GamersLive! Forums

[I¢E]

Finally, the beta of GamersLive has opened. I hope you all enjoy this new community.

splash: www.gamerslive.net
boards: http://boards.gamerslive.net

[Anakin]

Let's tackle the splash page first. Frankly it's perfect! It fits the style of the site perfectly and really sets the tone... well done on the splash.

Now onto the boads themselves. Looking at them, there's no doubt you are a very talented graphic designer, certainly more so than I am. However the boards weren't the fastest loading I've ever seen. In fact as I speak the "/images/Gamers/left-header.gif" image hasn't loaded and is still refusing to load. This raises the question of whether it is the graphics on the boards which slow things down, or a bad server. That's for you to decide.

Having refreshed, I can see the header fully now, and, just like the splash page, it looks great. I wish I could do all the stuff you can, such as the "equaliser"-style bar effect, the glows, and everything else like that.

On the forumhome, while the "Featured Section" looks good, I'm not sure what it's there for as there's nothing inside it... I'm assuming that once your main site goes live you'll be linking to your latest articles there. Is that correct?

On the whole, I like your forum home template, it's very professional and very suiting.

Sadly, I'm not so sure about your forumdisplay page. It's just very grey and lacking the fusion of colour which the forumhome page has. Perhaps adding a gradient in the background of the table row which has "Thread, Thread Starter, Replies, Views, Last Post" and on the "Showing threads 1 to 10 of 10, sorted by" row.

Also the "New Thread" button on that page seems to have a blue background which doesn't look quite right.

Other than that the page looks pretty good.

Now as for the postbit. The postbit took quite a while to load for me on my trusty 56K modem. But... it was worth the wait. The postbit looks stunning, with plenty of colour, but the bit on the left of the postbit (with the user information etc) looks a little too similar to that on Yaxay. I can see that you've probably taken some inspiration from browsing Yaxay and tried to stop it looking too similar. It's not disturbingly similar and probably won't have to be changed, but the similarity with Yaxay did hit me as soon as I saw it.

On the whole I really like your postbit tempate -- it really does look the part.

On the whole you should be commended for your graphic design skills and your ability to integrate all those graphics into vBulletin. I'm in the process of redesigning my own forums in order to fit in with the relaunch of my site in a few months, and having looked over your site, I see I still have a lot of work to do.

Well done :)

[I¢E]

thanks for the criticism. It's a server issue as far as loading. We have around 1 million visitors in the first hour...wasn't expecting that. ALso, the forum display is grey because - as I said - it's still in beta form :) everything will be added as we go along.

[Floris]

The first thing that came to my mind was 'pixeljunction, yaxay mix' but this is not a rip, so don't panic. I like it. For a game site, it looks great.

[Paul J]

Another good design by yaxay.

[N9ne]

yep looks just like yaXay...looks good.

[I¢E]

can u give me some specifics about "yaxay"? :) Why? Because it's centered and has categories? haha. The postbit, maybe. But everything else...err...no.

Also, about pixeljunction we actually were building our sites at the same time and I posted in his thread that our designs coicidentally resembled each other. His site just opened as well. ANd it's obvious that I didn't build the site in a day after he opened.

[Paul J]

Just looks like c-prompt's standard design that's on every board on the net. :)

[I¢E]

I'd admit that the template structure is essentially the same. I think that's what most people are referring to, not so much graphically, but structure wise. Well, it's a very standard and generic structure. But I guess yaxay just RULES the world. ;)

hhee..oh well, time to start my own trends. Expect to see GamersLive!v2.0 after maybe a month or so. Hopefully it'll turn out truly unique.

[Sinecure]

Beleive it or not, PJ v3 was in development before Yaxay was released.. I guess you could say deviantart inspired the "portal" look as well? meh

Anyway, it looks good

[Dean C]

one word.... "inspirational"

its simply fantastic mate...!