New Website Research

Making Icar open source includes making all of the website files, blog posts images, and data open source too and that means a new website! Over the years, I designed a great number of websites, the early ones in in 1996 being little more than a bunch of images and a lot of text. The web keeps moving on and I try and keep the Icar website up to date with it.

A montage of Icar websites throughout the years in their standard blue

Bit of history

When I started Icar, there was no world wide web. It was only at University in 1995/6 that I learned HTML (thanks Tim Hastings!) and put the few text files that made up Icar version 2 online. I kept handcrafting HTML, CSS and javascript up until the current version, where I turned all the data associated with the pages into XML and then used PHP to transform them. I moved this blog bit into Blogger (to make life easier) and then linked the sites together.

The End of 2018 design

I don't hate it but it looks a little dated and isn't very good on mobile. 25% of the people visiting come on mobile and that is only going to increase. I also think it doesn't sell itself as well as it could. It does have the download page front and centre but I think it's all a little crowded. I'm tired of it, want to make a new one and that in itself is enough of a reason!

Touch of research

Homepage websites aren't really the hub of roleplaying online. People buy books from their friendly local game shop, Amazon or DriveThruRPG. I wasn't expecting much but picked three nearly-at-random nonetheless. Traveller (Mongoose Publishing) and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (Cubicle 7) do not cater at all for mobile users and their websites are what you might have found 10 years ago.

Warhammer Fantasy - pretty standard late 00s website even on mobile

Traveller - another standard webpage in the late 00s style

I was more impressed with the D&D website, which is definitely a mobile-first design:

Dnd has a very smart mobile friendly site

Technology

I have a mix of blogs, tables of data and long form text. I've decided to use a static website generator called gatsby. It will make building the site a lot more complex but will make blogging a little easier because I can host it all together. It means getting off blogger and converting to Markdown but that's not too bad - after all, I am a programmer.

Next steps

I'm going to get a simple shell working and the start playing with some designs, I'll post them up as I go. What's your favourite roleplaying game website? Is it at all modern?