Mr Sun Studios » Web Design

Merry Flippin’ Christmas!

MrSun — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 15:13:06 +0000

Merry Christmas, everyone! As a gift for everyone, I’ve put up the new re-design! Hopefully, you’ll like it!

10 Amazing Blog Designs

MrSun — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:00:16 +0000

I know these kinds of posts are a bit overdone, but here’s my choice of amazing blog designs.

9. Paul Enderson’s Reflections

5 Reasons NOT to Create a Flash Arcade Site

MrSun — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:00:51 +0000

A few online flash arcade sites have become very popular around the web. There is no wonder why hundreds of webmasters have decided to create a portal of their own in hopes of earning a modest sum of revenue. Almost all of them fail. Here are the reasons why you shouldn’t be one of these people.

1. Huge Competition

As I stated before, there are hundreds, if not thousands of online flash arcades out there. If you are the sole administrator of your arcade, it will be hard to beat them. You won’t be able to offer content that everybody else doesn’t have.

2. Returning Visitors are Rare

If your arcade is run by an arcade script that you bought, visitors are not likely to return to your arcade. They most likely only came across it through a Google search for a game. They probably needed to get past a firewall on their network and your site happened to be unknown enough that it wasn’t part of the database of arcade sites. Trust me, those are the only visitors you can expect.

3. A LOT of Storage and Bandwidth is Needed

Most websites, like this one, usually take up under 100 megabytes of space, and usually under 2 gigabytes of bandwidth. If your creating an arcade site with thousands of games, the space needed to hold of those games can really add up. Some games take up more than 10 megabytes of disc space. You could be using quite a few gigabytes of storage space. If your site gets even the minimum amount of traffic, bandwidth usage could get pretty high.

4. Ad Earnings are Minimal

Even with a reasonable amount of traffic to your site, your arcade wouldn’t be earning as much as a blog with the same amount of traffic. Why? Because most visitors to your arcade are numb to all ads. Pay-per-click ads wouldn’t work at all with this kind of traffic. CPM ads are probably the only option, but you would never earn too much from them anyway.

5. It Takes a Lot of Time and Money

Yes, it’s true. Administrating an online flash game arcade can be time consuming. You might be thinking, “Well everything good in life takes time and money to make. Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know!”. First of all, Rome turned out to be a great success (until it fell). Your arcade site most likely will not. Secondly, the time you spend on your arcade won’t be the kind of time you’d spent administrating a blog. No, you would be doing some very tedious tasks, like adding games, getting rid of spam, editing page layout, and so on. Trust me, that truly is everything you do.

50 Ways to Make Us HATE Your Web Design

MrSun — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:00:13 +0000

Make the text way too small (under 10px)
Make everything a really bright color
Make everything a really dark color
Have an awful color scheme
Don’t optimize the images
Add flash animations everywhere
Add background music
Don’t make anchor tags look different from regular text
Make it all aligned in a weird way
Make the main navigation unfindable
Don’t separate any sections from each other
Make all of the pages look totally different from each other
Have text everywhere
Don’t put in any white space
Don’t put in an obvious navigation bar
Keep out a search form
Don’t give us any indication of where we are on the site
If you have tabs, don’t make them act like so
Make a totally bizarre layout
Don’t let us re-size the text
Let large images overflow their container and mess up the entire design
Don’t have a place to put the website logo
Have background images that really stand out
Use drop-down lists for navigation
Don’t test it out in different browsers
Use tables to lay out your design
Use multiple colors for the same type of object
Don’t make it obvious what we can click on
Don’t make headers stand out even just a little bit
Make it really complicated
Make it too wide (unless it’s a liquid layout)
Make it too skinny (unless it’s a liquid layout)
Mess around with the cursor’s appearance
Use CSS that isn’t compatible with most browsers without any alternates
Make it take a long time to load, even on fast internet connections
Put important stuff below the fold
Don’t make it accessible
Don’t add hover effects to links
Have a bunch of fixed images/sections
Have images that aren’t relevant to anything
Over-complicate any aspect
Over-simplify any aspect
Make it for a crazy font that nobody has
Use repeating patterns that are commonly used
Make it boring
Use really thick borders
Don’t add in common sections like a header or footer
Keep out any personality
Make it unbalanced
Don’t be creative

Though breaking one or two of these rules won’t really affect your design’s appeal, more faults will make it really easy to hate. Of course, the most creative designs break almost all of these rules

The Grand Opening of the New Re-Design

MrSun — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:26:26 +0000

Well, if you haven’t noticed, I’ve created a new re-design for the site. It was all programmed and designed by me, without any help from or editing of other templates. I’ve tried to test it in all possible ways and fixed most of the bugs. But, there are probably still a few kinks to work out. It would be nice if anyone would comment in this post or e-mail me if they find anything that needs a bit of work.

Well, I hope you enjoy walking around the new Mr Sun Studios!

A Re-design is on it’s way

MrSun — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:38:40 +0000

Hey guys, I’m just dropping by to say hello and tell you guys that right now I’m making a redesign of the site. I really want to show off my web design skills in this one. Here’s a sneak peak at what the header might look like…

I’m thinking of taking the birds away… they kind of seem out of place

Mr Sun Studios » Web Design

Merry Flippin’ Christmas!

10 Amazing Blog Designs

1. N.Design Studio

2. Noupe

3. Veerle’s Blog

4. Design Disease

5. Vikiworks Studio

6. Web Designer Wall

7. Janko at Warp Speed

8. Abduzeedo