Help for Primus page

tenebriswolf

Hi people,

Some time ago I created my very first Primus Database page for one of my main character, Black Storm. It took more time than I thought to finish it, and even if I'm not really satisfied with it, I keep it like that and update it when I feel like it.

Now I want to make another one for my true main, named Wolflord. As you can see, I already started the page but I got lazy on the way. After seeing all the nicely done pages elected by the Page of the Month contest, I feel like I can try something better than my previous attempt. Alas, I cannot afford to pay someone for artwork (though I admit that people doing these are really talented ; I can draw myself, but I'm not into colors and I don't have a scan to put draws on my computer). I'm trying to find a way to put the whole thing in a good-looking page, something that gives people the wish to read the text blocks and really want to know more about the character.

So I'm asking you people, about the things I could do to make Wolflord's page enjoyable to the eyes. I got his background in my head, I just need to write it down, and the rest is mostly page setting and illustrations.

Thanks a lot.

sekimen

Depending on how much info you have available, screenshots may help. If you are going to have plenty of detailed information like this, inserting screenshots that are relevant to the section they are in might interest the reader further. Thundrax's page is also a good example (his layout was my main inspiration).

If you don't have much text, you can either avoid images entirely, use an alternative to screenshots, or just use relevant screenshots anyway.

I personally dislike colored bars for headers, but that's just my taste. I'd say a good looking page is knowing how to space things and have the reader think how they might need a few seasons to read something, rather than making them think "I'll never get through this". Good categorization also helps, since some people only want select info, so make it easy to find.

Quotes are also fun to find/write and use, I've found.

sterga

You can be like most *******s and just steal code from someone else's page without bothering to give credit.

Most of the "cool" stuff is CSS3. It more-or-less all looks the same in all modern browsers. The fancier you want to make your page, the more code you're going to have to use. HTML and CSS are super easy to learn.

My primus user page has a list of resources at the bottom that I use.

My first suggestion is to not waste your time with the "work in progress" nonsense. Web pages are always works in progress. When you choose your colors, make sure the font is readable. Your herobox is a good example of bad contrast between the background color and the text color. Dark background colors should have light text colors.

I would also recomend not using pure white as a background color. Books do not use pure white pages because they're not as easy to read as an off-white color.

Despite hardly anyone doing so, color your links. Most of the primus pages have the default colors for link which often just looks terrible. Yes, it sucks having to code the link colors by hand, but at least you'll know they can be read.

Use borders around your images. Most of the time, it looks weird to have some pic just floating out there. You can either use an image program to add borders or just code them in.

Learn how to use MediaWiki code. It's how I made the custom table of contents on all of the pages I maintain. No one else uses it except the people who ripped off my coding without bothering to give credit. It's a lot more work than letting MediaWiki auto generate one, but it doesn't at least it doesn't look like crap.

The best way to learn is to look at other people's source code. Google can help you out too. Or you can be a lazy git and ask someone else to do it. If you're feeling brave, you can check out the code I use on my pages. I use heavy CSS and it's generated by a php script, so it's not exactly easy to read, especially if you don't know CSS.

Normally, I sketch out a design (or two) on a piece of paper before I ever do any coding.

Having 50 commissions doesn't make your page good. I have none and only use edited game screens on my pages. Most of my pages are pure code + text, yet are better designed than 99% of what you'll find on Primus. Good use of colors and white space go a long way to making your page look eye-catching. I'm snooty and tend not to read pages that aren't designed well. My view is that if an author can't be bothered to have a somewhat decent design, then they don't care enough about their character for me to bother reading.