I'm hoping to get some feedback on the design of my site. Not the games in it, but the system, features and design that is presenting them. As it stands, I wanted it clean and simple to navigate. While I think i've accomplished that goal, I think i've failed in making the site look fun and exciting. What do you think? Maybe I should make graphic headers for each pane to spruce it up and or create a cool background instead of the blue gradient. Something along the lines of n-design.com but with a gaming theme.

What do you guys think would help? Oh here's the link: www.spraygames.com

Load time was fairly slow, i had a look at my FF status bar and it had quite a bit to load.

The design itself looks fairly generic, just another game arcade website. Although, maybe one of the easiest game websites to navigate, imo, i think the overall layout COULD be better.

http://gamesprays.com/ - I'm guessing this has something to do with your or a colleague, but for an arcade website, I think using the users full screen like GameSprays does, is an ideal way to present the games in their categories and while playing the game itself.

All in all, it's a fairly decent website, but the market is far too big to be able to get very popular when all you have is a basic layout and game feeds from other people.

Overall, in the market you're trying to compete in (Or be a part of) i'd give you're website a 6/10.

Thanks Naz. Very honest review. I developed gamesprays.com and this is sort of a spin off from it. It really has nothing to do with what that site is about but like you said the arcade market is huge. Having a loose tie to my spray site is one way I'm attempting to pull the initial visitors in. At the same time visitors of gamesprays.com are playing Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead and are unlikely to care about mini online games. The spray site was a side project and now receives 30,000+ visits a month. Anyway that's the link between the two.

That said, I don't expect the arcade site to take off. It's a fun side project that I'll work on from time to time when the motivation is there. So far I've spent 4 days on the design and various SEO & feature enhancements & modifications to a packaged arcade script. It will be very hard for me to ever break out of the "just another arcade site" classification. Realistically, I never will but it doesn't mean I won't slowly gain a following.

What I do have going for me is a professional web development background. I know PHP, MySQL, Flash, jQuery, CSS, etc. This allows me to quickly test ideas and enhance the site with any features I can come up with. Current site is functional with core features and limited extras. Now I work on the "special" stuff. Things to help stand it out from the crowd.

The main thing I want to work on is the initial impression. I'm satisfied with the current functionality and usability but there is no "wow" factor when you first visit. I hear you on the full screen idea but don't feel I'm losing anything by keeping it in the 1024 mode. All games fit within the aspect ratio and can go fullscreen with one click. I also feel I will gain more by making an exciting background / site wrapper. The plan is to have a gaming theme of objects, characters, etc sticking out from the sides spraying down from the top. The logo will be redone and nestle into the top of this like "flowing" collage of colorful gaming stuff... I will give the site name some purpose by making the logo a can of games that is spraying out all the background items. Basically the background will make up for the clean "boring" usability focused design inside it. Once that is done, I may spruce up the pane headers as the "black/white" is unnecessarily simple.

Game feeds from other people is all this site will have, while I have developed 13 flash games myself in my career, I simply don't have the time nor the motivation to populate a gaming site with them. Just not my thing. The only way it could ever get out of using feeds is if it got a large following and we've already established how difficult that will be.

Well if you read this far, I'm impressed. Didn't mean to write this much but meh. There it is.

SprayGames has a nice layout but it tends to look like all the other arcade sites. I also don't like the limiters of how many games you could play.

Cyrus, I agree with you on its tendency to look like all others. I started working on a mascot for the site. He's a little faceless gansta' with a spray can. I've drawn variations of this character since I was young. I'm also stripping the header completely out and replacing it with one that looks like graffiti arrows that flow down over the sides and point at the game categories. Logo is gone, I'm using same text but styling it differently, making it larger, and adding little details like paint drips. It's going to look like the lil gangsta just finished spray painting the word "Spray" in the title. Not satisfied with it yet, but when the new design is up I will update this thread.

Regarding the limiters / tokens for games. That is in place for Guests, you get 50 tokens, its 5 tokens a play which equals 10 plays before you need to register. Registering is free. Do you think I should just get rid of tokens all together? Maybe so...

I'm not happy with my slogan either. Any suggestions?

Well I've redone the header, background and gave the site the mascot.

I'm finiding while browsing the games, I really just want to play a bit of one and then move on. So... I think I'm going to add an "A.D.D." panel next the current game that basically just pulls 14 random games from the database and displays just the icons of them. Then it will be easy to just hop from one to another. Maybe do something like half from category of the current game your playing and the other half could be completely random.

What u think of design and the "A.D.D." panel idea?