Quote:
Usually this area is reserved for links to information not part of the primary page flow, like "Contact Us", "Sitemap" etc. Admittedly, News is probably not applicable, and Armylist Creator should definitely not be there. Being used for fringe functionality, this nav is not supposed to be eye catching.
I think there are better locations for fringe functionality within a site than a nav above site nav. It's eating into your page space and unnecessarily pushing relevant information lower. Most of the time when I've needed to use a top bar that's outside the actual site design it's been for global navigation features across multiple linked sites rather than elements that don't work within the nav of a single site.
Quote:
There are two primary functions of the site: To find out what's going on in the NetEA community, and to get information on specific races (army lists, datasheets etc.)
This is good to know. It helps to have this in mind when asking questions about how a design fulfills those functions.
Quote:
If you want information pertaining to a particular army, you can click on the associated race icon and be taken to a page that acts as the 'home' page for that race. The icons will all have hover states that state where they're taking you. The thinking behind including this as an option is I wanted to make the site look interesting and to encourage exploration. The race icons offer an excellent opportunity to do this. Each race home page will have the same layout as the home page, but the map and right-hand boxes will be replaced with race specific information.
The left nav allows you to navigate to all primary functions of the site including race information (currently "Army Resources"), and can be considered the 'main navigation'. Here you'll be able to find a detailed overview of the NetERC, find out who's responsible for what, and see a list of members together with their location and other information (if they choose to make it public). There will be a link to this forum, and featured galleries (currently "Recon Images"). Again, rubbish labels, they'll all change to something more descriptive.
I see what you are doing here but at first glance that doesn't seem very user friendly. If your top nav is changing to race specific pages, it doesn't follow that the primary nav is actually on the left of the screen since it would be expected that the menu integrated into the content area would contain links to content relevant to the race chosen. This is because the rest of the info on the page is changing to race specific. If the left menu is the primary nav, it should read as such. My thoughts are that you really only have one primary nav with the horizontal race bar. The info you are seeing on the homepage something that can pop up with a home button on the race bar or be treated like a race page.
Quote:
The thinking behind including this as an option is I wanted to make the site look interesting and to encourage exploration. The race icons offer an excellent opportunity to do this. Each race home page will have the same layout as the home page, but the map and right-hand boxes will be replaced with race specific information.
I'm pulling this out of the above quote because I think it should be brought up. With your site goal of finding out what's going on (provide news) and getting army information (lists etc.) how does using the race icons alone facilitate this if their purpose is to encourage exploration? Shouldn't the goal here be to provide easy access to the information in a form that the user can understand? Pretty is good, but it shouldn't be at the expense of the user. I don't disagree that the icons are interesting, but even reducing their size and including what they are next to them will reinforce the meaning without relying on the user to mouse over to get an explanation.
Quote:
It's another graphical flourish to draw people in and get them interested. My first draft concentrated on hard information on the front page and it looked like a wall of text. No fun. The map serves to show what's happened recently in the world of NetERC. If someone has uploaded a new Tau army list, an icon will appear in the Tau sector of the map. Clicking on the icon will bring up a bubble explaining that the army list has been uploaded, and provide a link to the Tau army list page. I could have several triggers that cause icons to pop up if desired - maybe someone created a gallery for a specific army, or maybe there's a new proxy available for a specific race. All of which will link the visitor directly to the associated page.
The map definitely does draw the eye and add interest to the page, but I think how interested a user is will be based on how evident it is that the map is to be interacted with and how effective it will be in giving them info. I assume the box to the right will have this same info since those boxes are related to what happens on the site. If that's true, how is clicking there to be linked to the associated page any different? With how you've described things, I don't know there will be enough information there for a user to decipher what the map represents. If you have a way to rotate a highlight through the news box to the right and have it correspond to a similar highlight of the icon representing that news piece on the map I think that it would be a bit more intuitive for the user what the purpose of the map was.
Quote:
Not sure what you been by anemic? I'm restricted to Google web fonts so Caslong Antique is out.
Anemic as in the strokes that make up the type appear too thin for the size and impact you are attempting to achieve. I understand the desire to use webfonts on the page but is there any real issue with a graphical solution?
Quote:
One rarely floats a web site left. It's partly down to personal preference and partly down to technical issues as to whether you expand the site to the full width of the screen. In this instance, it's a lot to do with the design choices I made. I'm using a 960 grid system which streamlines web site development. This allows me to spend my valuable time providing the features I think will make this a great community site. I've also gone for a fairly graphically heavy site, the 'LED' top and bottom borders are images which cannot be scaled to an undefined width.
No, not usually these days, but with the other design choices you made had me curious since it's rare to see a design that just floats in the middle without some form of container breaking the content from the background. With the boxes just flowing in the middle of the wide area I didn't know what your intent was. I'm sorry if a lot of this sounds harsh, but I am trying to help! I'm getting ready to head out and I haven't had a chance to really proof this but I hope it makes sense
