.

very good pro-site.