EB web site design aesthetic.

**Poita** · 04-21-2009, 18:55

Hi.

I'm a RTW fan and I've used EB but I wanted to actually talk a bit about your web site and it's look if you don't mind. I hope this is an ok place to do that.

I often get frustrated with the ugly presentation and bad, confusing and even deceptive (run you in circles to ensure more clicks) design of not most but it seems almost all web sites.
I understand that companies have to make money but I think their need to make a buck in the shortest term possible totally compromises their aesthetic sense and makes it impossible for people to even cosider that the design of a website could be a thing of beauty in both form and function.
I'm not talking about esoteric, fine art here. That's all well and good but what I really love is when every day, utilitarian things are designed and crafted to be things of beauty.

Now I come to my reason for wanting to talk about the EB web site. I think the EB site is one of the most beautiful web sites I've ever seen. Even if I wasn't a RTW fan I would think so. I hate the glare of a white screen (so much so that whenever I use MS word I change the colour to beige) and found it amazing how easy on the eye the parchment style presentation of the EB site is. Not just because it happens to 'not' hurt the eye but also because it's a real pleasure to look at it.

I know you don't have ads on the site so that helps but it's not just the lack of annoying ads and also the manipulative psychology that would have to go into their placement so as to assure as much activity on them as possible. It's also the colour scheme the style, the feeling of looking at real textures. Even the bottons on the top are extremly tasteful and a pleasure to use.

I have to say, I've been using the internet since about 1994 and the EB site is the most beautiful site i've ever come across. Sure there are some sites that have incredible features and amazing art but to me, design for designs sake is a waste of talent and energy. There is a beautifully subdued efficiency about the EB site. Everything I want is there, beautifully presented with no artificially placed impediments or design ego. It's simple and very pleasing to the eye. When I discuss design with friends I often show them your site as an example of the harmony of form and function.

I know I'm gushing a bit here but in fact I'm not an easy to please person. I am dissapointed with about 29 out of 30 movies, TV shows, or games that get released. I very, very rarely praise a web site and spend a lot of time talking with friends about how this or that design is not good. I even hate the bottons on my new home heating control because rather than a tactile 'click' that my old panel had the new one is so slickly designed that I'm never quite sure the press has taken and I have to look to see (which is annoying because there is a seconds delay for the hard to see black LED bar to appear)

I'm not a design major or anything. I'm just an every day consumer of life (a British journalist and English teacher here in Seoul, Korea actually) and design that is bad, over complicated, mind boggling (the light switchin my apartment is at the far end of the living room so when I come home at night I have to stumble around in the dark to turn on the light) or just plain ugly drives me crazy. Conversely, when I come across what I consider to be beautiful design (rarely, especially on the internet) I feel very pleased and want to let the people responsible know that their work is appreciated. So please pass the link of this post on to whoever constructed the EB web site. If the designer/s is/are happy to get some feedback on the site then I'd love to ask more questions about it.

Anyway, really good freaking job. To sum up, it's a darn beautiful web site. I wish there were more like it.

**General Aetius** · 04-21-2009, 20:28

Great 1st post POITA. THANK YOU for expressing so well what I too feel about the EB site.

General Aetius

**Zeibek** · 04-21-2009, 20:43

I still remember the time when my computer couldn't handle 0.81 and I went to the faction descriptions page and ogled those pretty pictures for hours...

I'm totally with the OP on this one.

**I Am Herenow** · 04-21-2009, 20:49

Hi there, thanks for your post and welcome to the ORG!

It just so happens that both the EBI and EBII websites are being (re)designed at the moment - see the linked threads - so if you've got any suggestions or requests, now would be a great time to post them!

I Am Herenow

**Poita** · 04-21-2009, 23:08

Well, I wouldn't change much. Just don't sucumb to the trend of wanting everything to be flashy, flashing and on the move all the time. Also many websites cram too much onto each page.
When I read the current EB site I feel more like I'm reading a magazine or even better, a book or graphic novel or picture book. It's very relaxing as I can look at content a pleasant background and not have lots of other stuff being crammed around it.

I would like the buttons at the top to have more of a contrast when they light up so I hardly even have to look hard to see if the mouse roll over has activated it. Also, I like it when buttons have a physicality to them so there is a visual 'de-press' and even an appropriate shunt or click sound when clicked on.

In the Gallary the tiles for the pictures could be on individual parchment (or is it leather?) squars so they don't just hang there over the texture of the back ground.

Apart from that I love the site. I better get some screen grabs in case it changes drastically.

I have a few questions.

1. Does using those parchment/leather textures as a background slow the site down at all? My computer tends to dump cookies or something and have to reload sites almost every time.

2. Why don't many other sites have more texture so that the person viewing the site can feel that they are looking at a physical substance rather than a glaring screen? is there some kind of trade off?

3. Actually, I'm hoping to start a company next year and a big part of it will be a site. It's not game related site and I won't copy the EB site but the aesthetic will be an inspiration. So, what software is the EB site made with. PHP, HTML, Flash? Also, if the EB site as it is today were to be comissioned from scratch then how much would it cost to make, how long would it take one person or a small team to construct?

4. Who actually made the EB site? Was it one person or a bunch of you. Are you expert or amateur web designers? Can you email me the email address of the made dude.

Sorry the questions have veered into the practical. ;)

**Tellos Athenaios** · 04-22-2009, 06:07

Originally Posted by Poita

I would like the buttons at the top to have more of a contrast when they light up so I hardly even have to look hard to see if the mouse roll over has activated it. Also, I like it when buttons have a physicality to them so there is a visual 'de-press' and even an appropriate shunt or click sound when clicked on.

IMO this has a few drawbacks:
(1) Contrast is a dangerous tool: you mentioned you didn't like the bright white many sites use, but it really depends on how much `contrast' there is. Too much and things start to hurt (your eyes don't get time to really adapt to the stark differences between light & dark anymore).
(2) Shunt/click sounds can be quite annoying (things get repetitive soon enough, and we all hate to be interrupted in our music/movies/silence/w.ever because some stupid program decides to make some noise). Plus, getting them to play at all can be quite tricky given that not all `user agents' (whatever is used to access the website) will support all sound formats.

In the Gallary the tiles for the pictures could be on individual parchment (or is it leather?) squars so they don't just hang there over the texture of the back ground.

I see what you mean... I'd say it could be worth looking into converting the images to PNG and then giving them soft rounded corners (or just have 1-2px transparent border): that should make them `blend' in with the background better. Misc stuff for when time is abundant and work is scarce.

Apart from that I love the site. I better get some screen grabs in case it changes drastically.

I was mainly thinking of trying to persuade the 2d artists on the team into making a couple of buttons to replace old ones: currently from a form-follows-function design P.O.V. contatcs & forums buttons are a bit weak. (The original contacts page used to rest on firmer grounds but e-mail SPAM destroys all good things. The forums button is IMO a bit sloppy: we have more than 1 place that can be considered EB 1 forums.)

I have a few questions.

1. Does using those parchment/leather textures as a background slow the site down at all? My computer tends to dump cookies or something and have to reload sites almost every time.

No, it's just an image like any other picture on the site. And cookies are completely unrelated.

2. Why don't many other sites have more texture so that the person viewing the site can feel that they are looking at a physical substance rather than a glaring screen? is there some kind of trade off?

It's design. At any rate, many sites are a leaflet/brochure/simply-a-document of sorts. You don't put a leather/parchment/rope theme on a flimsy 4-page leaflet either, so neither do you do that on a company website intent on selling cars for instance. A typical website look is glossy plastic, or metallic and failing that a restrained (not too much contrast) paper: a look emphasised in brochures as well.

3. Actually, I'm hoping to start a company next year and a big part of it will be a site. It's not game related site and I won't copy the EB site but the aesthetic will be an inspiration. So, what software is the EB site made with. PHP, HTML, Flash? Also, if the EB site as it is today were to be comissioned from scratch then how much would it cost to make, how long would it take one person or a small team to construct?

The current EB 1 site is 100% pure HTML with a few JavaScript effects built in. And one hack I heavily rewrote already because Firefox/Opera changed quirky HTML was rendered making the random warrior move all over the screen. This brings forth a whole class of problems:

I'd guess a good 50% if not more of all source code deals with outdated mental models of websites. The menubar for instance is copied over from page to page, which is annoying if you want to quickly edit something but are otherwise not familiar with the web page: if you do not know what to search for you can easily get lost in the numerous lines of opaque HTML.
HTML has zillions of things that all do about the same and CSS does better for instance.
It is HTML. That in itself is a liability. It is prone to errors, and HTML errors are not easily traced to the cause.

So the `new EB1' (very much in its infancy when it comes to content, CSS etc.) and the to-be-EB2 site will do things radically different. The idea is basically to kill 5 birds in one stone with moving to the different architecture:

Separate content from structure: simple XML (or XHTML) snippets will contain the content. XSLT will be used to transform XML into XHTML. PHP will be used to transform all these loose snippets into a document you will be able to view in a webbrowser and not be able to tell the difference with a pure XHTML approach.
Reuse code: lots of pages basically follow the same structure. That can be exploited using PHP (altough it is done in a somewhate complex way to make maximise code-reuse).
Rewrite the download tracker from scratch to use the mechanism behind (2) to use an XML file instead of plaintext. That opens up a hughe amount of interesting possibilities... (And the thing is actually about finished already.)
Using PHP to do a lot of the stuff that is currently pushed to the `user' on the `server' instead: for instance this way you can incorporate the random_warrior feature as an ordinary image, instead of an ugly JavaScript hack. Which means that it will work even if JavaScript is disabled altogether. Also: consistent formatting of date and time, as well as automatically generating a lot of code becomes possible (for instance if we have a news page we can automatically generate announcements from that).
Using the SVN system we already have in place for developing the mod on the website as well means that when the site is reasonably mature I can simply draft the EB team in its entirety to keep it up to date... Going as far as to enable the entire EB team to maintain the download tracker also... That means in turn things like releasing a mod no longer depends on me or some other site `admin' to be online...

4. Who actually made the EB site? Was it one person or a bunch of you. Are you expert or amateur web designers? Can you email me the email address of the made dude.

Krusade & therother would know, the website predates my membership of the EB team. Currently the EB 1 site content receives very little maintainance because (my) website work focusses on getting the code behind the new EB 1 site done.

**Krusader** · 04-22-2009, 08:10

Dead Moroz did the design.

I added the content, with therother updating the Downloads section and both of us added News items.

**Poita** · 04-22-2009, 14:15

Thank's for that long reply dude. It was very interesting, even if some of the technical stuff was a bit hard for me to follow. That's good for me if I'm going to get a site going though. Even if I can't actually do it myself I should at least have a grasp of what goes into makeing such a site.
It's amazing that what looks like a simple thing on our end can be a tangled forest on your end.

Form-follows-function is one of my favorite phrases. I realised after thinking about this philosophy for a while though that sometimes form-is-function. Does that make any sense?
Recently while watching presentations on TED.com a couple of designers/engineers used the phrase 'What's effective is more important that what's efficient'. I'm still trying to get my head around that one as usually the most efficient thing is also the most effective. I guess one way to illustrate that is to say that if you selected the 11 greatest soccer players in the world they could be easily beaten by a team of lesser individuals who have a history together.

Anyway I'm glad to hear that you arn't going to radically change the site. When my head is spinning from the ugly mess on the interent I sometimes drop by the EB site just to reassure myself that it doesn't have to be that way. I know that some companies just want to communicate information so they arn't going to put lot's of resources into a site but many companies exist as a web site and I think there is no excuse for them to be so ugly.

I once rented a car in the USA and i took time to familiarise myself with the controls etc. It was going to be dark in a few hours so i didnt want to be looking for the headlight control in the dark while driving. I'm not kidding but it took me almost ten minutes to find it. It was in such an obscure place. Ok it was an American car and that was in 1995 and I think design has gotten better since then. Then a few months later I rented a Japanese car and as i rested into my seat and relaxed I just let my hand move to the spot where I'd like or expect the light control to be there and it was almost as if my hand found the control the first time without hardly even looking. I realized then that the American car had chosen a spot for the headlight control that was difficult to reach and obscure to the drivers mind but very convenient to the guy or robot in the factory to intall. The Japanese car had not let anything get in the way of the smoothest user-machine interface. I want websites to have that philosophy as far as function goes and of course with form I want them to have the betst and most appropriate aesthetic to their particular theme.

Does Dead Moroz have an email that I can contact him on?

**Krusader** · 04-23-2009, 08:39

Dead Moroz hasn't been logged on to the ORG for over 3 years.

Here's his member profile:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/member.php?u=2798

Last time we spoke he was going to start some webdesign studio.
Unfortunately I can't find any email adresses of him.