The Building Of StrafeRight v4.0

**wootini** · 10-13-2007 04:55 PM

The new website is surely one that we hope to see last us a long time, at least in it's core concept and construction. We hope to add a lot of things to the site as time goes on (which is why we decided to use an open source CMS to begin with) that will further enhance the user experience here at SR.

But instead of talking about the future, I thought I'd spend a quick post showing you some of the past and how this new site came to be from an artistic standpoint.

As you may already know, our own DanForth is who brought the concept of a new website from an idea to a tangible and visual object. The one who then took that art and made it a usable and interactive product would be Teck. Both the coding and the artwork on this website speak for themselves...absolutely awesome stuff.

Even though DanForth and Teck did the gist of the work, it should not go untold that both BuddhistSoldier and Vincent Vega contributed integrally to what you see in front of you today. Buddah hammered out a lot of CSS coding for the beautiful header you see on every page, while Vega is responsible for the uber-hot archives system we now have for all of our SR v3.0 content. Those may seem like little things but let me tell you, if you can't have a head on pages and a way for search engines to find all of your old content, it makes for having a website a huge headache to say the least.

Now I've said this before and I'll say it again, without all of the input from members over the last few years, we would not have been able to create the website you see before you now. With all of the ideas and suggestions that have come in from various means, we have been able to (we hope!) fine tune a website that is part community, part news, and all gamer goodness that everyone can easily navigate and use for whatever they wish.

StrafeRight's greatest resource has been, and will always be, the awesome people that call this website home

Ok, back to my point...

Have a look below at images of the progression of the site design from day one. Click on the first image and then cycle through them using the right arrow to follow them chronologically.

**YankeeDeuce** · 10-13-2007 05:59 PM

cool

**BetterOffDead** · 10-13-2007 06:24 PM

Very nice. I know a thing or two about web design (I have a minor in website administration) and can say the site looks very impressive. I even took some graphic arts classes as well. We spent a good deal of time studying what makes sites bad and what looks good.

The graphics are simple yet professional looking, and the site navigation is simple and straight forward. You were even able to integrate the very necessary site Ads into the template in ways that don't negatively impact the website. I realize how much work it takes to make a site like this. More sites should use sR as a template for how to design effective web sites.

I'm sure this isn't the place for feedback, but I noticed that the "Account Manager", "Logout", "Search", and a few of the "News" buttons don't have mouse "rollovers" to make the button seem more clickable like the rest of the banner and site has. I don't believe the forum nav bar (new posts, calendar, etc) has rollovers either, but there may be a good reason for that. Other than that the site is just stunning. Great work and nice writeup on the creation process!

**wootini** · 10-13-2007 06:44 PM

Thanks BoD

The more rollovers, the more stuff to load on each page so we wanted to keep them to a minimum. Someday we'll be on uber-hosting and can really jazz it up!