toptiergaming.com

We are a website dedicated to various Trading Card Games. We've been open for nearly 3 years now. However, since July of 2005, we've had the same look, however, just recently, around late september, we cleaned the look up and stylized it even more. Now I'm debating if I want to create a new look for it all together. I need opinions on the current look, to see if it's up to par with what good designers would believe is good.

Thanks!

Jarrett

Anything??

Hi! I think the site looks great, its clean, uncluttered, the sound chosen for when the controls on the top are used is not too obtrusive, it is just right...

One tiny suggestion, if I may, would be that the colour of the linked words change when cursor rolls over, like to a red, specially for the INDEX list on the left (sorry if I am not fluent at web design talk). I think this would create more interest, would be a good addition of colour.

But I am very green at this so I have NO idea if this would make
everything load much slower (?)

I'm not going to comment too much on the design, but here's a few things I recommend. Do not use Flash for the header!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That is absolutely the worst possible idea. Well, maybe not the worst, but it's really bad for SEO (plus that sound is annoying). Use images and text links via CSS.

Second, more about coding. Tables are not meant for website layouts. Look into XHTML and CSS for designing tableless websites.

http://w3schools.com/xhtml/
http://w3schools.com/css/
http://csszengarden.com/
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/

The design is a bit dark and the trend at this time seems to be lighter. However, I still think for gaming sites, music, bands, etc, dark is very acceptable.

If activity and traffic are good you are probably ok. If traffic and activity are down then maybe a revamp is in order. How's that for being wishy washy!