• Guest, please be noted that suggestions may not receive an official reply until the project state allows us consider them. For the majority of suggestions, this means after an alpha launch.

Website Format

Aetheism

Noble
First impressions mean everything, especially when it comes to a service like a Minecraft server. Currently the Dyescape site is functional, but it does nothing to separate itself from the average server website. Along with this, it has some quirks to it, like the tab that says "START DATE" being above the reactions.
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A bit of dedicated time on the site would mean the difference for many players. If the server has an exceptional site, one that entices curious players just by its look and teasers alone, then more site visitors are likely to put in the effort to join the server. Having something eye-catching yet visually pleasing would put you that much farther ahead of the competition.
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Here is a basic rough draft of a format that I (very little experience in web design) came up with for a home page. First time or unlogged-in visitors would be prompted to click the Tour button, which would then lead to a drop down list of Dyescape's prominent selling features, with descriptions written in a way that would highlight the fact that these features are Dyescape-unique.
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These are just basic templates to get the ideas out there and visualized, in no way am I saying these should be used or are templates for future design
 

Aekalix

Frontend & Content Manager
Manager
I'd love to implement this, but I do think you underestimate how much web development costs and currently it is out of our budget.
 

MrDienns

Lead Developer & Technology Manager
Manager
Developer
The template draft you shared is quite generic and can be found on the majority of websites. But as Aekalix said; you most likely underestimate the cost of these kind of things and you most likely overestimate what we want to achieve in an alpha. This website here is built from a pre-made template, with some customizations I did. When you want a properly developed, professional website that truly reflects Dyescape, you're simply looking at a custom design. I already did my research on this last year. The cheapest reputable one I could find, which offered something solid but still relatively basic (can be compared to the current setup we have) would cost us $800. Something full blown, with custom made artwork, assets, a proper theme, great attention to detail, etc, simply costs you somewhere between $3500 and $5500 (actual quote from Themehouse).

When you want a super professional website, there's simply a tremendous amount of work that goes into it. First, you'd have to come up with a design that reflects what Dyescape is, which is easier said than done. Then, the company behind it would have to start developing the entire thing. They'd have to create everything from code blocks to layout options, styling settings, making it properly responsive, etc etc. On top of this, it all needs to be done properly and not hacked together so it stays future proof. This simply costs a lot of manhours, which are simply super expensive in the software industry. It's perfectly normal that companies building custom software such as this to ask somewhere between $75 and $150 an hour (I was told employees cost $160/hour at where I work).

Let's say a custom built theme costs $75 an hour, which is probably the lowest you're gonna get in any medium sized company, they would have 60 manhours of work left just to finish the website within budget. That eliminates any chances of profit, so that's already unrealistic. I've done jobs like this where we install pre-built themes on (partially) custom built websites, and even that took us a week.

It heavily depends what kind of website we want, whether we want it super detailed, minimalistic, flat, advanced, or anything. One thing you absolutely cannot deny is how expensive it will be. And to put it simply, we are not going to spend any time or effort on this in the curent phase of the project simply because it's not relevant. Our current website looks fine, not amazing, but fine. It structurally logically built, understandable, and easy to use. It functions perfectly fine on mobile too (which was an issue with our previous theme). Our current setup gets the job done perfectly fine, it works on mobile, it's maintainable and properly built code wise. There's no priority anytime soon to change this.

I won't lock this thread, so please feel free to share some websites that you think are nice and that you think would fit us. However, please keep in mind we will not change our website anytime soon. It heavily depends on alpha; if we end up getting a huge amount of support from our lovely players and we are financially speaking able to do something like then, then we will. However, at the moment budget is simply being spent on improving the actual game. I think everyone would prefer us to spend our time and money on the game rather than the website.
 
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