BB Central

[Majortusk]

My lord, there is a hell of a lot of comments. and not one by me Someone remembers /sniff

To fully explain myself, when i started Blood Bowl Central in may of 1996, I did intend on having it become a full database of Blood Bowl Information on what Galak is making. At the time I know BBC was one of the only websites to have most of the 2nd edition scans, along with all the 3rd edition scans. I had almost every article printed from the Citadel Journal in the archives. I did do alot of research for BB, I just never had the funds for it.

Blood Bowl Central started as a sidesite off of Brian's personal website through terracom.net way back then. Since then it has evolved and changed. By far I believe that the yellow version of BBC was at its best. The green Version, I never was able to convert all the information over, was second rate.

The last 3-4 years BBC has been in glide mode. Somehow the message boards kicked into high gear and really kept the site alive as the main part stagnated. My loss of time for the game, other hobbies, the loss of my father and other things took my love away from BB in general.

I have gotten that drive back, I am not coming back to step on toes, I hope you all realize that I am not that type. I have never stated that BBC was the best, or will be the best. I will do my website as I see fit and in my vision. Yes Blood-bowl.net did borrow a few things i had originally had, but thats how I started I am hoping that the innovations, inventions, and Interface of the new BBC will help drive people to check it out and keep checking it out.

for all the naysayers of myself and my BBC, better start sweetening up your foot, you might just have to taste it.


enough of my rambling, see ya all later.

[carnage4u]

oh zombie your last post was too funny.
You need a hug or something

[Mestari]

(Anybody else remember Lynx?)

Remember? I used it yesterday

We have unix terminals along the uni corridors that you can use to check your mail. They're text terminals so if you want to check some info from the web there's no alternative to Lynx...

Otherwise I'm a rather happy user of IE6 - hasn't given me any griefs unlike the older IE's and netscapes.

[Majortusk]

thats something I pride myself on, all my websites work in 99% of the browsers out there.

[Mestari]

I have pretty much given up the idea of making a dedicater BB page myself. I might do stuff like the kick-off calculator every now and then, but bigger wholes are out of the questions.

The reason is simply the fact that the quality level of the major BB sites is simply astounding. Both the design and the content are at a level that would require too much dedication if I wanted to compete with them. Most of the BB website niches are already fulfilled, especially now that the NAF site is open. Appears that the BB community has several members who are very adept at creating excellent sites.

However, I do envision an increased amount of competition between the sites. There will be competitors for the major sites, and if the BBC is going to be anything like what's been described here, it will become a great competitor for perhaps both the TBB and B-B.net. This I consider to be simply a good thing: it keeps the administrators of the sites on their toes and competing to provide the best alternative of the competing sites.

Nah, enough of theoretical rambling.

[Anthony_TBBF]

Hmmm... I've been thinking about what I wrote before. I just wanted to say that I'm not trying to criticize Anthony and everyone else who worked on the NAF site - certainly I couldn't have produced what you did with the XHTML that I know.

Sorry!

No worries, I didn't take it that way

[neoliminal]

I, for one, can't wait to see the new BBC! I always enjoyed my visits there, even when they got a little heated.

[Piepgrass]

OK, 1st off the whole NAF thing has been a joke. Your hard core BBers waited for it, but the average player wrote it off.

Seems like you were wrong. Unless all the 508 members at the moment are all hardcore fans.

Poul

[Skummy]

508? I'm pretty sure it was less than 200 at the beginning of the week!

[Indigo]

I'd like to pipe up here too... tried to post this 2 days ago but forum wouldn't let me

As the official (or one of them), dedicated NAF site tester, I did do a certain amount of testing on different browser/OS/connection configurations - it's my day job, and I have a pretty decent amount of equipment at work to do this. This also means I have a decent amount of recent statistics about browsers and target audiences with which to tailor my testing. I even ran the site through a few HTML checkers and the W3C parsers etc. as part of the test process. I've done this kind of testing hundreds of times before, for a wide range of corporate, charity and home-user sites. Personally, I don't place much faith in these kinds of tests, but they are occaisonally useful.

Studies have shown that a user will decide whether he or she will like a site within 5 or 6 seconds of the page opening. Once they have made that decision, they tend to either use it a lot, or not at all (click-back rates are very low, less than 3 or 4 percent - i.e. if they DON'T like it on first appearance, they rarely go back to see if it's changed). Think about this - you do a search in Google for "blood bowl" and it returns about 497,000 hits. You open a site, and if it doesn't appeal to you then you move on. Sites that do attract your attention might get bookmarked. This happened to me with the TBBF - I hadn't looked on the web EVER for BB, and when I do I find this site... and it's stayed on my bookmarks list since then. Fact is, you dont go back to ones you've visited.

What point am I making here you ask? Read on.

However, the fact that the TBBF site (or whatever!) does not score a 100% W3C rating does not put me off. Try doing a validation against www.netscape.com... ffs it doesn't even qualify as a valid webpage!! The fact is, the web development scene is moving just that little bit faster than organisations like the W3C. This doesn't mean I don't think their work is worthless, it's just I don't use it as a be-all-and-end-all approach to making a "good site".
A W3C "valid" site would be nice to have, but at the end of the day if making it 100% compliant gets in the way of a release or interferes with customer operations then it is not important. Sadly, the same approach applies to disabled user accessibility - how many sites are there that provide adequate compatibility for disabled users? The kind of features needed include audio descriptions of ALL pictures, links, controls etc. as well as alternate large print versions of all functionality. This is simply not feasible in 99% of situations.... try running your favourite site through something like the 'Bobby' validator... chances are it wont pass, even if it's W3C perfect.
http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp

The important thing to consider with sites like BBC and the NAF site are the intended audience. Statistically speaking, the majority of internet users connect over a 56k dialup line, using IE5.0 or higher. As good as Netscape is (or any of it's cousins, e.g. Mozilla), it simply does not have the 'market share' of users. Of the Blood Bowl fans who will be connecting to the web to look up their favourite game, the vast majority will fall into this category. Here's the magic word again.... statistics show it tends to be the more net-savvy internet users who use Netscape, for example (but not limited to) developers & Microsoft haters. Most people couldn't care less about the version of their browser so long as they can look at pics of minis, read match reviews and download pr0n. Sad but true

So the design guys behind the NAF site have, IMHO, approached the NAf site project exactly how I think they should have. Whether they intended it or not, and I like to think they did having exchanged mails with them a good few times, the site works well at acheiving it's goals. Not perfectly, it is impossible to reach perfection (getting zen on yo' asses here...) While I admit there is little in the way of content at the present time, that was never the intention of the dev. team. However, the framework to allow the easy addition and manipulation of content is there and, by and large, works. The content will be added when people start using it. That argument is like checking TBB within minutes of it opening and saying 'It suxors, there is no content'... a flippant comment, but I hope you understand the meaning behind it.

At the end of the day, it boils down to a few factors. The NAF site sets out to do a job - attract and maintain a following of like minded people who wish to discuss their favourite game in an appealing setting. I think this goal has been acheived. Sure, the colour scheme might turn people off, it might not look 100% correct (or even display at all) on all browsers, and others may hate the opinions/comments/sight-of some of the contributors... no names mentioned.... but it works in my book.

Having never even heard of BBC, I wont judge it (interesting since I have scoured the web for decent BB sites...). All I think is that provide people get what they want out of BB sites on the web that's enough... there is no point flaming others etc.

Rant over...
Feel free to pick up on any of my comments and come back to me, I don't mind debating 'em. And bear in mind I typed this on the fly for 40 mins straight so be considerate with all the spelling/grammar errors.

If anyone wants any info on web stats/site testing etc. then

a) Wonder why the hell you want to, then
b) mail/PM me

[Indigo]

of course, since I wrote this 2 days ago it may be out of date now the argument may have moved on

[Grumbledook]

Interesting read there Indigo (though i guess not for all people). Ive read a lot on web vaildation and w3c etc on sites like alistapart and other such web resources.

I think you might be a bit off with developing being ahead of the w3c, I think its more down to the mess that was there to start with. By this I mean the state of web browsers before the w3c was created. For a long time there have been no standards and designers have had to use plenty of bodges in their code to get sites to dispaly properly in as many browsers as possable. The use of tables for posistioning is probably the biggest one. This wasn't what tables are meant to be used for but becuase it was the best way in the past, its used loads now.

The w3c standards and other such things are what the future is going to be. Seperating style from content is the way to go. Using the different markups/languages for their specific purpose. Also the browsers are starting to converge to applying the standards correctly. Even on my site which uses just xtml and css, i've had to use some bodges to get the box properties correct in each browser.

As for what you said about the site works and is correct for now. I agree with you there but I seriously think things are changing if be it at a slow pace.

For the record if you want to look at my site (there is no content on there at the moment though, its just an empty shell) its at http://www.gnomelands.co.uk There is not a single use of a table on there at all. Its all positioned with css and is completly style from content. The great thing about this is, if a browser doesn't support the css all the content will show up in their browser correctly and work, but it will all just be stacked vertically, as in the title at the top then the menu then the page content. I spent quite a bit of time tweaking it best I could and I am pleased with the outcome, Just need to fill it out with some content now, but thats waiting till I can implement the php properly.

[Indigo]

heh you're better able to say what I am thinking than I am at typing it

[Grumbledook]

Heh like i said i've read a lot on the subject. Now if only I could find somewhere that has a use for my knowledge and will pay me for it ;]

[Anthony_TBBF]

However, the fact that the TBBF site (or whatever!) does not score a 100% W3C rating does not put me off. Try doing a validation against www.netscape.com... ffs it doesn't even qualify as a valid webpage!!

LOL, that's OK, I don't rate Netscape as a vaild browser