Thread:Winter Edition/@comment-1536954-20140615062033

Alright, after examining the wiki's source code, specifically the main page, some templates, and the css, I'll just point out some surface issues.

Look and feel
Firstly, this wiki places a crude emphasis on making things look nice in favour of accessibility.

The colouration is far to over the top. Bright colours like red and yellow or orange and blue all in the same place just cast aside other things which should be brightly coloured, like user avatars, badges and images, and make them a little difficult to pick out. With predominate usage of black in the background, things like the wiki logo (with the black B) simply cannot be seen over the background, blending it all together in something of a mess.

The wiki navigation could use with better fleshing out. Instead of "RWBY Fanon Wiki" put something like "content". Also the usage of excessive glows on some of the text in the drop down menus renders the text very difficult to read.

The centre background, (with the css tag of .WikiaPage .WikiaPageBackground) (it can also be easily edited in the theme changer) of which all the text and stuff lies on, is in my opinion too transparent. A good wiki would use little to no transparency, or at the very least would use a background that does not distract from the text of articles. A fairly good example on this very wiki is the background image used in the chat box. It foregrounds what the wiki is about whilst not looking glary and distracting to the point where it interrupts the text in front of it.

The wiki background itself, is too high of a quality and takes a while to load for new visitors to the wiki. It should be at least 500kb (this can be resized in photoshop by saving it as a jpeg, or saving it for web. You're an artist, so I would assume you'd have the skills to do that. I'm not sure if competitor programs like Gimp or SAI or whatever have similar resizing functions). The wiki background should should complement the centre. A good background would be a full-size image of that woman dressed in yellow in the background of the main page.

When it comes to wiki design, simplicity is king. A single good-looking image in the background, a centre box with a light texture or flat colour, and little to no usage of flashy additives to links is great.

At this point I'm okay with the usage of yellow glow around all the boxes, and the usage of gradient on the wiki navigation. They're simple effects which add character as apposed to distracting full-quality images everywhere.

Coding
Coding for html and css is quite evidently copied from other wikis. Comments, for instance, (/* example */) in the css vary widely in their markup, and use html tags for reasons unknown to me. Identification maybe?

The main page uses div class, which is very interesting to be seen on wikis. From what it currently seems, the div classes actually do function. However In my opinion I find template pages a lot more simple to use. It still separates colouration and markup from the main content (of which is an industry standard practice), whilst being a lot more accessible to users outside of those with sysop powers. Instead of "{| class "portal_container" I'd suggest usage of " ". I'm 90% sure that the majority of the tags used in the css have html variants, and plus, I wouldn't be using things like "list-style: disc;" when designing a wiki. If you can actually code html, this may be a good chance to actually resign the wiki's templates into a better coloured, easier on the eyes format.

Also the main page has a blank div on it. (for Wikia it's these things: {| class= )

Lastly, there's cross-browser compatibility. Luckily, Wikia works around a lot of these issues for us. For instance, outdated HTML tags like and actually still work, whilst in my experience as an admin on other wikis css/html prefixes like "-moz-" "-webkit-" and "-o-", which are designed to make things compatible for other browsers, actually aren't crucial for generic markup.

Well, in conclusion, these are the major issues I've spotted. There's a lot of issues about the placing of icons and usage of headings on the main page, however these are arbitrary, and with enough looking around can generally be worked around. There may be a few more the deeper I delve into this wiki, but outside of that these are pretty much the errors in the wiki's design that I can point out to you. 