Plan for Adam DeGrandis

I had a most unusually productive weekend. I designed and built Games Extract version 2. Here is the story.

Now that Ive been working with the site for about 4-5 months, Ive had time to analyze whats working and whats not. One thing that bugged me pretty much from the beginning is the navigation. I hate the look of vertical navigation, which is why I went with horizontal on the first round of the site. It didnt take long to realize that that wasnt the smartest path to take. The more content I added, the longer the navigation for the resource pages would get, until they eventually hit the end of the table cell and the line wrapped down. A wrapped nav bar is worlds uglier than vertical navigation. For awhile I toyed with the idea of using something fancy like dropdowns or disappearing/reappearing menus, but in the end that just added extra clicks. One thing you need to pay a lot of attention to as a designer is how something is going to be used. Its great if you can make something look pretty, but the beauty of functionality is something to hold in higher regard. Drop downs and disappearing menus make for clumsy and redundant navigating.

All of this stuff was pushed into the front of my mind a couple days ago when I added a new sub section to textures and the nav bar wrapped around.

A different problem with the site was its structure. It was built using a lot of tables to control content. For those of you not in the web design know, this is becoming somewhat of an old approach. The problem with this method of site construction is that its a lot of code. Each page starts to get very cluttered if you look at the source. If you are the creator, its probably not a problem, as you know the little nooks and crannies of it. However, if you are someone else trying to, for instance, see how someone did a cool little trick, you cant make heads or tails of it. Another problem with the table method is that it takes a lot of massaging to get it to show properly in each browser. This is probably the most irritating problem there is.

The new way of doing sites is informally called css design. Css is the extension for cascading style sheets. What cascading style sheets do is force a broswer to display thigns a certain way. This is most easily demonstrated with type. Lets say you make a page in dreamweaver. You highlight all of your type and in the little properties box make it red and Arial face. Those changes are going to be held in a tag. Font tags can be overridden by browesers, which in turn means that the layout of your site can be changed. Thats a scary thought. If your type was controlled with a css, then you would never have that problem.

Besides type styles, css can also handle positioning of elements. Its pretty awesome. You make a div panel (a box that you put stuff in similar to a table), apply a css to it that says it should be x high and x wide, and then say that things should be spaced with x pixels, and bam, anything you put in there will follow those rules. It makes for clean code and besides that, it will (usually) show up exactly the same on every browser. I wanted to make version 1 of the site with style sheets, but I was apprehensive to take on both creating the site as well as learning how to build with css.

So on friday I rather randomly sat down and said, "hmm... I think Ill do some concepting for the new site". Concepting us usually a long process with me. I tweak and edit until my fingers bleed. But thats only because my keyboard is actually made of a series of x-acto blades. But really, I do usually spend a lot of time playing with a design. I didnt expect to be ready to build until the end of school. In actuality, though, I had something i liked after just an hour. After being amazed at the fact for 30 minutes, I decided to go ahead and start building. More than that, I decided to build it in css; the design was really begging for it.

It turns out building with css is a piece of cake. I love the way the site looks now. First off is its design; clean and crisp and minimal. There is nothing superflous at all. Its great. The navigation is awesome too. Its vertical, but Its so simple I cant help but like it. Besides that, now I can add catagory after catagory and never have to worry that it will look ugly.

I also had the opportunity to add a few major areas. Neither of them are done, but I'll still mention them here. I added a links section so I can connect visitors with other artists that I think are doing really awesome things. I think its really important that artists constantly look at other peoples work. It prevents your own work from becoming stale. I also added a Utilities section under resources. Here I can place little freeware apps and plugins that I use (and that make my life worlds easier). Finally, I took out the Guides and Assistants section. There was a reason I made it when I was designing v1, but its since gotten muddy.

Thats the story. In content news, I added the barrier packs to the 3d section. Go look at the page... I find it strangly awesome looking... little icons all in a row. Im pretty proud of the barriers. I look at them and textures I did last summer (when I started taking the first steps to make Games Extract) and im shocked at how much Ive improved. It rules. Besides the barriers, I also added a liquids section to the texture area. Right now there are 3 lava textures. More stuff to come.

So thats that. GamesExtract v2. Im pumped. Built in two days. Go check it out. Its real purdy like.