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[tesselode]

Here's my website:

tesselode.110mb.com

It's hideous. It used to look a little better (phoenix0.110mb.com), but the pages were a little bit awkward to create and manage. I want to make my website actually look good, but I have no idea what it should look like or even how to make it look good in general.

My website will focus mainly on games and music, which is the inspiration for the pixellated note logo I have in my avatar, if that helps anybody.

Anyway, if anybody could help me come up with a design for my web site (mockups, general ideas, or whatever are welcome) or wants to discuss how to make a good web site design in general, please do.

[Tumetsu]

Why don't you search some free premade templates and then start modifying them into new designs? It is much easier to tinker with something existing than create one from scratch. That's how I have made my site's designs.

[Kekskiller]

Take a blog, categorize, template. Be happy.

[C.A. Silbereisen]

Take a blog, categorize, template. Be happy.

Pretty much.

[J. Kyle Pittman]

I agree with the above, starting from a template is probably going to get you the nicest results fastest. But if you're interested in building from the ground up, I'd recommend learning PHP, MySQL, and CSS. I've been digging into these recently and having a blast with it. I haven't redesigned my own site yet (been working on an issue tracking app instead), but I've had some ideas on how I will whenever I get around to it.

The high-level goal should be to decouple the site's content from its presentation. That is to say, whatever data you want to provide, from textual descriptions of games to screenshots to links or whatever, those should all be separate from and agnostic of the actual layout of the site, and vice-versa.

Using the tools I mentioned, you'd do this by setting up MySQL tables containing all the content you want. Then you'd probably need at least two PHP pages, one for a general browser, and one for showing details about a specific game. These would each query the MySQL table to find the relevant data to display and then output the appropriate HTML in a plain "vanilla" format. Finally, there would be a CSS page to define the actual presentation, which is where you'd specify things like fonts, colors, sizing and positioning, and so on.

From there, adding details about a new game would be as easy as adding a new entry to the MySQL table. You could write your own tool to do this, or if your host offers any admin tools like phpMyAdmin, you could just use that.

[brog]

The fractal at the top is pretty.  Gives a good first impression.  So it's not all bad.
(if the rest of the page was in the same style it'd be amazing, but i don't quite see how you could do that.)

[RobHaines]

While it's nowhere near perfect, I've found Wordpress to be a fairly straightforward content delivery platform. Even though you can use it for blog posts, etc, you can also set up individual pages based on wider templates, and so on. I took the default template, learned myself a bit of css and php, then sat down and drew on paper how I wanted my site to come out.

The final version isn't identical to my original sketches, but it helps to have some idea of the shapes and functionality you're working towards. I now run the site off Wordpress for most of my content, and a separate php script to deal with other elements. I'm not much of a coder, so it's certainly doable with a bit of research and a clear vision of what you want.

http://www.generationminusone.com

Edit: I agree with brog regarding the fractal; you could probably create some interesting designs taking that as a theme

[Christian Knudsen]

Another recommendation for Wordpress here. I pretty much did the same thing as RobHaines.

[Triplefox]

It's easiest to get a template.

But here are some quick-fix ideas for the existing design:

• Move away from centering everything, it doesn't work well for lengthy content. Pick a side and stick with it.
• Pick a width for your text so that it doesn't flow all the way across wide screens. There's a limit to how much width our eyes can tolerate. It's common to fix a width in pixels to simplify layout and guarantee a certain experience across all monitors and browsers.
• Stagger the alignment on the heading and body text(e.g. one is indented)
• Use a palette-building tool to make a more distinguished color scheme, or add contrast to the existing one(e.g. unique colors on heading, body, links).
• The fractal image idea could go from a thing in the heading to a fixed background(doesn't move when scrolling). You'd need a bigger image, of course, and contrast against text becomes an issue when doing so.

[RobHaines]

One possibility would be to combine some of the ideas above; use a fractal image as a fixed background, with a solid-coloured blogroll-size area offset to one side for your updates (powered by a low-maintenance content-delivery system such as Wordpress). Something like this (as a two minute prototype):



This sort of design gives you a simple but elegant site, keeping the text in an area suitable for comfortable reading, minimising messing around with the site code rather than making content for it.

[tesselode]

I went ahead with Wordpress. I have one blog post and a couple of test pages. I customized the default theme slightly.

I would like to do more customization in the future, so someone tell me what changes I should make and maybe give some advice on how to make them.

[rivon]

Nice julia on top of the page, though it looks kinda JPGed...

[supershigi]

Personally I love Wordpress, so I think you made a good choice.  I've actually been using it for a long time and I've found that I didn't really need as much customization as I thought I did when my plan was to build the site myself (in the past I've always built my own sites, or worked with a friend to build them because I was big on customization, but I've found that it was far more important that I was easily able to make updates).

I think your current setup looks great!  As you go along you'll probably find things you want to add (WP has all these random widgets that are fun to play around with).  I like using the text sidebar widget to add image-links to friends' sites and stuff like that.

[Richard Kain]

I will always trumpet the strengths of designing a site all by your lonesome. But then I am a web designer/coder by trade. For pretty much everyone else, Wordpress and similar blog services really are the way to go. They're simple, the default shell choices look clean and professional, and they provide a decent degree of customization options if you know your CSS. It's a fantastic way to get the general structure of a decent web site up there displaying things, and then focus on the content rather than the back-end structure. It's what most people actually need for their website.

Stick with that for the time being. You always have the option of re-designing your site later, when you feel more confident. For now its just important to have your content up there.

[tesselode]

Nice julia on top of the page, though it looks kinda JPGed...

Thanks, it's actually a PNG file, but when I look at it closely it does look kind of like a low-quality JPEG. That's because I rendered it at a low quality. I replaced it with a much nicer looking version now.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

I've always been a fan of doing the design in raw CSS/HTML then injecting wordpress into the news section.

Allows way more flexibility on site design. I'm surprised more people don't do that.