Want $200 and Neverending Glory? Redesign eyesonff.com!

[Cid]

I will give $200 to anyone who comes up with a new design for eyesonff.com that I love.

Here is the facts:

:: I feel like eyesonff could use a little make over. I don't have the time anymore, but I still love the site and I want it to grow and stay competitive.

:: I was going through some old design ideas (1, 2, 3)that Ash threw tegether way back in early 2001 and it got me thinking about how nice a change would be. Please note that while I show these images as examples, I do not necesarily suggest that I want you to copy that style. Be creative.

So here are the rules:

1. If I get 50 submissions and I'm not happy with any of them, no one gets any $. A reward will only be given for the artist of a design that is chosen.

2. Make as many designs as you want. You can make 20 designs if you want to.

3. If your design looks like any other FF site, I will most likely give it little to no chance. I don't want EoFF to look like anyone else. This design, for instance, looks FAR too much like a certain other site.

4. Don't be afraid to experiment with colors. Maybe make a site with the existing eyesonff colors and then make another with different eye pleasing colors.

5. Redesign of eyesonff.com may spark a redesign of a new style on the forums. This, for instance, would make a great header to the main site as well as to the forums. You get my point?

6. You can post your work in this thread, or you can email me at webmaster@eyesonff.com.

7. In terms of the amount of time for this contest to go on, right now we're looking at at least 2 or 3 weeks. If I'm not happy with the submissions or it's not enough time, I'll extend it.

8. All I'm asking you to do is come up with a design idea, not take eyesonff.com and go through and plug in every page to your design. Just work out the graphics and html on eyesonff.com/index.shtml and I'll all the rest of the pages in myself (if I chose your design).

Good luck.

[Loony BoB]

Just so everyone's aware, Cid is running this himself so please don't PM me asking for any details. While I'm not good enough to come up with an HTML-from-scratch of sorts (and therefore it's very unlikely I will be submitting designs) I have always had a lot of ideas for the site that I would like to use, I'll do my best to remember as many as I can and list them off in this thread. If anyone sees an idea they'd like to implement just say so. Off the top of my head, these include using a different News program (we currently use the extremely ancient Newspro) which allows for an RSS feed as well as having specific images for each type of news, drop down menus a la Loki 7 or even a la the vB3 forums, integrating the site with the forums, as well as smaller things like seperating FF and SE games. I'll obviously come up with a lot more later on.

Cid: Should we not advertise this on the frontsite/announcements, and can we advertise at other forums if we like? I'm thinking of submitting this to vBulletin's forums to see if we can get any more good ideas as well as possibly a couple of people submitting designs.

[Baloki]

drop down menus a la Loki 7

Is vaugly famous

Nah I shall have a stab at it for you, I doubt I can come up with anything spectacular but who knows I might just have an idea for something you might want to use...

*shrugs*

Edit: If you can't get hold of any webspace to display your example page PM me and I'll probably upload a copy onto my back-up server so you can show them off to Cid and whoever. Only bother if its a complete one though as I won't give you FTP access because my host doesn't give me 2 FTP accounts...

[Loony BoB]

Oh yeah, you can contact me about that - If anyone wants me to upload a design for submission onto my eyesonff.com/BoB/ space, I'm happy to do so. You'll have to email, loony_bob at yahoo dot com.

[Agent Proto]

By design? Do you want an image provided of a specific design, or do you want HTML included?

I'm not any good with HTML so I can't provide that, but I can do something by an image of a design I may make.

[White Raven]

Once you decide which one is fit for the forums, will you 'test' it out for a bit and gather reactions from the members. Though I trust your judgement, if you pick one that no-one else likes, I don't want to be stuck with it ^_^.

[Baloki]

Just what I've got so far:

http://www.merchantsofdoom.com/~baloki/eoff_test1/

Not finished of course but I'll add to it now

Edit: Added to it, just need to add the right hand bar and it should be finished

Edit²: There should be finished, I dunno if I missed anything but meh... I now wait to see what my competitors come up with

[Cid]

By design? Do you want an image provided of a specific design, or do you want HTML included?

I'm not any good with HTML so I can't provide that, but I can do something by an image of a design I may make.

I pretty much meant html :(.

[Yamaneko]

If you want something different, green is a nice color that I haven't seen used in any FF sites.

[Cid]

Once you decide which one is fit for the forums, will you 'test' it out for a bit and gather reactions from the members. Though I trust your judgement, if you pick one that no-one else likes, I don't want to be stuck with it ^_^.

I would plan to have this style (EoFF v1.0) still selectable from the style menu, of course.

[Erdrick Holmes]

Im HTML stupid so would you be accepting anything done with Microsoft Frontpage?

[Cid]

Sure, that's html too.

[Flying Mullet]

My only two cents on this is that when the winning style is selected that one central style-sheet be used for ease of updating the site's style in the future.

Plus if you wanted to real slick you could assign a style sheet to each style (the current one and the winner), then you just need a javascript method that loads the style-sheet that the user selected and set their preference in the cookie. So then not only could a user select the style they like in the forums, but for the front site as well. Of course to do that then the layout of the forums couldn't change, or it'd be a nightmare trying to readjust everything in the javascript.

And on a side note: If you ask me nicely I might HTML-ize your entry for you if you're HTML illiterate.

[Baloki]

FM if you were gonna go down the route of using two different layouts for the front site and making them selectable you would probably be better off PHP'ing it and having done wiht it

[Flying Mullet]

Yeah, two different layouts would be better that way. But for two different color schemes javascript would be worlds easier.

And that's a possibility for you Cid, if you like a certain layout but can't decide on the colors, you can always use the same layout with two or three color schemes that are selectable in the footer of every page. How many Final Fantasy sites offer that outside of their forums, huh?

EDIT:I have a question, how do ads play into this? Do contestants need to consider where they go in the layout and do they have any room in deciding where they go and what they are (i.e. banner ads vs. sidebar ads)?