First, the Rackham site is horrible. You click on any link, and it takes 4-5 seconds before you can see that you have in fact clicked the wrong link for what you're looking for, and should now press back on your browser, displaying thje previous pages' flashanimation all over again. Of course, it's not your fault you clicked the wrong link -- there not enough info telling you where you're going in the first place. I don't pay for broadband so I can wait five seconds for each page.

I got into WWG almost a year ago to the day. The website then was the first version I saw, and it totally sold me. When I waved to my girlfriend to come over and have a look, I could easily go to each product's page and show her the images I really wanted to. The only thing that bugged me was the self-starting movies with sound, which isn't so bad. The website was simple, but the models stood out, and wanted to buy them all -- I craved them -- I needed the Maiden and I needed it now. [I'd still buy a sister ship (say, a slightly shorter pirate ship with a gun deck and a higher castle using some recolored files and some new ones) for the full price. Or a bigger ship, I'd go over $15 in a blink even if I knew some textures were being re-used and stuff. Okay, I've been veering into wishlist territory now...]

Now, when I have interest in some of the back catalog, I go look at the pictures I downloaded back then -- the website doesn't present things in a way that appeals to me anymore.

And where are the demos for the new stuff? The First Light ship and Skull Cliff have sold me into WWG. I mean, a small spaceship with ejection seats and a closing canopy, how cool is that!! Now I can't even get a nice trapped room to sample LotDG. (And don't give me a sample Dragon -- we all know that's a completely separate product packed in as a bonus.)

The store is ugly, but once I'm in there, I've already decided to buy and I don't mind so much -- maybe first-time would have been a problem, but DTRPG (or was it the other one?) gave me my share of trouble as well. What I do mind is that I get the impression that I'll get nice combo deals and kitbashes by becoming a member, and in fact I fail to see much of these. (I realize that you probably mean by *shopping* with worldworks, but it's ibn a box labeled Membership with a big "Not a Member?" signup logo.)

SJGames has been through redesigns of many parts of its websites from 2004 and up, and it's been all good. The site now is better than the site then. Product Pages are informative, have a lot of little links to help you find what you want, have a nice non-aggressive coloring, etc.

AdAstraGames has a thoroughly ugly website, and its product information is very misleading. At least the game is good. (I have AV:T) [I know whoever mentioned it was talking about the boards -- they're fine]

The new version of the WIP meter really has to go. It's large, clunky, and only serves to undermine the credibility of the company. When something has been delayed too much, it starts sounding like Daikatana and you don't want that. The old version was okay, at least it didn't take much space.

Honestly, I wouldn't list sets in there until you're willing to offer a preview of some sort, give people an idea what they're waiting for. Otherwise it's just silly - you're listing, almost by name only, a set that's probably going to be canned by the time it goes past production. It's annoying.

I like the webstes of most videogame makers, in terms of content to eye candy ratio: SEGA, Xbox, CAPCOM (usa)... Bioware is too subdued. NAMCO too red. TECMO (tecmoinc) tries too hard to be hip and just annoys me.

That's enough from me. I'm off.

Oh, and don't spend too much time on it, we want to see those Streets. SOON!

I'm all for better, bigger pics of the models themselves.

As for an extremely nice, clean, and fast gallery layout, check out .

His site, and others like it, are done by .

Maybe you can talk to them about working that functionality into your pages.

The layout is not bad, although the graphics do feel somewhat disjointed. The header wastes a lot of space though.

Definitely more along the lines of the current WWG jam-packed style.

Geez thanks Denny for showing me Steam again - its been forever since I had that loaded on my machine, now look what you've done! I found Rag Doll Kung-Fu, downloaded the demo - fricking rocks!!!

Now to get the game - its soo wrong but Oh so right.



Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

You know, I don't often pay attention to how good a website looks, as long as it's functional, and they don't make any major blunders (like designing a page for a fixed width - shudder).

However, in order to be able to give some more reasoned feedback, I decided to go through a bunch of RPG publisher websites, and actually pay attention to them.

My conclusion... most RPG websites suck!

Ok, so I did find a few that I'd put in my "not too bad" category. But none that I'd really want to hold up as an example of great web design. FYI, my "not too bad" category consisted of the following four sites, from about 20+ I sampled from this year's (roughly in order of "not-too-badness"): , , , .

If you think these don't look that great, you're right. But you shoulda seen the other ones!

Anyway... a couple of common elements in the websites I thought were better than others:

- a well-done color scheme (especially Necromancer and Atlas Games)

- rescales well to the width of the browser window, and/or doesn't look to bad at different widths (esp. Necromancer and Black Industries - I also appreciate how Atlas has some graphics to the right of their otherwise fixed-width page: at least it's not completely wasted space for someone who's crazy enough to maximize his browser window).

- Pictures of their products on the front page!

- Apart for the aforementioned pictures, the text on the page is fairly unencumbered with graphical elements. I actually want to read that text, not get distracted by fancy headers and boxes.


Out of these four sites, I think Atlas Games looks and feels the most professional. It's very pleasant on the eyes, and everything works smoothly. The main reasons I didn't put it as #1 are because (a) it's a fixed width page, (b) it's a little *too* sparse - they could have fit just a little more content on the page without it getting crowded, and (c) the product images on the left look ugly, because they relied on the browser to scale them down from much larger product images.

I like that Steam site, Denny. Well, I like it apart from the massive waste of space black banner going across the top and serving no purpose other than to make me scroll down to catch the bottom of the page.

And those are exactly the kind of blocks I was talking about, BTW. Dead on.

The only problem I have with the steam site is having a scrolling box in the middle of the page, I really hate those, at least ones that small.

I agree that the vertical scroll bar in the middle of the page is what I would label as a negative on the Steam Site, but overall the design is clean and simple. In the web-based applications that I architect in 'real life' people seem to really appreciate it when things are presented in a clean and simple manner.

To me it is a balance of white space (even if the whitespace is taupe). Too little and the site looks crowded. Too much and it looks empty.

I really like News portions on a site.

Having updates on the front page alongside the forums (for new people) that is updated often would be very nice for WWG.