At the Gates of Death: Quake III Arena

Planning to create or to revamp a shrine and need some help or a second eye with your content? Post away!
Forum rules
The usual guidelines in Constructive Criticism apply, and you have the option to flag your topic as "Sweet".
Post Reply
dubiousdisc
Administrator
Posts: 2535
Joined: Thu Jun 21, 2012 5:49 pm
Contact:

At the Gates of Death: Quake III Arena

Post by dubiousdisc »

So, through the years, I've ended up making several small sites to my favorite characters from Quake III: Arena, which I keep together in their sub-collective site. I'd like to revamp all those sites at some point, but I'm facing a few struggles in conceptualizing how to tackle this project.

My problems:

1. To understand each character, the background information about the game and its universe is a prerequisite. Right now, that information is repeated on each site about each character. See for example the opening paragraph of the Orbb site and then the Conjectures subsection. This results in a lot of repeated information throughout each site, and I don't like that. I would like to only have to say that once and make that the starting point from which each individual site branches from. So, the most natural conclusion to me is that I should have At The Gates of Death as not really a collective but rather the opening page of all sites, and so have this section that all sites share right there, but there's one problem: the way each character relates to the universe's background is different and important to each character and worthy to be discussed within each character's site. So, I don't really know what to do.

2. If I choose to go on the route of having the collective become the starting page of all sites, there's one problem: the fact that, right now, I have three sites about characters, and then I have the quote database which is an information base sort of thing. If I revamp At the Gates of Death to be focused on character analysis, I think this does a disservice to the quote database, which is an important and useful resource which I end up referencing a lot in the characters' individual sites. I don't want to give the impression that the real meat is the character sites and the quote database is less important. Also, in the future I might add more sites that aren't pure character analysis, so I'd like this revamp to take that into account. What would you do to avoid having this slant?

3. Design question: I still want each site to have its own layout which is completely different from the others, would you be weirded out if you were to visit a site like that? Would that make you think of each site as completely separate from the others? I really would want to avoid having three or whatever many different sites as much as a larger project about Quake III: Arena.

I hope I've managed to explain myself, and thank you in advance for any thought you have to offer on this matter.
Lethe
Posts: 1342
Joined: Thu Jul 19, 2012 1:20 pm
Contact:

Re: At the Gates of Death: Quake III Arena

Post by Lethe »

Hey! I've got a Claymore collective up but haven't found the time/muse to make the character shrines for it yet though, but I've already vaguely planned things out, so maybe my thoughts could be useful to you...

1) Yeah, I don't like repetition either, and yes, I would suggest making At the Gates of Death an opening page instead. Depending on the length and how much you want to talk about, you could have a) the introduction information directly on the collective page, or b) make a separate site for it that is linked at the collective along with the character shrines - but given more visual exposure so people read it first.

I would try to extract the fundamental informational bits / the common denominator for that info and limit that introduction to it. Character sites would then build on that knowledge while going into different directions and fleshing things out.

A non-spoiler example using my Claymore shrine (mentioning it because I know you have Claymore knowledge), which follows option b): All that worldbuilding, mood-setting and addressing of themes is important to the series as a whole and all the characters. But the characters I plan to shrine are of different "factions" or even "times", and their roles within the series differ. My main themes, "identity, humanity and solidarity" may not even mean the same across all characters. They all have a different relationship with the "organization" and choose their own path according to that, while a few of them touch on the inhabitants of that world too. Some of them even go through the very same, or similar events together, but the outcome of those may hold different meaning to each of them.

Both the organization and the world's inhabitants are mentioned quite fleetingly on that introduction shrine, without too much judgement, I think - because the individual characters' voices are missing from that overview. So in the character shrines, I would expand on said info and recontextualize it to match the respective character's perspectives and motivations.

??? Not sure whether this works for you??

2) I don't understand some things about this!

Firstly, I don't think it'd do a disservice to the quote database if you remade the landing page into an introductionary site? I think you can frame the quote database as equally important with presentational elements (for example, having all icons/buttons be of equal size, as they are now), or by adding a blurb to say why it's important. I know shrining folks love browsing quotes overviews too, so... Plus, even if you expand the individual character pages, they'd hardly use ALL quotes (especially with your style), right? So people would still be interested in checking out the quote database.

Secondly, you don't have to frame At the Gates of Death as a character analysis collective - just say it's a Quake III: Arena collective containing many different things? It already does contain the quote database after all! I know we mostly make character shrines in this community, but especially with one such collective, you could branch out a lot and build on stuff all around the collective.

3) Nah, different designs are great. The hub is NOT "just" a series site in the conventional sense after all, but a collective. The sites don't exist in isolation, and there are synergy effects, and there's a lot of insight to gain for a visitor the more sites they visit from the same collective. Besides... We used to have, and still sometimes do, have shrines where each page or section looks differently - and everyone loves those. Since that's usually restricted within a single character shrine, sure, the pages would mostly share the same stylesheet. But for an entire collective, I think it makes sense and is very appealing that each site has its own layout and a completely different structure - after all, that's what makes the idea of your collective so fun, appealing and enjoyable to work on, right?

idk whether that was of any help at all... But I'm here cheering for you; I love this collective.
Both despair and ecstasy are part of the elements that compose a person.
Robin
Events Staffer
Posts: 3072
Joined: Thu Aug 07, 2014 3:15 pm
Location: North Carolina, USA
Contact:

Re: At the Gates of Death: Quake III Arena

Post by Robin »

Seconding what Lethe said about introductory information--a graceful series introduction, followed by four equally large, importantly styled links to each Quake III Arena site, would be just fine. You could even do blurbs underneath/as part of each link to further introduce individual sites if you wanted!

As for the designs...different layouts are AWESOME. You could potentially stick with the same color scheme for the collective to help unify things, and emphasize a different color from the scheme on each smaller site? (Like, for instance, say if you used black/teal/gold/white as your collective color scheme, then maybe your quotes database emphasized the gold in its design, and one of the character shrines emphasized the teal, etc... I know that is a super wild example but just trying to illustrate my point xD)

Basically, gurl you worry too much!! Your sites are the bomb.com!!! :D :D
~ a dream is a wish your heart makes ~
withinmyworld.org
dubiousdisc
Administrator
Posts: 2535
Joined: Thu Jun 21, 2012 5:49 pm
Contact:

Re: At the Gates of Death: Quake III Arena

Post by dubiousdisc »

Thank you both for your input!

Lethe: I was totally thinking of your Claymore collective while I was considering this revamp, hee hee. I like the idea of having the information open the same for everyone and then be put in context on each shrine. I especially like the idea of highlighting the themes on the opening page to then develop them in different ways in each shrine - actually, I can see this working very well with the material I have.

On 2: believe it or not, I didn't think of the blurb idea at all, lol. I guess that solves it then. XD I KNOW I'M TALKING TO YOU, MASTER OF THE BLURB, but I guess since I rarely do it for my own stuff I didn't even consider this to be a possibility XD

On the different layouts: the thing is, I would want it to be clear that this is not a collective as much as...some flavor of a general fansite, since each site spans the beginning page plus the character-specific shrine. I'm just wondering if having different layouts doesn't make it harder for the visitor to think of this project as such. I guess not. Maybe I should just...write something to that effect on the opening page. Huh. What is even the term for what I'd be doing?!

Robin: I really like the idea of the colors! I just wonder if I'd be able to pull it off and not just go "whatever this one looks good in yellow so suck it" XD But, hmm. Maybe not even just the colors, but also some design elements that reappear within each site? HMMM I like where this idea is going though, I'll play with it :D
Lethe
Posts: 1342
Joined: Thu Jul 19, 2012 1:20 pm
Contact:

Re: At the Gates of Death: Quake III Arena

Post by Lethe »

Glad that the input was helpful!

Aaaaand it appears I read your third question wrong or something (I see that I posted at midnight lol). So basically, you want to make it clear that the character sites (and other sites such as the quote collective) are branches/extensions of the main site. Yeah, I'd just state so in the header/on the index if I were you.

(For my planned Claymore shrines, I plan to 1) put a visible linked button/banner to the collective on the index, and 2) state on the index that knowledge of the fundamentals as laid out in my series introduction shrine is required, as I won't roll things up again, but expand on them.)

... You could also "brand" the branches the way Destinie does with her Monster collective. 8Da

Robin always has such neat ideas. <_< >_> *-*
Both despair and ecstasy are part of the elements that compose a person.
dubiousdisc
Administrator
Posts: 2535
Joined: Thu Jun 21, 2012 5:49 pm
Contact:

Re: At the Gates of Death: Quake III Arena

Post by dubiousdisc »

I used to have a shared sidebar on every site, but I didn't like how that looked at the time because of my own poor design choices, lol. It's not a bad idea to bring it back - I hadn't thought of it at all!

Thank you :D
Post Reply