Ask HN: Review Our Club's Site

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=733720

by mcastner • 17 years ago

6 8 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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!

Our site is: http://urbangaming.org

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.

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?

redorb• 17 years ago

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 :/

phantom784• 17 years ago

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

qsilver• 17 years ago

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

wal9000• 17 years ago

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

Ennis• 17 years ago

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!

mcastner2• 17 years ago

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!

cjg• 17 years ago

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.

mcastner2• 17 years ago

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.

Ask HN: Review Our Club's Site

Related Stories