I personally don't mind anything but that front page they critiqued. The front page is a little cluttered.

So where are the suggestions on how to improve it?

BTW none of those comments said that there was anything wrong with the color scheme. In fact, they said that "strangely enough they work well together". Most of those comments seemed to be referring to the layout of the site.

It's worth noting Penny-Arcade use the same blue/orange color scheme. Though recently they incorporated a whole lot of black into their layout.

It's not really the colors which need improvement, it's the layout. It's sort of a clusterfuck, packing as many boxes as possible into a small area. Ever hear the phrase, "Less is more?"

I'm all for trying to improve things and last month we were working a bit on some alternate mockups. It is not such an easy problem because BYOND itself is not that easy to pigeon-hole, being a development community, a gaming community (without the benefit of embedded games at the moment), and a small social site. Every few years we've been updating the layout to try to better organize this stuff, and I do think it's been getting better (although I realize nostalgia will cause many to argue otherwise).

I think that the best direction is to try to simplify, to reduce clicks, if you will. We'll try some mockups where the front games page is really just the "see more" page, maybe find a way to highlight top games in there.

I may be in the minority but I really dislike a lot of the mainstream flash sites. They may look more "professional" with their black on white color-schemes, but the pages are just full of dozens of blinking icons and videos. Also, every one of these sites looks the same. Doesn't work for me, but I'm willing to concede my personal bias if that's really the way to go.

The Naked Ninja wrote:

Notice how there is usually a top-rated category of some sort with a small handful of games, then usually sub-categories with the same size handful.

Well, this is what's on the main games page. We have our categories and a selection of games from each, and then you can expand to see more. We've messed with the layout a bit over time and I concur that the current one is probably more wasteful of the space than is necessary, so we can improve that. But fundamentally the content should be exactly what you are describing. Now one option, that I mentioned in my last post, is to just lose this front page and move immediately to the "see more" view, which is a bit more straightforward. However, it wouldn't show things like medals and screenshots, which I think are kind of nice.

I don't really like sites like http://www.armorgames.com because they have SO much content on their pages. Their font and color choices are certainly pleasant (albeit a bit generic-- all Web 2.0 sites seem to pick this same scheme). But I don't think we're talking so much about font and color here.

Armorgames isn't really the greatest example of a clean layout. Instead you should look at Newgrounds.

In some ways it's very similar to the BYOND layout, only they have a much more professional, organized, and artsy look. They have large, clearly defined tabs linking to the different sections of the site. They have a large section highlighting a great recent submission. Then they go on to feature the top movies/games right below it. Everything below the 'featured games' is irrelevant.

When you strip the site down to its base components it's almost exactly the same as BYOND. I don't think BYOND needs a complete redesign, it just needs a little polish.

Tom wrote:

I may be in the minority but I really dislike a lot of the mainstream flash sites. They may look more "professional" with their black on white color-schemes, but the pages are just full of dozens of blinking icons and videos. Also, every one of these sites looks the same. Doesn't work for me, but I'm willing to concede my personal bias if that's really the way to go.

Those kinds of sites are all ugly and incredibly boring. Pass.

EA, Activision and Newsground all have an (unfair) advantage over BYOND.
As one of your reviews mentioned (and as is displayed by Activision), game movies would be nice, but BYOND lacks quality graphics to display.
Even Jojo games has some nice graphics in their products, but I have yet to see a similar level of quality in art on BYOND.

While I agree that BYOND could use some more interactive feeling/options, I would not want it to become one of these flashing media pages either.

The concept of BYOND is special (developer, player and social network) and as such the design likely needs to be unique as well.
I can see the need to shorten ways to reach content and to display BYOND's quality in a more intuitive way, but that might require some base decisions as to concluding on the precise goals first.

TheMonkeyDidIt wrote:

The biggest advantage that something like flash gives a web page (IMveryHO) is the added dimension of time.

You can give 10 games 10% of a front page to advertise themselves with just height and width, but if you add time you can give each of those games 70% of your front page for 60 seconds at a time - which will probably be more engaging.

(Aside from problematic hyperlinking) flash is pretty useful in a few ways. I think it's overdone more often than not, tho.

(You can also get that time factor from a more link-friendly system like Javascript through jQuery or MooTools)

Flash is definitely something that should be avoided in a webpage if you expect a decent mobile audience and don't have a mobile form of your site, though. I hate going to check something on my iTouch only to see that the entire site (or a good portion of it) was written in Flash.

here's an example of byond's organization issue; i'm going to compare it side by side to armorgames because regardless of personal opinions on its scheme, it's very well organized.

say i just found the site and want to look at strategy games. at armorgames, i click the nice big obvious "STRATEGY" button and get taken to the appropriate page; about 10% of screen space is used to display a featured game, then below that about 20% displays NINE other popular strategy games; below that is a listing that takes up 70% of the screen and shows TWENTY FOUR games at once, all of which can be sorted easily sorted based on plays, name, rating and date.

say i want to play a strategy game on BYOND. i start at the homepage, find the "games" link, mouse over it, a panel drops down and i click "Strategy". i then get taken to a page with a weirdly sized splattering of boxes; 25% of the screen shows five games, another 25% shows 9 games further below that, and then the other 50% of the screen (on the right hand side) shows a ton of medals and i think to myself "why is 50% of the screen displaying medals? i want to play games, not stare at medals."

i then see two links- "Visit BYOND Strategy" and "See more games". how are they different? i don't get it. does this mean the "See more games" link goes to non-strategy games? so i click "Visit BYOND Strategy" and end up at the strategy guild, where 70% of the screen shows the 144 tech tree posts rambling on about all sorts of things, 15% shows comments, blog posts, and "about us", and another 15% in a thin panel off to the right lists some strategy games. if i scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and see the "More..." link below the games, i can click it and finally end up at a page that lists strategy games without all sorts of random clutter. even then, it shows fewer games using a lot more screen space, and doesn't have useful sorting options like a rating, number of plays, or date.