Gigahertz Games is officially LAUNCHED!!!

Hi everyone!

Well, it took a considerable amount of effort, but it was worth it; Gigahertz Games is now hosted on the web at www.ghzgames.com!

I would like to give a huge thank you to everyone here. You've all given me enormous help and encouragement, and the gift of honest criticism. Thanks to your links & advice, all of Ghz's games are now packaged in a Windows installer, created in Inno Setup. (GOD, I love that program!!!) I also cut the price to $5; time to get more realistic.

The website itself has a clean, fresh look, utilizing "glowing" buttons and a 3D "drop shadow" effect without getting overdone or visually cluttered. Also, I've got a 150 GB/month bandwidth, and the site's being monitored with Google Analytics, so the hit counter's ancient history.

Although I'm the sole creator of Gigahertz Games and its website, it was really a joint effort, since this probably never would have happened without all of you. You've all given me a great gift.

Now, head on over to ghzgames.com and check out the bold new look; it's an internet party, and everyone's invited!!!

Nice website, looks great.

Thanks!

Which reminds me, I must add your site to the Links page. Rectifying... Done

It mostly OK but I don't like the banner across the top. Don't know if its the font, or the background, or a combination of both. Looks tacky and spoils the rest since its emblazoned across the top of every page.

Flaming logos and 3d spinning text?

o_O

Dude, what website did you go to??

i remember that being part of an IBM eCommerce advert

The site is much improved. As Gfk said, the banner is spoiling the rest. Also, your signature needs updating.

It's better than it was, although still could do with more content.

Adam, if your looking for some help with the website I'm free. No cost, I just want to have some web stuff to work on (I've been lacking friends/family needing websites) mostly for pratice. Making website designs isn't that fun if they don't have a purpose.

Here's some of my work that's on the web atm:

http://www.ratcityrodz.com
http://www.ratcityrodz.com/site01
http://www.ratcityrodz.com/site02

If your interested talk to me over MSN or something.

cool ! :) - playing 4 games at the same time - haha
now I know where the title comes from ! - lol

"As Gfk said, the banner is spoiling the rest."

Ditto'ed. ;)

"the site now has a clean, proffesional look"

You spelled the most important word wrong ;o) Always spell check your website. Looks alot better though and some useful links there.

i like the design of it and its definately better then my feeble attempt at webdesign. but one crit i have is imo the glow on the selected menu item is too strong, it makes my eyes feel blurry(could just be my monitor though). other than that i like it.

Yeah it looks better congrats. However it can still be improved as some areas look a bit "programmer art" (like the logo and menu). I also agree with KingNothing that the glow on the selected menu item is too strong as you can't read "Home" very well when you are on it for example.

my list o' crits:

- the glow is indeed too cliche and too much.

- inconsistent: everywhere the site says 'Gigahertz Games' yet the bottom reads: "All content © copyright Gigahertz (Ghz) Games 2008." The Ghz part is not needed I think, apart from that, iirc it's GHz, not Ghz. You may wonder whether your name should be Gigahertz or GigaHertz, but alas..

- The grey logo on top of the website is a bit too Photoshoppy (meaning it looks like a font with tons of blending options, usually way overdone in terms of creativity)

- customer_service@... get real :P In combination with the content and looks of the website you just know that all these email addresses end up with the same person, because it's bleedin' obvious this is a 1-person enterprise. I'd stick to the common info@ or contact@ addresses. It's comparable with your 'CEO' title. You *may* think it looks like 'more', but really: it makes it look 'less'.

- Contact Us! This is basically the same as the previous point, I'm quite sure there *is* no 'us'. You can solve this by replacing 'us' with 'Gigahertz Games' or 'address'.

..but, do with these whatever you want.. :P

Two of them are repeating things already said, but I would suggest :

*Redoing the banner.

*Using "owner" instead of "CEO". It looks far less pretentious. And you are the owner, but you're not a CEO.

*There's no nice way to put this. Not taking Yahfree up on his offer of help. Those sites are three of the most awful designs I've seen. From a technical standpoint, they may be quite good, but they're chock full of the most basic design flaws, and your site isn't. So I think you could only go downhill following that road.

I say that Contact Us is fine but actually just plain "Contact" may be alll that is required.

Gabriel, while I appriciate the critique on my designs, it's still no reason why I can't help. The design is unique to what it's for, those designs and were for friends done in a couple hours and their not even done yet(actually not even close to done). In short their not my best works. Also, that's your opinion, other people may see them differently. And even if my design skills aren't the best I could still help with coding(php, html, css, js) if Adam needed that.

And besides that, it's not like I'm asking tonnes of money from him, I'm doing this for free because I want to work on my website skills some more.

Also, Gabriel, if you could post some more specific critique on the green one in the thread below it'd be appriciated.

http://blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=80022

Yahfree: I think Gabriel is right, on this one. There's no doubting your understanding of HTML and your ability to achieve reasonably complex layout, but the overall look (colours, graphics/textures) is not professional.

No big deal - I'm not a graphic artist either. I know what layouts look good, how to put the XHTML+CSS together and I know how to create a colour scheme. I'm absolutely useless when it comes to introducing graphical elements though.

I never said Gabriel was wrong about those designs - I was simply saying that there's no reason why I'm uncapable of helping/improving Adam's website. I didn't like the fact that he said that(incorrectly in my opinion) Adams site would only go downhill if I were to help out.

Anyways, I'd love feedback on that green one - it's still go alot of work to do on it(Link in my previous post).

Hey, thanks for the feedback everyone!

I was actually already thinking about making those glows more subtle; I think the style of glow on the "Try Demo" buttons is better, since it's subtle but still noticeable.

As far as the logo goes, I was thinking; I like it being there, BUT, since the Ghz logo already displays at the beginning of each of our games, I could probably just swap the banner out for some simple (but attractive) text. What do you think?

CS_TBL: I claim artistic license with the GHz/Ghz thing. ^_^ Thanks for the info, though. Oh, and Ross C: I can't BELIEVE I made that classic "proffesional/professional" mistake; thank you so much for spotting that!

One more thing, totally unrelated; have any of you tried Vector GFX? I think it's kinda fun.

Perhaps you should update your logo AND update it on your games?

Impressive site!

I really like how it looks Adam.

Keep up the good work, and I look forward to you next game.

The Mighty WERDNA(Lord Of Darkness)

You might want to avoid the site linked in the first post. If you are the least bit sensitive to motion in games, you will get sick from one the graphics on this site.

Oh, with regards to the Yahfree issue. I think the issue here should be wether his (or her?) coding skills are up to scratch. After all, even if you hire a professional webmaster, you don't just go to them and say "make me a website." Well, maybe you do, but I don't. I could work out the design issues, while the important thing would be wether or not Yahfree cuold make them work.

Yahfree, the website's pretty much finished at the moment, with the exception of some images which I'll be re-working in The GIMP, so at the moment I don't actually need your services. However, if I decide to make more content-related changes in the future, I will definitely contact you & see what we can do. Thanks for the offer!

What is Vector GFX? (Link?) Thanks.

OK, I take your point about the suggestion that you might not be capable - that's between you and Adam to decide, I guess.

As for a real critique of the green-theme'd site, I've taken a closer look at the code. Whilst you are declaring XHTML1.0 Strict, your code is full of invalid XHTML and actual errors.

You're missing the quotes around the path to link to your external stylesheet.

The paragraph text isn't in a paragraph block (you should put text inside <p> </p> tags, <br /> shouldn't be used to break up paragraphs, also note the space between "<br" and the "/>").

You have CSS embedded in the HTML. This is generally bad practise and means the browser cannot cache the CSS. Causes a poor visual experience whilst loading the page (especially larger pages).

<center> is completely deprecated and shouldn't be used in XHTML. Even its use in HTML4 isn't optimal. Formatting is the stylesheet's job.

The layout overall is centered, which is good. However, I think the only reason it actually displays as centered in IE, FF Opera is that each browser fall back to quirks mode due to the invalid XHTML. There's a simple method of using CSS alone to center a whole fixed-width site. Take a look at http://www.creditorbully.com/ for an example of a valid XHTML1.0 Strict site with CSS centering (very simple site, so easy to understand).

The colour scheme is a little off. The background of the News section and the background of the main section clash slightly. There are a couple of tools available that generate complementary colour schemes, or even take a look at http://kuler.adobe.com/ for some really good colour schemes.

I am aware of this, I need to recode alot of it, what you see now was basicly left overs from me trying to get a quick visual on the browser so that I could refine it from there.

With my recent projects I have stopped this bad practice though.


I coulda sworn I used <p> tags, thanks for pointing that out.


I actually did not think this made a difference in speeds - I'll look into this.


Again back to my quick-dirty thing, I was having trouble using the traditional "Margin: 0 auto;" method - so I improvised. This will be fixed.

---

I agree with the panel color clashing with the body, this will change and is also on my list.


Thanks for the feedback, though we really shouldn't be hi-jacking this thread, if you have further feedback lets discuss it in the other thread.

For future reference this is how my cycle usualy goes:

1. Use inkscape to sketch out the layout with labels and color codes
2. Create the css for it and then the basic XHTML page.
3. Create the images for the layout and insert them
4. Create the content and functionality
4. Make sure everything looks as it should and refine the coding.

Hey all!

Just an FYI update: I've taken care of the huge glows on the NavBar, and altered the banner.

Y'know, I think I figured out what was wrong with the banner! The Ghz logo is very active, loud & energetic, great for setting the mood before an action game. However, the website has a very cool, smooth feel to it, and the loudness of the banner was clashing with the calm "sophistication" of the site. Anyway, I think it's all good now. Thanks for the feedback!

Oh very nice Adam, looks great.

I should redo mine because I know its awful (and always has been awful) but its like a nostalgia thing for me and I can't bring myself to do it.

And its not like that's the reason I'm not getting traffic.

But yeah looks great, like the revisions.

Looks alot better now Adam. Good job!

Suggestion:

Its not so bad now with 2 games... but in the future:

Have a link with maybe a thumbnail for each game on the game page. Then make a page for each game, its to much of a pain to navigate through the long page.

Either that or a "Table of contents" thing with internal links.

Adam, you link in your sig points to your old site address.

Please forgive me however I had an opinion or two:
-It looks very amateurish
-No content. Granted one can just come to download games however the site is plain enough to justify one visit, get what you want, and then never return.
-Everything is waaaaay to big. At 1600x1200 this site is still way too big, I'd hate to have an 800x600 desktop and attempt to view this. The rule of thumb from school applies here, if you have no content, make things bigger and space them out. Problem is that when I see a site where everything is huge I know in the back of my head that the site will be pretty slim on actual content.

Again, no offense intended, just my critic.


heh

Yahfree: Good idea! I'll definitely update the site with the page-per-game method once I release Midnight Hacker.

andy_mc: Woah, thanks for the tip; I'd completely forgotten that! I'll update it ASAP. Also, I just realized, I still don't have a link button for Schizo... Hm. >_<

Dark Half: No offense taken; all opinions are welcome. I don't really know why it appeared so large though, since it was designed on a 1024x768 screen, with space at the sides to spare.