

Ask HN: Review Our Club's Site - mcastner

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?
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Ennis
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.

Suggestions

 _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.

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.

_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.

 _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.

_ The Welcome text on the front page in the blue bar is really all the about
us that people need.

 _You don't need a Home menu item.

_ I like the colors.

 _I like that it is not full of dynamic content or javascript.

Here is what I would change: _Front page: Banner and dynamic picture take tons
of screen real-estate.

 _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.

_ 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.

 _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.

_ No Overview pages of any sort.

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.

Hope this helps and good luck!

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mcastner
Wow thanks for the feedback. We do have a little content bloat right now due
to some over-eager Liberal Arts majors writing for us. We'll see what pages
can be eliminated over time. The original idea for the page when you click on
a section heading was to have a list of pages underneath but somehow that
changed during the course of development.

The reason for the drop-downs isn't quite obvious right now but we run some
big games through the site and we want to make all the functions available
with minimal clicking from every page.

The reason the image cycle and welcome text on the front page is so big is
because we really want to emphasize "This is what we do" and "This is where to
join" on the front page. The news and upcoming events and everything is below
the fold because it's not as important for prospective members.

Support section is kind of redundant, I agree.

We'll keep working and refining though, thanks!

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phantom784
I did the backend for this site, it was a great experience. I hope you guys
like it!

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cjg
Your warning about IE6 is undismissable. Why go to the extra effort of
deliberately blocking IE6 users?

An IE6 user is probably quite happy to view your site with a few layout
problems. Please don't be a hater.

For what it's worth the site layout looked roughly OK through the opacity.

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mcastner
We're worried about all of our features working on IE6 and it's just easier on
us if we don't support it at all. I'll try to go ahead and make the warning
dismissible though.

Also, Penn State won't let you connect to their network if you have IE6 (in
their ToS) and overall our percentage of IE users is around 15%, IE6 users is
exactly 0.

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redorb
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..

\- honestly; I feel old, and jealous - in the clubs I joined chicks weren't
diggin it :/

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qsilver
I am on the head of the team that developed this. Hope you guys enjoy checking
it out.

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wal9000
I'm in this club! This is a cool!

