Forgive me if I am out of line in saying so but have you thought of making the website look better? Personally I feel people respond more to visual aspects and even myself who is very familiar with UO, I almost didn't join the shard because I didn't like the website at all... I am a graphics designer and a little familiar with web designing as well so I would love to offer my help even if just in designing portions to give a more unique look and eye appealing to the masses.
Welcome! I like the website. The design is attractive and very practical. While your opinion is appreciated I think people who really want to enjoy playing uo won't care too much about the shard's website anyway. Its all about the in-game action and our Renaissance's is unmatched in the uo universe.
I joined entirely because of the website - I actually think it's really well set-up, especially the homepage with the scrolling shots of the major features of the shard. That said, I am not a professional in this area, and I know the shard owner is looking to improve the website in the coming months, so I'm sure he'd love to hear your ideas. His name is Chris on the forums here.
I do like certain features of the website especially the images of the game but the layout as well as graphic portion that are not directly screen shotted from the game I think could be incredibly better. I own a company which focuses on media/marketing/promotions and altho I do agree there is many good features of the website, I believe it can easily be so much better just from a graphics/design standpoint... BUT nice to meet everyone.... I come from the dead and still dying UOSA Shard....... I was on this shard for not even an hour and all my great memories of UO came back... I've played 99-08 and came back to UO mid last year..
I came to this shard based on word of mouth, same with the last shard I played on (UOSA). The site was an after thought and I only use it for information and think the set up is quite good for that. Obviously it could be improved but I still think it's pretty good. I'm shocked to hear it almost turned someone off from playing here.
Thats just how I am.... even in business if someone hands me a poorly designed business card I tend to throw it away and not take them serious.
I almost made the mistake of using the website as this shard's proverbial "cover" by which it was judged. But I found you have a few different 'skin' options and I finally found the one I liked. Also, you may notice that this website has a much richer database access, and live map feature which is not available on any other shard I've seen. Want to scope out potential spots for a Tower, Keep, Kastle, or K'fortress? you can do it here I have compared the website to a few others and I'd say this one ranks my top 5. I've visited some other UO shards and I ran away screeming just at the 'site' of it. bwahaha. but not this one. Welcome aboard Rembrandt, I hope to see you paint some vibrant memories here! - Jupiter Greystone
I think the main site is great. Personally I hate flashy sites that take forever to load and require tons of java and flash to operate properly. Bring back Geocities! :lol:
The different services of the website are pretty great. Love the ladders, especially. My main gripe is the left-hand navigation. It changes depending on where you navigate to - gets confusing when options disappear and are replaced with new ones.
Agree'd.... I think the website has TONS of great information and definitely is better than many uo sites I've seen previously.... I just think the format in which to access can become a bit confusing.....
Rembrandt would you mind sharing with us a sample of your online portfolio? And while on the topic, could I get your company name? I have some external needs that I might reach out to you on. Many of us here do little things to help promote the shard. Your assistance on an updated web design could be your "little part" to help keep this server #1 (which it has clearly now become in the freeshard community). And welcome to UOR. While it is sad to see what happened to your old shard, people eventually move on when a product becomes stagnant, and that's exactly what happened.
The website is far too new as is, I was used to the oldschool UO wesbites written in plain HTML in notepad.
I personally love the site, but a more attractive, newer look could possibly draw more to the server. Obviously none of us are concerned with graphics as much as the game play of UO, but playing MMORPGs for 17 years I'd assume there are a lot of people that would hit the site and think this looks old and out dated compared to some of the others. I was in a guild called Condemned for the past several years and in GW2 we started an alliance called the Titan Alliance. We would get comments on our website all the time. When we did interviews with people that wanted to join our guild we'd always hear how others websites were just trashy and unattractive. They would just leave the other guilds sites when they entered them. It's kind of lame that someone would do that, but it's a fact that people like updated looking stuff in the age of technology.
Actually the whole website was written from scratch in notepad++. As I have never designed a modular website before, this was a good project to expand my experience in this area. The website has never really been about the looks, as I have been focused on the content available. Anyone can download a template from the internet and copy paste a few pages of text into pre-formatted pages. Some servers don't even bother to be creative, they just steal the template from another server. The website will continue to be a mad scientists laboratory for the various crazy ideas we come up with to add new wrinkles to the UO Experience. Since I am not overly constrained by a format, it gives me the freedom to experiment in a simplistic environment. We have 10+ systems on our website that you will not find anywhere else. Custom Compendium (Wiki) Interactive Multi Item Search Utility (with images) Character Profiles Player vs Monster Leaderboards Interactive World Map with Live Houses Server Status Graph Complete World Item Database Item History Graphs Item Detail Pages Item Colorization based on UO hue Website fashion police citation or not, our website traffic is growing steadily each month. Some website stats for this month; 15,000 Unique Visitors 700,000 Pageviews 400gb of traffic 3,750,000 content hits We have also created a truly staggering amount of content for the website 10,000 Item Images 1,000 Greyscale images 400 monster icons, monster compendium images 10 million+ historical records of deaths, daily stats, monster kills, etc. So while it may not be the most attractive thing on the planet. Anybody can download and customize a pre-designed template. The amount of information we make available to our players is unparalleled. Keep the ideas rolling in however, I incorporated several ideas from this thread into a recent update to the site to improve usability.
O sorry lol... completely missed the fact that there was any other responses.... lol I can post designs I've done n what not... don't really have a portfolio for web designing anymore... I use to do it actively and got more into photography and graphics designing... business promotions.. advertising.. etc
