posted 03-21-2001 03:26            

Okay, I have to air something. The flamewars have gotten childish. And I am probably going to get flamed too. I can feel it, but hey, what can I do. Since we all care about penIs I think that it's in our best interests to NOT flame Fenomas as he is our friend. He took the time to make a nice layout (IMHO KTHX.) and frankly, instead of whining, complaining, and griping about the quality of the layout, why not tell him in the form of *constructive* critique on what to do. I mean screenshots, sites which he should take elements from, and stuff like that. Instead of saying that the main logo is gay (I frankly think it's pretty damn cool) come up with a better one. If penIs has such a dedicated readership then we shouldn't have ANY problem coming up with an intelligent (correct me on this if i'm wrong) and eloquent way of improving the site. For the love of god people, we're *supposed* to be on the same side. It's not like we're meant to flame eachother until we're crispy.

posted 03-21-2001 03:52            

Oh, shit. I need another flamewar hit. Where's mightymon when I need him?

posted 03-21-2001 06:30            

I think letting random people help with the design of a page is not a good idea, especially a page visited by random people and flamed by random people. I think Eod should just point a friend out who he thinks is a great designer, and is willing to do it, and let him design the page. Or do it himself.

Al this 'let people think along' will only result in a testosteron-fest like :
"I am the best, let ME do it. Fuck you Faran! you suck at designing! LEt me do it! ME ME ME ME ME ME!"

Redesign it, and all visitors will wait in anticipation (sp?) on what it will look like. Now thats fun!

My 2 cents...

posted 03-21-2001 11:01            

Oh wait, wrong thread.

posted 03-21-2001 11:49            

1) I coded the original
2) Jeer did some changes.
3) Fen knew flash and one day I woke up and there flash at the top. Seriously I didn't even know he was putting it in. Fen was working with the excisting layout. He has since built the back end of penIs today through his php programming.

What I plan to do with this mailing list is get constructive feedback during the design phase. Depending how we decide to layout out the new site will determine if we need many code slaves (with one person over seeing) or just one person.

I tried the find a designer and let that person redo the site. You know what? Every designer I have met is LAZY.. I mean extremely lazy.. Since I'm not some company with a lot of money and a deadline he can start work on the night before it is due. This seems like the best way.

posted 03-21-2001 14:40            

Let's face it, this IS an E/N site and therefore it must have a bunch of fairly brief blurbs arranged in reverse temporal order from top down on a front page, hopefully with archives of older shit that scrolls off the page. It must also have a navigable internal link area - ie, thingies to click and hit the BBS, the message board, and the other non-news sections of the website itself.

Optionally, it can have links to other sections of the web. These links can be in a section all their own, or they can be directly linked from the front page, or the best of them can be on the front page and the rest of them on the separate section.

Given all these functional constraints, yes, it's probably going to look like every other damn E/N site... which won't matter, because it WON'T be every other damn E/N site, it'll be Penismightier.com, which is the whole fucking reason we ARE here and not at every other damn E/N site any damn way.

Right?

As far as design elements that ARE unusual even in an E/N site, I very much like the Flash link-of-the-instant and the flash tagline generator. They are muy cool. The vertical... dammit, I already forgot, starts with a K (Katakana?), but at any rate the vertical Japanese text scroller looks very cool to me, but it's not as flavorful as the other two, so I wouldn't hesitate to see it go if it clashed with a new design element. But I don't see why it would, so why fuck with it?

I don't really like the Flash expand-o-text link section on the left. The colors are too dark to read on most monitors until they are moused over and begin expanding, and the whole thing strikes me as unnecessarily "gadgety." I would probably replace it with standard HTML stuff, personally - but then, my aesthetic sense when it comes to functional components of a website is pretty Spartan.

I would recommend making one easily identifiable section for functional links - preferably on the left side, where the current Flash one is, with all components easily visible whether or not they're selected. If there are many of them, they should probably be organized into demarcated subsections, so that the most "important" are closer to the top and possibly somewhat bolder than the others.

posted 03-21-2001 15:07            

I've been thinking of having some sort of menu system possibly at the top, maybe under the flash stuff. It really depends on the format that we organize all these links.

posted 03-21-2001 15:18            

<table><tr><td>Flash and HTML Header Stuff Goes Here</td></tr></table>
<table align="left" width="250">
<tr><td>Internal Links Go Here</td></tr>
<tr><td>External Links and/or Miscellaneous Crap Links Go Here</td></tr></table>

<!--#include virtual="output of Fen's php news backend goes here"-->

This, of course, would produce a basic structure like this:

======================
!.......header.......!
======================
!...!
!...!
!...!   E/N shit
!...!
!...!
!...!

... with the advantage that posts would start displaying immediately, even if the top and sidebar tables hadn't finished rendering yet.

posted 03-21-2001 19:33            

That all sounds like good ideas to me. The only problem is that they are already implemented. The page is currently a frameset, so the top, left, and main frames load simultaneously, not in sequence. And the php script creates a flat html page which is served to the reader. You only view dynamic content when you search for past posts.

As for me, of course I'm a big fan of flash, and I think it gives a lot of cool opportunities. If you're worried about too many links on the left side, I've been working lately (for another project) on an expanding/contracting meny system in flash that (and this is the cool part) pulls data out of an xml file, meaning you can change the menu without editing the flash. This is just an example of how I think flash can help- all it requires is to be built into an overall site design. There are a lot of great sites that mix html with flash seamlessly, and wind up with a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

posted 03-21-2001 22:23            

Jimbo-
I didn't realize that table vs. frameset was the point you were making. I'm pretty ambivalent there... I don't think there's any huge reason the page uses frames, except so that the titles don't scroll off the page, and to separate up the content into different files.

posted 03-23-2001 07:31            

huh? wha?
why? if someone goes to the message board and then back to the main page, why make the server piece together header and body files so the flash at the top loads twice?

posted 03-23-2001 09:41            

The behavior of the "Refresh" button is bad enough, and in the case of PenIs, it's really the only problem - but lots of folks just have undying hatred by now for standard framesets due to the long, long history of frames being used for evil purposes.

Like the legions of frameset pages that load links in one of their frames rather than in the whole page, and then make it difficult to get the hell out of the frameset without going up to the address bar and manually typing in an URL to replace the whole page.