I started my own webpage. Woot Woot ! http://www.1337news.com/ It's a headline collection page with stuff you'd actually care to read about. Come check me out.

It's like all in one news, very well organized.

Pretty cool, get some better fonts going and some nifty graphics and I'll bookmark ya! Heh...

well it's a work in progress right now. I'm using Adobe Dreamweaver to code it. Nice little program that does it all for you. Anyways, I'm trying to update it constantly. Check back and see how I'm doing, I'll take any honest criticism!

Nice page. I think it would be cool if you could make it so that when you click the links, they open up in a new window. Sometimes when I'm done reading a particular article, I close it out of habit, and then mutter to myself "grrr, duhhh, awwtf why'd I do that" and have to navigate back to the main page. Also, putting on a freshness date or organizing the links chronologically might not be a bad idea, just so seeing what's new would be easier.

Still, I like it. Needs more chubby girl porn, but it's good.

ALL pages could use more chubby girl porn! But thanks for checking me out anyways. oh, and the links ARE in order. the latest news is at the top and they just get moved down as new news gets posted. they're all in moveable columns.

maybe one of these days i'll be getting enough hits to get some ads going and make some $$. you would think THIS page would have ads everywhere, with as many hits as it gets??

Sorry. I knew that. I just meant maybe you could date them (not literaly, cuz they don't put out anyway) so simpletons like me don't read the same articles over and over. Yes, I've been there repeatedly. But it's not really an issue, I was just mentioning it because I'm a petty fucking asshole.

[spoil]Btw, thanks for the Tomcruisescientology video (garbled to hide from the OT-clique), that shit was fucked up. Somebody needs a psychiatrist and some drugs, stat.[/spoil]

well i've updated some graphics and changed the font. i think it's looking pretty good now. I've got a question for my peeps here. is something like a talkback section to news stories something you look for in a news site? do you really look for that section or is it something you don't fool with? or is just reporting the news simply what you look for?

I usually ignore the talkbacks. That's mainly because of the "first!ers" and the fact that by the time I read something, it's usually been commented to death. I guess I do leave comments occasionally, if I have something valid or mildly intelligent that I want to share, however. I just usually don't bother. Sometimes I do.

allright, here's my page. i'm pretty much done with the design. now i've got to figure out how to market this thing and get some page views. does anyone out there have any ideas on marketing web pages cheaply? i.e. free?

[web]http://www.1337news.com/[/web]

To be honest: While your fundamental concept is a pretty solid one -- and you've got some decent article links -- your overall site design is pretty poor. There's almost no workable organization to it. The sheer volume of text links is overwhelming.

Maybe cut down on all the text links on the front page, displaying only the most recent 4-5, and then provide a navigation panel with links to more "Gossip" or "Sports" or whatever news.

Also, and I'm not sure how much it matters to you personally, but your layout isn't particularly friendly to lower screen resolutions.

Keep working at it, though, especially considering that you're early in the design phase.

thanks for the comments. what I was going for was something along the lines of Drudgereport.com but "cooler".

I personally get a little overwhelmed by all the flash menus and navigation bars at these news sites and really only want the headlines to stories I care about.

My goal in the site was to simplify news, maybe even as a throwback to the internet 1.0 days, but add a little design flair. one thing I hadn't considered is the screen resolution thing. I work off a widescreen laptop and it's designed to look good on it... but I guess it needs to look good as well for you "square screen" peeps as well. I will take your comments into consideration!

I absolutely agree. There's such a thing as over complicating the issue, making things fancier than they need to be. But I've never been a fan of Drudge's site design, either.

I think the text links you already have are a good idea. And I wouldn't suggest going into flash/java territory. You can still add some organizational design by simply using bare bones HTML/XHTML. I hope it works out for you.

Allright, I took your advice about it not being friendly to lower resolutions. I completely rearranged everything and tried a more horizontal design theme. I think it works a little better. tell me what ya think!

I like that a lot better. The organization is much more appealing. Good use of the tablenames2 jpg as well. Definitely sets an overall vibe for the site.

Just two further comments: First, I still have to do some sidescrolling in order to read all of the rightmost headlines. I'm using 1024x768 resolution (1280x1024 works perfectly, though).

Second, and this will probably come in to play should you choose to further shrink the horizontal dimensions: the font sizes for some of your headlines are too large, causing them to spill over (or under) rows below them. Slightly reducing the font size would help. Or, you could try and make the row heights dynamic so they expand and shrink based on the amount of text (kind of like the forum rows in phpBB).

But yeah, I think you've definitely made some big improvements.

are you a web designer? you're giving really great and seemingly professional advice. more so than the average, "yo, that rokrz" anyways, THANKS!

I'm glad the feedback is helpful.

As for me, I'm an amateur at web design. I started working on websites almost 5 years ago, at a TFN-spinoff message board (there are like 50million of them nowadays). And I've been working exclusively on my own project (not SW) since last summer. I like to think I can work out a decent aesthetic, both in terms of organization and visuals, but I'm hardly up there in the big leagues with either coding or design. For me, most of it is simply trial and error. Heavy on the error.

lets get a link to your site then. see what you're up to!

http://www.dauntlessmedia.net/

It's intended to be a loose collection of review, news and preview sites. Since I decided to focus on content, I went with using a pre-made CMS -- in this case, Wordpress -- instead of coding the site from the ground up (something that I could only do with a very heavy investment of time and creative energy). That left me free to customize the look and only have to worry about minor code changes to suit my needs.

how do you typically advertise your site? how do you drive traffic there? that's something I'm worrying about now. getting hits. all this work is pointless if noone knows you exist.

I actually haven't done any explicit advertising just yet. Thus far, most of my traffic has been generated via search engine results. Once I get a little more content completed, I'll spend some time trying to contact other sites, set up link exchanges, etc. I just don't have the budget yet to advertise. But if there
's one thing I've learned about the net thus far, it's that longevity makes a big difference. So as long as you keep your site running, and keep getting indexed by search engines, chances are you'll see your site's profile continue to increase.