19 replies to this topic

[DieGuitarre]

Hey,

Just thought I would let everyone know that myself and a few other people have made a new U.S. based Airsoft news site.

the site is www.statusreportairsoft.vze.com

Since it is brand new and we don't know if it will take off or not, we are not going to make it a payed domain until we have enough people visiting it, and posting in the forums and such.

Our goal is to bring up to date news, previews, and interviews with more content on upcoming events in the U.S.

Thanks,

Doug
Owner/Founder Status Report-Airsoft

[whiteair0nes]

Dont look as good as Arnies, but good job!

[aeroduro]

black background = no.
text placement and layout = kinda clunky
effort = good

[DieGuitarre]

It's still a work in progess, I had my doubts on the black background myself. However I am trying to avoid copying arnies. Which is pretty hard considering arnies is the best.

My main goal besides bringing info about the US to the US, is to get stories differnt then that I found on Arnies... Which is in its self a very hard task. But if I can convince the other ppl working on the site to go ahead and get a payed domain it will look much better (once that stupid geocities ad is gone).

Anyway keeping posting suggestions, it can only help me make the site look better  

[Magsz]

Please for the love of all that is holy get rid of the black background.  

[DieGuitarre]

Any suggestions for something besides the black background?
It almost looks worse with white. However if you would like to see the main page with a white background the URL is www.geocities.com/statusreportairsoft/index2
Let me know which of the 2 you like more.

Edited by DieGuitarre, 06 April 2005 - 04:52 AM.

[Robot 2000]

I think the black background is fine. Once you get rid of all the adverts and clutter it will look great

[Magsz]

You could try changing the black background to an off white or a tannish color.

You mentioned that you wanted to distinguish yourself from Arnies.  My first suggestion to you would be to change your sites layout from black/blue white/blue to something else.  Arnies has been white and blue for as long as i can remember.

[Arnie]

You could try changing the black background to an off white or a tannish color.

You mentioned that you wanted to distinguish yourself from Arnies.  My first suggestion to you would be to change your sites layout from black/blue white/blue to something else.  Arnies has been white and blue for as long as i can remember.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

That's because I was too lazy all those years back to change the a/href CSS to something other than blue so made it all blue as I thought it was esthetic that way. Kinda stuck since then. I can't stand sites that are in green/camo myself as I find them almost impossible to read (sorry Redcap ). Evolution of websites seems to be more haphazard than most think at least in my experience, a lot of things seem to come to life on their own either that or it's the coffee doing it.

[TMC]

You could try changing the black background to an off white or a tannish color.

You mentioned that you wanted to distinguish yourself from Arnies.  My first suggestion to you would be to change your sites layout from black/blue white/blue to something else.  Arnies has been white and blue for as long as i can remember.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Blue/white is a very heavily used color. It's great for webdesign.

I like olive drab/grey stuff.

[DieGuitarre]

Haha TMC, we were just testing olive drab/grey. Looks pretty good.

Basicaly I made a new border without the bright white at the end, and just changing its color around, and comparing it with differnt backgrounds as well.

Thanks for all the input guys

[Tinkerton]

get some decent hosting man!

www.domaindlx.com that'll do ya for what you want. its not frames is it?

[Magsz]

I prefere the lighter colors to anything darker since black backgrounds with white text causes excessive eye fatigue for me.  Dont ask me why, my optometrists are just as stumped as i am.

[DieGuitarre]

I am working on an ice blue/dark blue setup.

I like blue, and it mixes the best of both worlds for dark and bright colors.
I will let you know when its done.

[DieGuitarre]

Ok I completly changed plans, and made it a very nice grey scheme.

I havent done the forums yet, but the rest of the site is updated with the new colors.

I hope you guys like this one

[aeroduro]

The color is better.  Now something you could definetly improve is that you should have it be able to autostretch.  What I mean is, go to the News page here at Arnies, "restore" the window so its not maximized, and mess around with the window's width.  You'll see that the column stays in the center the whole time.  Now here in the forums do the same thing and see how everything squishes or stretches to fit the window size.  These are 2 kinds of autostretching and you could use either to make a big difference.  Probably the first would work better for the purpose though

[DieGuitarre]

I see what your saying. I'll  work on it, and see if I cant get something like that.

[whiteair0nes]

Arnie, Im just curious...how did your website start out?  Did the number of members slowly grow into what you have now?  How did you make it so successfull?

[DieGuitarre]

Arnie, Im just curious...how did your website start out?  Did the number of members slowly grow into what you have now?  How did you make it so successfull?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Good question, tips would be nice Arnie

[Arnie]

Hmm there's no real tips to it really other than updating things every day and keeping content added all the time. This site has been updated almost every day now for 5 years so it represents quite a bit of work now, last I checked this site now takes up 5Gb of storage server-side, so there's rather a lot online.

Reader submissions make life a heck of a lot easier, as one person can't write all the material at the needed rate on their own. Lots of nice folks send in news and material here which helps an awful lot with the day to day workload. Even with all the help though I still don't have enough time to do all that I want, but it's pretty well updated these days anyway.

This site gets at least 4 hours of work on it each day/night.

As for popularity, I guess that just comes with familiarity and helping folks out here and there. Best people to ask would be the people that read the site.

I started on free hosting, then moved to my home ISP, then onto BT (then a brief stint on my old academic allocation), from there I got help from UKAN then the chaps at ASC, and now it sits on my own server where I now do all the legwork to keep the server itself happy too. Life is much easier if you have some experienced friendly linux/admin gurus to show you the ropes first though.