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Old Mar 20, 2010, 05:42 AM
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quintin3265 quintin3265 is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: State College, PA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sgtrama View Post
So I'm pretty around 90% done with ironing out the IE issues. Most of them stem from the fact that IE ignores both width: 100% and min-height in CSS, both of which are easy fixes. Only problem now seems to be with the search bar, which I'm still working on.

New Preview here: http://dougarley.com/design/remixSit...OfConcept.html
Changes have been comitted do a CSS file: http://dougarley.com/design/remixSite/style.css
IE fixes have their own CSS file: http://dougarley.com/design/remixSite/iestyle.css

As you can see from the background images in the header and footer that the image you gave me didn't scale well at all, and I DO need a higher resolution. SVG version would probably be preferred.

As far as the gradients go, they are intentionally "brighter" to give the design more contrast and make the rounded corners "pop" a bit more when compared to the background. They also mimic a sort of "lighting" effect similar to what you see here, without the gloss. In any case it's pretty much a random number that "felt right" to me, and I'm open to suggestion. I'll make a few variations so we can decide what looks best, but I highly suggest a good level of contrast.

As far as the logo goes, I completely agree that you need to find something that gives remixSite/GameRemixes/whatever a distinct look. This can come from a font, and I think it would be better to use something a big flashier than Verdana or Tahoma, but I do not think that Miguel properly fits the design I did. I think that design calls for a cleaner, sans serif font. If we can get away with doing it with a pre-loaded, but less used font, then great, if not...well we can figure something out, image based.

Here are some system fonts (Century Gothic being what I used in the image mock up, Verdana being used in the HTML mockup, but with CSS letter-spacing):
remixSite (Arial)
remixSite (Century Gothic)
remixSite (Lucida Sans)
remixSite (Trebuchet)
remixSite (Verdana)


gameRemixes (Arial)
gameRemixes (Century Gothic)
gameRemixes (Lucida Sans)
gameRemixes (Trebuchet)
gameRemixes (Verdana)


My design is based off the first design from the initial post, and we could try to find THAT font (it looks pretty common, but I can't place my finger on it. Possibly Lucida Sans) else I recommend looking here: http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=501 And for clarification: My main beefs with the Miguel font are readability and the roughness of it. For a more grungy design, similar to ReMix:ThaSauce, it could work, but for a clean design, it's not ideal.

Which leads me to my next suggestion: More so than a font, what's really going to make the site stand out is a symbol. Symbols transcend language, and are more easily identifiable. ReMix:ThaSauce has the big red R, OCReMix has it's headphones and controllers, VGMix has it's VM logo that VGMix X hasn't really implemented, Google has the G, McDonald's has the arches, Pepsi has the ball, etc etc etc etc. Pretty much everything you can think of has a "symbol." The site right now is using the swirly notes, which I like, and implemented in my design, but it really gets lost when scaled smaller than 200-300px which becomes a problem. When I was trying to make the site icons for R:TS I had a really big problem with remixsite. Anyway, I don't really have an idea of where you could start, but I'd ask around for suggestions. I think something like this would really help a lot. As I said before, symbols transcend language, and to explain what kind of impact that has: 1/3 of ReMix:ThaSauce's traffic is strictly Japanese language speaking (which is why I link the Japanese Google Translation on every page). They rely primarily on pictures to help them navigate around (as I've learned from Japanese blog posts). This also means you may consider trying to grab different images from vgmdb is availible because, in my experience, the images themselves don't really portray what the source is very well.

Finally as far as the name change goes, if you really feel it's necessary, than by all means go for it, but while "Game Remixes" is pretty literal it is, in my eyes anyway, the worst "name" for a website I've ever heard. Theoretically with a name/domain like that you could get to the top of the google listing by relevancy, but in practice it'd never work. OverClocked ReMix has existed for over 10 years, it has over 2,000 in-links (which is the MOST important thing), including high-profile sites like Wikipedia and slashDot, and lesser known sites like kotaku and Destructoid. The only way you'll be able to top them in the Google listings would be if they somehow disapeared from the internet and you somehow got SUPER popular on your own. VGMusic doesn't even fare that well, and they've been around for even longer. "News.com" (albeit redirecting to CNET) doesn't exactly top Google either. What you're going to have to deal with is that one day you'll probably be on page 1, and that's going to have to be enough. There's only so much SEO you can do.

WHICH, I don't know about you, but Google amounts to practically none of my traffic. All my traffic comes from either: RSS, Twitter via RSS, Facebook via RSS, or word of mouth via OverClocked ReMix. The fact of the matter is you are supplementary to a long-standing community, or small collection of communities. Anyone looking for video game remixes is going to find OverClocked ReMix first, everytime, and will branch out from there. Most of them won't look past the first Google link, SOME may, eventually. So anyway, maybe your numbers are different, and SEO is definitely something to consider, you have to consider branding for the long run. A "distinct" domain name, over something that "extremely literal" would be a much better idea in the long run.
OK, now that I've eaten breakfast I can offer my comments here.

First, I think the idea of a symbol is a great one. Perhaps a way to get around the notes being too small is to reduce the number of notes in the small symbol. If there were only a few notes, instead of the 20 or more that are in the current circle when it's large, it would be a recognizable symbol and allow for greater detail in large form.

I don't think we should write off the idea of this site competing with Overclocked ReMix at some point, whether it be next month or in years. The reason is that the argument you gave is fallacious. While it is true that VGMusic is listed lower than Overclocked is, VGMusic was around for many years before Overclocked was. In fact, it was undoubtedly the first video game music site around. To state that Overclocked ReMix can't be toppled simply because it has been around is untrue, because it's already happened before. For whatever reason, Overclocked ReMix was perceived as a better place than VGMusic was, and people started using it. If Game Remixes is ever perceived as a better place than Overclocked ReMix, then I have no doubt that Overclocked ReMix will become less popular. As Liontamer himself claimed, success is not guaranteed.

On to the traffic statistics. About one third of visits come through links people post at the Overclocked ReMix forums. 18.38% of visits originate through links at the VGMdb. 17.58% input the URL directly into the browser. 13.93% is search engine traffic; 5.18% is from metroidmetal.com, and 4.69% from the press release site prlog.org. Another 5% comes from Dwelling of Duels, remix.thasauce.net, and a number of other sites. Facebook is not a significant contributor to traffic (1%).

There's also the question of what traffic is most valuable. The people who originate from the press release sites are the most valuable; they stay at the site for an average of 9 minutes. People from Google are the second most valuable at 5:32, with Dwelling of Duels at 5:29, and Overclocked ReMix at 3:39. For search keywords, "Jamison Randall" tops the list with an average time per visitor at a huge 14 minutes, "carolina heridia" second, various topics related to symfony third, and the newcomer "video game music remixes" at fourth. All searches for "video game music remixes" have come within the past ten days, and that's because I've systematically changed the site to use those words more and more. The search engine optimization techniques are working.
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