GRcade

http://www.samgwilliam.com

It's still pretty bare at the moment, but I just wanted to get it out there. Have a look. Suggestions/criticisms welcome.

There's a little more content up there now. Plus you get to hear about my ASS.

That Flash game is addictive, good lord. I'm really crap at it, too.

Thanks for taking a look! Filler Killer is a game I need to develop properly. Currently the presentation is poor and the difficulty curve is too high.

Also, to anyone who knows - my button rollovers are slow sometimes. This is how I've done it:



Is this the right way?

What is it for?

I dont like it. The colours arent great, and the design appears very dated. Some things dont align properly and pages dont match - ie, filler killer bottom bar sits next to the sidebar instead of on it. Contact details dont look right, look too cheap, Id recommend a universal look across the icons. Also, regarding the gallery, its better to have no page at all than an 'under construction' holder.

I like your ASS and would be interested to see what designs you roll out.

You appear to have fallen at the first hurdle in web design 101 though, clicking the top banner doesnt return me to your homepage, is this by design?

For all the criticism, its not a terrible first effort and seems stable enough. Now refine and cut all the superfluous stuff.

I've got about 10 schemes in my ASS - what's the one you saw? The water one? But I admit it's still a "beta" right now. And I've spent too much time faffing about with aesthetic trinkets than I have actual content.

I thought about the header linking to the homepage but, seeing as the About button is just underneath it (which it the de facto home), I thought it superfluous. But I'd appreciate any help on the Filler Killer footer problem. It's stumped me. I even made an "ironic" acknowledgement on the page, lol.

As for the purpose - it's just a learning exercise mostly. It's always gonna be a work in progress as I learn more. But I aim to make money from web design some day, so it's also a kind of "showcase" for my current level of skill (which is still low of course).

I've already done little jobs for this guy but never anything from scratch - just editing/photoshop and stuff. There's also another guy I designed a logo for. He's a bit of a prick but he targets small businesses and makes them a basic page for about £200 cash in hand. This is one of his efforts:

http://www.ceriwynne.site40.net/

And to be frank if he can make easy bucks like that from bilge like that then so can I. I designed the Welsh dragon logo but the rest was his design.

But I appeciate the feedback of course.

I know you like your retro stylings so I'm not going to bother criticising that.

It's a good starting effort. Reminds me of the sort of stuff I would put online mostly for my own egocentric amusement like http://thegreengecko.co.uk/phelsuma/?page=create (I think I made this during my GCSEs. Obviously I took my own little world far too seriously.).

If you're serious about having an online portfolio though.. And you're using it professionally. I'd adopt a less kooky writing style. Reminds me of Karlprof Or maintain different domains for personal style, and professional style. A lot of how you present yourself, and your competetence, could be judged on how you write about yourself. Instead of playing down your qualifications.. Just state what they are and then that's it. Understated. You seem to have crammed in the ironic self satirisation to explain just a few facts about yourself. Don't make up content that isn't there IMO. Or it ends up reading like a MySpace profile. I used to ramble about so much gooseberry fool and had this inane dense writing style.. Ok maybe I still do that.

I haven't had time with GR and freelance work etc to make my own design for a few years, so I just use Cargo Collective for my fine art stuff at http://www.benmobbs.com. Who gives a strawberry float if it works, it's clean, it's consistent and it's easy for me to update. I might switch to a bespoke site with a Wordpress blog though soon, as I have to do more to promote myself to earn money now I'm job seeking.

The banner should link to the home page because it's convention. If you want your site to be accessible and not irritate the user then you suck it up and confom to their expectations, not your rationale.

Keep doing stuff like this from scratch and you should be able to sell low budget sites, even if they are knowingly ass. But it's up to you to be able to do that quickly enough that it's a visible proposition to earn money in a reasonable frame of time.

That your friend manages to sell sites that like that for £200 a pop makes me want to cry. And not only because there's a free hosting pop up on every single strawberry floating page.

No amount of coding will give you design sensibility. I'm not really sure where to start you off there. Seemed to come naturally to me and from being highly critical of pretty much every Website I've ever seen and knocking up some stuff similar to this since I was 14.

Read http://www.websitesthatsuck.com

You might be able to make money making bad websites but would you want that on your portfolio?

Also if you have a domain you should set up email forwarding to your personal accounts instead of having an unprofessional hotmail, aol etc.

Yeah I've got loads to learn. I've literally been learning from scratch for a few months. I like my design style - I realise it's a bit "colourful" and and acquired taste but I've done more "austere" things for other people. I think it's better than the example I showed you off the other guy. I see your point about the writing style though.

Nice tips though. Cheers.

I've got to be brutal and say your site looks like it was designed back in 1992. Things have moved on from the old side menu that is also linked to the top nav. Also, rollovers are pretty horrible (not yours, just in general) and I can't remember the last time I designed a site with rollovers that were anything other than a simple colour swap. Maybe make yours so they don't appear to move as much (like only a pixel or two difference in the change). Also, you really should take that photo of yourself off the top, it really makes you come across as a knob...fair enough if it was on an 'about me' page but it makes you seem really amateur (i know you are, but you get me i hope).

Freelance design & coding is really tough going as every banana split and his dog has access to a computer and thinks they are a designer, so people really don't value what you do. You have to work on a few designs, even if it means pretty much copying another site to get used to the way things should look for a modern site. I've been at this freelance business coming up 2 years now (was a full time designer for 7 years) and the things i produce now dump all over my earlier stuff, so practice practice practice!

Sorry if it comes across as harsh, but people need to be told these things. I wish people had flat out told me some of my early work was shite instead of saying, "looks great mate!" and then you don't get any work out of it.

Its very tempting as a newbie to create something which may demonstrate a lot of techniques and codes, but if it looks like a mess or behind the curve, people wont pay.

Ad7 wrote:
Sorry if it comes across as harsh, but people need to be told these things. I wish people had flat out told me some of my early work was shite instead of saying, "looks great mate!" and then you don't get any work out of it.

I know it's not totally comparable, but my writing was ripped to gooseberry fool by my editor when I started working on the newspaper 12 years ago. You can't beat honest, straightforward feedback. Your skin thickens and you get better - and there's no room for dicking around when this is something you want to make money from, because the creative industries are competitive as hell.

Green Gecko wrote:No amount of coding will give you design sensibility. I'm not really sure where to start you off there.

Jesus christ, what a pretentious arsehole you must be IRL!

~Earl Grey~ wrote:

Green Gecko wrote:No amount of coding will give you design sensibility. I'm not really sure where to start you off there.

Jesus christ, what a pretentious arsehole you must be IRL!

Is that you in your Avatar?

That's a generic statement that you have chosen to take personally. I think it's fair enough to say that code and design are two separate crafts that are brought together by the medium. One doesn't necessarily give birth to the other. From what I've seen and from the admittance of my compsci friends (who I've worked with in designer/coder duos for this purpose), programmers don't normally come equipped with visual arts skills but it can be learnt like anything else.

Neither am I saying I have those skills.

Fwiw I've never been called out as pretentious in real life. I've worried myself over being perceived as such, since I follow uncommon paths of study and interest. I simply stopped caring some time ago, because who gives a strawberry float.

Edit: Why have you said thanks for my feedback and tips, and then come back to have a pop at me months later?

~Earl Grey~ wrote:

Green Gecko wrote:No amount of coding will give you design sensibility. I'm not really sure where to start you off there.

Jesus christ, what a pretentious arsehole you must be IRL!

Says the person with a photo of himself in his 90s gooseberry fool looking website

~Earl Grey~ wrote:Thanks for taking a look! Filler Killer is a game I need to develop properly. Currently the presentation is poor and the difficulty curve is too high.

Also, to anyone who knows - my button rollovers are slow sometimes. This is how I've done it:

Code: Select all

<img src="x" onmouseover="this.src='y'" onmouseout="this.src='x'" />

Is this the right way?

I can't see where the rollovers are on the site, but it's probably the loading of the alternative images that takes the time. You can pre-load an image with something like:



That should get the image into the cache ready for the rollover.

You can get some script bashed out by Dreamweaver for that and admittedly I've nicked it a few times, but I don't use JS for that anymore as you can do the same thing in CSS with lists and the a:hover attribute and background-image.

Actually you don't even need to use images anymore as you can draw up gradients and rounded corners etc in CSS3. Depends how complex you want the images to be. Imo they should be as simple as possible.

Green Gecko wrote:That's a generic statement that you have chosen to take personally. I think it's fair enough to say that code and design are two separate crafts that are brought together by the medium. One doesn't necessarily give birth to the other. From what I've seen and from the admittance of my compsci friends (who I've worked with in designer/coder duos for this purpose), programmers don't normally come equipped with visual arts skills but it can be learnt like anything else.

Neither am I saying I have those skills.

Fwiw I've never been called out as pretentious in real life. I've worried myself over being perceived as such, since I follow uncommon paths of study and interest. I simply stopped caring some time ago, because who gives a strawberry float.

Edit: Why have you said thanks for my feedback and tips, and then come back to have a pop at me months later?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It just seemed a little backhanded and patronising, that's all.

I understand that coding and design aren't the same discipline. The site has had a major overhaul since then. I don't claim it to be amazing, but it's all me. No wizards, no copypasta or anything.

But there's some interesting content on there, if one cares to investigate...

fwiw I took a look and it looks a lot, lot better. :thumbsup:

I noticed you coded/found a collapsible div script. It's like you are playing with all these different things you find. I miss that, I haven't innovated within my skillset for bloody years. Web design is a really fun thing to learn because you get more or less instant results/feedback on what you're doing and the interactive nature of it is very different to really any other medium. I whiled away hundreds of hours, but nowadays default to some kind of CMS because I just don't have time.

The last thing I never finished was this: http://www.thegreengecko.co.uk/wip

I was trying to use as little code as possible (now I could replace all the images with CSS gradients). It's just a page navigation system that I started integrating with Dreamweaver and I also got some prototyping up in Fireworks.

There's loads of random crap on that domain.