Final Website

Rationale

For this brief I chose to do a redesign of the Adversity Gaming website- a New Zealand based competitive gaming community. For the site I wanted to create a very simple minimalistic layout that focused on clarity and easy navigation.

            To do this stylistically, I chose a simple colour scheme that consisted of one shade of dark grey for type and boxes with a shade of red for important titles and links.  I created a simple and functional layout using the 960-grid system. This way my site can fit into a browser with a width of at least 840px. I chose not to add any background images, or unnecessary aesthetics as I found they only distracted from the actual content of the site.

            Most other gaming related websites I researched appeared very dark and often consisting of grunge and/or metallic textures. I chose not to have a dark aesthetic for my site. Instead I went in the complete opposite direction and chose a mostly white colour scheme for the site. This is purely as it reflects the AVT brand better as their logo has a white font with grey and red outlines. This is reflected with a grey toolbar and footer to frame each webpage.

            The aim for my site was to give the target audience the information they require quickly and effectively. Based on my research into the community, I found the most viewed and used area of the site were the forums. The gaming sections of the forums were the most popular, telling me that more focus should be put on the games as opposed to social media, or galleries etc.  I have now introduced a separate games section with published guides/ strategy section and links to the forums. To retain the social media aspect, I included a small fixed toolbar along the top of the page. This toolbar contains account sign in and sign up links, along with this I have included outgoing links to AVT’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages.  .

            To create my site I used DreamWeaver CS6 (HTML5) for all the pages. I used Jquery on the Starcraft II page to get tabs that change the content for the guides.

            Given more time to work on my website I would like to expand the forums. I would like to add some of the actual posts from the AVTs forum, or at least some of the sticky threads. The only other thing I think the site could use is a small profile page, although they weren't used all that often on AVT. A profile could have things like  preferences and settings for forum posts, for example: setting a signature image, profile pictures, maybe links to independant YouTube accounts etc.

          

        

*All screenshots taken on 1600x900 monitor