[POLL] New HoN League site (Preview)

[HunteR_]

Hello, we've been hard at work developing some new sites, one of them is HoN League.

AS you know, currently HoN League is a very basic site with a very basic forum thrown on with tournament and ladder.

We have been secretly working on the site in the meantime and I wanted to get the competitive community's input on the layout.

Granted, most of you have never seen a DotA Inhouse League website or what to expect, and most of them aren't very good. That said, we wanted to raise the standards and offer something amazing and unique to our competitive HoN community.

http://honleague.com/honleague_layout.jpg

Thoughts?

Please no trolling, a simple input would be sufficient.

Yeah, I failed, i didn't press the poll check box, so please elaborate below.

[PeteScrub]

Site looks good, but I'm loving the Poll lol!

-No Way!

[FiNGERS]

That looks much better than what it looks like in it's current state!

[Ozzzzz]

i like the color scheme, much better then its current state but perhaps a bit too much white? the top border is eye catching and creative but the main body part is rather bland.

[Von_Moltke]

Looks pretty decent.

[svirrz]

I see krangry!

[Broodax]

Hmm, its good, but I feel it needs some heavy tweaking from a layout perspective. Let me do a quick re-arrangement in photo shop to illustrate my thoughts better. I'll edit this post.

EDIT:

I attached an Image with this post, so please take a look at that.
I have 4 areas selected in red, these are areas I feel need the most work.

1. This is an example of what I feel is a more attractive way to post your news. Now granted its not much more attractive but its easier on the eyes and makes each post feel like its own thing. Before, with the titles all floating out of the gray box, it felt detached, like it wasn't really part of the post. You don't need to shrink the image, but you should consider allowing the words to wrap around the posters avatar if you are going to have it there. Much less wasted space that way.

2. This add just felt extremely out of place. I think you can get away with 2 bar adds on your site and it'll help your layout be more consistent.

3. This menu area seems awkward and the design at the bottom of the page feels distracting. Smaller text, centered at the bottom of the page would probably work better.

4. This whole area is just weird. You have two menus here (not counting the login stuff just above it) I feel like the HoNcast.com add, the Support S2 Games add, and the links to Rules, Wiki, Support, and Contact could all be moved some where else. The HoN League banner should be the top of that layout IMO. You could find a way to move Rules Wiki, Support and Contact in to that blue bar where you see Home, Forums, Player Rankings ect.

Its not a bad design, but it just feels busy and disorganized. Theres a whole lot going on. But I do like the theme and the colors. Though, that gray behind the news posts feels really out of place. Take a lot around at other similer websites and draw inspiration from them.

Esportsea.com (http://www.esportsea.com/) was mentioned, and its a good example of a simple, clean, and organized layout. HoNreplays.org (http://www.honreplays.org/)is another site you could look at for inspiration as well.

[Fusi]

Look nice! I like the clean simple look. Reminds me of http://www.esportsea.com kinda... could we see a sample of the forums?

[HunteR_]

Nope! That's all I'm showing for now :) Thanks for input so far

@Broodax, thanks for the constructive comments

[DrexlSpivey]

Do you bros sell sideways hats by chance?

[DrexlSpivey]

Simple is more gooder. As long as it's easy to navigate, tis all good.

[Vadi]

It looks much clearer, so yes, better.

[Freshpro]

I dont see why u need top psr ppl inthere since its public and not "league related". And is top clans gonna be based on hl tournaments or from the MM ?

[balmain]

site looks good! fresh and clean.

[HunteR_]

I dont see why u need top psr ppl inthere since its public and not "league related". And is top clans gonna be based on hl tournaments or from the MM ?

It's not PSR, it's league rating... duh! HoN league has it's own in game rating system which S2 is developing, you know that!

[Vinthian]

Needs a skin option for a black theme. Not a huge fan of bright sites.

Lose, or make a new graphic around the hon ad below the header. Looks tacky!

Your text bubble needs to have your avatar outside of it (to the left with a border).

The color scheme is a bit.. weird, don't go for faded and washed out colors,especially for fonts. Make it sharp with contrast. (Your ads stand out more that your site)

Take off the underline in links.

Also, the "h" in your logo needs to be more recognizable. Took me a while to figure it was "hL", makes no sense to have a lowercase and an uppercase letter together!

I had more to say, but this is already too much!

Just my two cents. I know it's a work in progress, but it needs some cleanup! Good job so far though.

[schneeb]

Your eye candy CSS/image combo leaves horrible whitespace between everything, perhaps white is too bright for the background, colour scheme needs more thought in general imo.

In conclusion, either improve the colour scheme or lose the CSS/image trickery so the content isn't 200px apart... (things like the pseudo speech bubble for a news post really do nothing but hurt the overall layout...)

[lysol]

i lol'd at krangry and hellfire being on that poll

[Skasian]

First impressions are "Eewwwww Advertisements!"

Final impressions are still "Ewweewewww Advertisements :("

[Krangry]

lol. i think that is just the first people that signed up maybe?. Anyway i like it a lot, the color scheme is awesome, good work hunter!

[Extreme_Cake]

Do not want

[Darkstrand]

Hellfire in anyone's top 5 list is lol

[Fencer]

Needs a skin option for a black theme. Not a huge fan of bright sites.

This, and the bottom right picture having that horizontal line as a cut-off point.

Other than that, looks pretty good.

[Murs]

looks more like a blog site than a professional website, but its a vast improvement from what you had before

[`Cherry`]

i don't like how the news are presented but the rest of it looks pretty good.

[zykIon`b]

Hellfire62 best ever.

[Blavo]

I don't like the preview, there is no reason Chu should ever be ranked above me... by only 2 spots.

[VyyyE]

Looks brilliant. Any chance for a darker theme option though?

[Kelebek]

I like how your advertising stretches the page. /fail

[HunteR_]

it's a mockup from the designer, we don't want to do "premium memberships" like MYM, and dota-league, we would rather have a few ads to produce a revenue stream to make the site self sufficient.

I'm sure you all understand the costs in providing these services. If not, then go price it!

[Pupp3tMast3r]

My $0.02: get rid of the wiki link. We don't need yet another wiki that nobody is really using.

[thomme]

I don't like the arrows next to the menu points. And the menu seems to be unstyled.

[Decency]

Holy ads.

+1 on the white and whitespace. A dark theme would be much preferred.


You drastically need to clean up the UI. There are 4 menu bars. That's just a joke. Dropdown menus are your friend.

[IH8Pants]

A few notes in response to some suggestions...

The lightness of the background is not going to change. People tend to just have personal opinions on what they like in a design, shade wise (black/white/neutral). The gaming community as a whole enjoys black based sites, or darker neutrals.

The problem with this is that with darker sites you downplay sponsorship and advertisements, something HoN League cannot afford to do. HoN League relies on sponsorship and advertisements to ensure that tournaments and the ladder have prize pools. White/Light Neutral based sites allow for better information architecture (ie: controlling the flow of your eyes, and what you look at as the control of bolder images is present).

Would you sacrifice prize pools for a personal preference of a black/dark neutral based design?

On the subject of the news area and it's layout... This again harks to the flow of information. Constricting news posts and making their seperation overly apparent draws attention to the area, as seperation stands out. This would take focus away from the parts of the site that are more important: navigation, logo, advertisement, account management. As it stands, while not being the most appealing approach, the news area draws no attention away from other important areas yet is noticeable and has a degree of separation between posts.

On the "busy" notes on the design: That's going to happen regardless. Ads, Text, Links, Rankings, Images... There's a lot of information to be shoved into the front page of the site. I'll make some alterations and see if I can tone down the busy-ness of the layout without sacrificing the inf-flow.

On the note of no wiki link: you're probably right :)

On the note of 4 menu bars... There's actually only 3 and multiple menu bars are a good way to symbolize importance without cluttering navigation. Of course dropdowns are an option, but you seem to still be living in the design times of 2005. Dropdowns are bad in design unless utilizing AJAX calls for information on demand. For general links, it's not a good idea. Older browsers don't handle dropdowns well, and studies have shown that users are generally lazy. They don't enjoy having to focus their attention to making sure their mouse is in a certain spot and in the 'hover area' just so they can view a sub-page. It's the equivalent of an "extra click" which has always been a bane of sites (thus the entire AJAX movement).

Take 2 sites... On the first use a regular menu. On the second use a dropdown. It's a guarantee you will lose traffic to pages in which links are contained in the dropdown menu from browser incompatibility, and lack of effort. This is a tested and proven issue.

Dropdowns are cool, but they hurt performance for large traffic sites.

On the issue of whitespace... Whitespace is good. It helps you control the information flow. Lack of imagery leaves focus to the images in between. Google: Information Architecture and read some articles for more points on this subject that I don't have the time to note.

Thanks for the responses. Anyones I didn't note in this reply I'll be attempting to implement.

[HunteR_]

Thanks for clearing all of that up with the community at large

We have some big things coming guys :) BIG!

[daG]

Looks nice, the current side is kinda hard to navigate on and find things but it's nice that your working on it. Keep the good work up!