All summer our small team of 3 people has been working on the website for a small student organization at Pennsylvania State University. Our club hosts battles with Nerf guns, scavenger hunts, and other outdoor games. After 3 months of hard work we've finally finished our site and we're all curious what the experienced hackers here at HN think of it!<p>Our site is: http://urbangaming.org<p>Some tech specs:
Everything on the site was done by our team of students.
We use the CodeIgniter framework and phpBB to power the backend of our site.
Our server is provided by Linode (seriously, the rock for donating the server!) and runs nginx.<p>Our goal for the site was for it to be professional, expandable, and stable. We believe we've reached those goals, how about you guys?
This is a fantastic site from what I can see right away. I hope you guys can open-source this effort or package it into a ready to use cms for other clubs/organizations to use. Even if you charge for it I would be your first customer. Bravo.<p>Suggestions<p><i>The drop down menu is not necessary. The main item on the horizontal bar links to a page full of text. Your goal should be to maximize the percentage of content per page that is consumed. Your visitors will be happier.<p>Suggestion is to discard most of the text and replace with a clean graphical interface that contains the items in the drop down of the menu item linking to the page. Example, The games page would be a grid of boxes with each game listed and a picture above the name.<p></i>Video and pictures need to be more front and centre instead of in their own category hidden under About Us. The entire menu is very logically laid out. But this should not be your aim. Show the user what they want first. Show the best content first.<p><i>The calendar doesn't need to be it's own menu item. In fact it should always be shown - maybe on the side bar to the right like on the front page - but do it on every page.<p></i>The Welcome text on the front page in the blue bar is really all the about us that people need.<p><i>You don't need a Home menu item.<p></i>I like the colors.<p><i>I like that it is not full of dynamic content or javascript.<p>Here is what I would change:
</i>Front page: Banner and dynamic picture take tons of screen real-estate.<p><i>Make the title smaller. Add a caption to it to decribe the site. Delete the Welcome text. Replace the welcome text with a grid of 4 videos - the most recent or dynamic ones. The news posts should be trimmed. 2-3 short paragraphs
max and only if you have to. Your front page is your one chance to convince new visitors to come out to an event. Service your existing users with news in other ways - email, or on the bottom of page.<p></i>Upcoming events and Keep in touch are perfect. Add your emails to the keep in touch and get rid of any other sections in the site where you list emails.
Get rid of About us. Replace Register, Login, and About us with a login box and a Get Involved.<p><i>Remove Support. Have one easy to find line of contact for all Help requests. No FAQ. Nothing else. Either it's easy enough to figure out on my own or I should ask you. Otherwise I'll think I'm an idiot or being treated like one.<p></i>No Overview pages of any sort.<p>Keep removing text and pages until you absolutely can't anymore. Less is more. You're done when you can't get rid of anything else. That's when you know. Check out how youtube.com front page does it. It's good.<p>Hope this helps and good luck!
Your warning about IE6 is undismissable. Why go to the extra effort of deliberately blocking IE6 users?<p>An IE6 user is probably quite happy to view your site with a few layout problems. Please don't be a hater.<p>For what it's worth the site layout looked roughly OK through the opacity.
wow - mad respect; for taking a 'outside the box, crazy ' - 'never to old to grow up' idea - and not only make it happen; but in college, and then to build a website .. and spread it..<p>- honestly; I feel old, and jealous - in the clubs I joined chicks weren't diggin it :/