Hello all. For the past week I’ve been studying the “art” of HTML & CSS. 
After reading this book and doing a ton of reading online, I present to you: Kemoy.net.
The simple idea is that it’s a website for my game-dev ‘group’ if you will. So here’s my question: How do I improve it?
Is the web design really that important? Are there many things that need re-done? Should I just make the forum of the site the main page?
What are your thoughts?
Uh. Take the commas out of the menu maybe.
Also, your staff table thing is weird. You could just list each person once. It’s pretty much a given that an Admin would have all the privileges of a Manager.
Besides that. It’s not the kind of site that you need to be very attractive, as you aren’t trying to win over customers. From what I can tell, it’s just to let people know what you guys are working on. So, the design can be whatever the hell you want.
The staff table was a bit more of a test.
It’s not even getting info off of a database, it’s all being displayed right there in the HTML, which doesn’t sound efficient at all.
Couple tips from someone who not a pro but eat from making web things:
Thanks for the advice! The staff table looks terrible, I know. I’ll fix it soon. ;D
I have some sort of addiction to gradients. I’ve been using them everywhere. And I mean everywhere. So I don’t know about the header. I DO know that it should be more simple. The gradient on the header attracts attention when it shouldn’t, so maybe there shouldn’t be a huge difference in the two colors that I use in it.
For the welcoming section, it originally didn’t have a background. I figured it should attract attention so people would read it, so I added it.
Huh? Explain. ???
Well, first off, my suggestion had nothing to do with where the info is coming from. Second, there is no information there that should come from a database. Even if you had a staff of 10-20 people, there is no reason for them to be stored in a database to display their name.
Darn, I thought there would be a more efficient way to do that 
Then again, I’m sure there is.
And yes, I know what you said had nothing to do with that.
What do you mean by efficient? You’re displaying text on a web page. That’s not cumbersome in anyway.
If you mean efficient, as in time-consuming, then not really. Setting up the database and then writing the backend code to pull from it would take more time than simply typing each name all at once.
It just feels weird having all of the members info in the web-page itself, not being displayed from some sort of document.
You’re equating it to hard coding values in application development. You can’t build a website with the same mindset as programming. A web page is something that displays static content. So yes, you directly specify that information in the HTML that makes up the page.
Or you could use Ruby on Rails or some other dynamic website system and have the staff in a list on a YAML or JSON then load it and do a for loop listing them. You could also make a Ruby method that does this and just call it in the HTML. This is probably over the top, but nonetheless I am using it for my website mostly for experience. Something really helpful could be detecting OS and providing the right download (for non-Java programs).
I think I’m fine using something like this.
I thought about moving the staff list and that type of stuff to the forum, and just using the current Kemoy website as a backbone for other things, primarily posts and pages dedicated towards certain pieces of software.
If so, for welcoming section use white BG and dark font.
I might try that.
I could add some sort of REALLY LIGHT tent of red.
As others have pointed out, the menu should be re-done. I actually don’t bother with the commas (one could argue that they are part of the design) but the menu is hardly noticable as a menu. At first glance, it just looks like some additional catch-line.
The fact that the text uses the whole screen width makes it hard to read on anything but a 4:3 monitor IMHO, because you constantly have to move your eyes from the far left to the far right to read it.
Also get rid of this grainy background texture and replace it by a solid colored one.
And some basic SEO hints:
Give the title-tag a little more content. You already have different title-tags for the different pages, which is good. Just add some additional stuff to it.
Add a meta-description to each page that briefly describes the page’s content.
You are already using h2-tags. Try to give each page one h1-tag in addition with some descriptive text in it.
Don’t use images as text, use text. Whatever looks like text on a webpage should be text, not an image.
Okay, I know I will be keeping the commas, but I will at least separate them so they aren’t part of each link.
I might keep the grainy texture, but I will redo it so it doesn’t look so eye-hurting.
There should be a sidebar to the left, I’m trying to avoid centering everything on the page. I additionally thought that instead of doing that I COULD just set the width for the content, so it takes up X% of the browser’s width so the content itself is centered inside the screen, but the text isn’t.
Something like this:
And I know, I shouldn’t be using images for certain text, but for some reason I couldn’t do the tag when I had decided I was going to make a big header for every page.
Thanks for the advice!
Writing and designing a website from scratch is really inefficient unless you really know what you’re doing. If you want to make it look better you should probably use a design library like Twitter Bootstrap or just use Wordpress as your homepage or something. You can write other functionality you need by yourself of course.
I wouldn’t think it’s REALLY inefficient, but I have thought about using Wordpress, that depends if my host would allow it.
And when I mean design, I don’t mean how beautiful the webpage itself is (But it’s still REALLY helpful getting advice on how to make it look better), I mean how conveniently everything is placed.
– Off topic –
“Simply Works.”
I like that slogan 
I replaced the background.