Competition?

Hey, that was my idea!

Hehe, hopefully you're joking, Starax. SL has a loooong way to go in the user friendly department. In fact, along with scalability, I see the SL's poor interface as one of the greatest barriers LL must remove before SL could possibly hit 250K users or be anywhere close to going mainstream.

Well just looking at the source:

- inconsistent use of css and html properties
- inline css styles
- no doctype specification
- improper use of div, span, and tables

Then from the design perspective (which is the more qualitative part) -- there are about 3 shades of green, that horrible repeating box "bannerish" thing, the brutal layout, 2 mid-ground colours, and a black background. I don't see consistency or efficiency in anything here.

Plus their logo doesn't really address what I as the subjective viewer feel the message is, which is poor for mindshare... it's just not good, it doesn't communicate a single clear message... it's not going to stick.

Granted, I'm not a fan of branding and all -- but it's important and useful.

Well-designed websites?

www.alistapart.com

Be sure also to check out their list of contributors and their websites.

totally true torley

and it's one thing to make your own online game, it's another to market it and convince people to play it... as every entrepreneur discovers in SL... but at least in SL you're not starting completely from scratch

I installed the Kaneva software and at that point begain getting virus alerts from my EZ-antivirus program, one last night and one this morning.

The virus mentioned is win32.ircflood.

Could be a coincidence, could be a false detection caused by the installation of some low level bit of software for talking to the Kaneva game network that my antivirus thinks is bad.

That alistapart page has text too small for me to read comfortably, and wastes space all along the sides (on my machine) that's just blank, making a complete waste of the money people spend on large monitors to increase the readablilty of the text.

Plus the layout is dull, and makes little use of the monitor's ability to produce colors.

It has the look of pages produced by the simple editors that comes with free websites.

Suezanne, if your resolution is high enough to make that text (which is a normal size) too small to read then you should have the default text size of your browser set larger. That's one of the reasons the setting is there and properly made websites will scale the text well.

Whether you like the look of a site or not is a personal preference, personally I like mute colours (just because a monitor can produce lots of colours doesn't mean it has too) and prefer text in columns like that because I find it easier to read. Technically the website is pretty good - really it shouldn't have image tags for some of the things it's using them for (all images should be text and replace it with images in the CSS unless the only point of them being there is to be an image) and I feel the title should come before the menu in the code, but that's not hugely important.