-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Yikes, what's up with the web design of IGN and Gamespot? Any other veteran gaming sites that look nothing like back then?
- Thread starter hwarang
- Start date
I would imagine some of that is due to websites having to serve multiple devices, screen sizes, etc. Back in the day, you just had to deal with monitor sizes.
I usually go to IGN via links to articles or forum threads. I had never even seen the IGN home page!
Why would you hate it as a developer? It makes things much easier to develop.
ha! same.
but yeah it's mobile first these days. can't deny the numbers
I absolutely hate both of those designs with a passion. It's also why the Facebook desktop site is trash now. It's the reason why I stopped visiting IGN as a whole other than through twitter links.
I get how many web designers want to design a website that can be viewed the same way on a computer, tablet and phone but in practice it just makes me feel like i'm viewing a compromised shitty version of the site.
The biggest crime is how much blank space takes up the screen on all of these. it's awful.
I get how many web designers want to design a website that can be viewed the same way on a computer, tablet and phone but in practice it just makes me feel like i'm viewing a compromised shitty version of the site.
The biggest crime is how much blank space takes up the screen on all of these. it's awful.
OP
OP
Yeah as someone who browses 90% on a giant 4K TV from a desktop PC I don't really care for the modular phone design. I mean I get why - most sites these days get most traffic from mobile, but I would love the option for a desktop site.
n64.com was the first regular place I frequented on the internet. Do either IGN or Gamespot still have people dedicated to one platform?
Someone mentioned it earlier in the thread, but most people come to a website from a social link, not to the homepage like in the olden days.
Mobile site design isn't actually good when you're a site that hosts millions of articles and has all sorts of information dating back to the 90's. Makes it harder to actually find what you're looking for through endless scrolling. And in IGN's case it's a narrow line in their news section.
OP
OP
Yeah it's awful. Everything is everywhere. It's a mess. From a creative design and development perspective.
"Easy" sure. While I agree Frameworks and such have made it easier to code for a variety of devices, but as a profession it's gotten more complex overall. So we still have complexity, but now sites are harder to get the information you actually need and they look like shit.
Eh, I'm fine with the current paradigm of things. Just don't like how IGN has everything scrunched to the middle. Like the desktop version should actually be a damn desktop version, lol.
Also for God's sake put a background or something. Both of them being white is both lazy and makes them both look like the same website.
Also for God's sake put a background or something. Both of them being white is both lazy and makes them both look like the same website.
I haven't been on the IGN home page in maybe 5 years, and I can't believe it actually looks like that now.
Just looks incredibly bland... it used to look so cool too.
Just looks incredibly bland... it used to look so cool too.
last time i looked at the dying remains of ign and it's weird design, which was months to years ago which says a lot, i just figured they're turning into a video centric site like everywhere else. sadly, video is where the money is. you dont need much of a site to say "here's our videos"
Definitely need a dark theme, or at least some kind of texture or shadows. They look like websites that are suspended in infinite oblivion.
Having a good mobile site is important.
But so is having a good desktop site.
Having a solid mobile site shouldn't mean firing all your desktop site designers. There's a reason mobile browsers can change version...
To be fair, resolution is still the primary driver for "responsive" Web sites. Sure, we deal with more aspect ratios now, but you'll still often find yourself as a desktop PC user looking at the top portion of a banner designed for mobile devices when you first visit a page, mostly due to the increasing screen resolutions of larger phones and tablets. Ironically, the earlier versions of HTML were arguably better suited to the way we need information to appear on screens, as standards weren't especially strict and often came only with recommendations as to how certain items might be rendered. Basically, you'd rely on the browser rendering elements based on the device.
"HTML" is less so HTML now and more so a hacked-together collection of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, often obfuscated and/or overly reliant on frameworks that're supposed to make using them more tolerable. Aside from it generally being unintuitive, you're also expected to seek out information on proper etiquette when it comes to building sites, which in turn encourages you to misuse some of these technologies to add structure to sites where the more numerous tags of older versions of HTML might've made more sense. If HTML simply focused on creating structure for pages and showing relationships between content, then we wouldn't find ourselves having to design around at least 3-5 different device configurations (which, for the record, you currently have to do, even if you're using something to "simplify" the process, such as SquareSpace).
Basically, since it's a complete pain in the ass to do anything that doesn't fit squarely into one of the aforementioned frameworks, you end up with a lot of compromises in terms of how you can lay out a Web page without it breaking on another device or just becoming a chore to navigate. That's why content is so similar across the Web. It's virtually impossible to create a WYSIWYG editor for Web content with any real flexibility that doesn't rely on the end user understanding at least some code, due to how things like floats work, and people who want to avoid wading through the mess that is Web development by hiring a "Web developer" will often end up with someone whose idea of Web development involves tweaking a WordPress installation. To make matters worse, people get overly fancy in their implementation of certain features, leading to sites that're damn-near unusable in any predictable fashion, let alone usable at all by people with disabilities.
It's a sad state of affairs. I used to love Web programming, but I feel as though I went from having to do the occasional hacky thing to make something unique work to instead doing hacky things all the time to get basic, popular features on major Web sites working even remotely well. I'm always impressed when I see a complex Web app running, since I realize it must've been a complete pain in the ass to get it to work even that well, but when the big guys like Google and Microsoft can't even build a proper Web-based text editor that can reliably even open large files, you know it's a case of someone just forcing a square peg into a round hole and being okay with the idea that it's not gonna work 100% of the time. That's kind of the problem with the Web (and many Web services) we use now is: it's all basically just a less reliable version of something we used to natively install on our devices, or it's a Web wrapper.
Indeed it looks bland, but I don't mind at all. It's easy on the eyes and I can check all the news quickly.
I'm not into web development, but it seems there's infinite scroll on both sites. Are they using PHP for that? Most news sites use only html to save on processing. Most that I visit at least.
-
Reminded me of this:
I'm not into web development, but it seems there's infinite scroll on both sites. Are they using PHP for that? Most news sites use only html to save on processing. Most that I visit at least.
-
Reminded me of this: