Press Start is a site for gaming nerds. I consider myself in this category even though I’ve never played World of Warcraft and I barely do any form of online gaming. The idea behind Press Start was for it to be slightly different to the other gaming sites out there in that it is uniquely South African and it tends be much more informal and “irreverent” when compared to its counterparts. When I started working on Press Start there was already an existing website in place that had a rather loose framework of its own. I had to work with this existing website and modify it to be what it is today.

I was given the logos and a vague design brief, so the look and feel was up to me in many ways. As far as functionality went, there was already a working back-end that I needed to enhance quite substantially and flesh out into a proper content management system. By the time I was finished with the site, it looked and functioned almost entirely differently to the previous version.

I chose to give the site a open and spacious layout to counter the prevalence of cluttered and over-crowded websites that exists in the gaming industry. This created some interesting layout problems that I needed to work around and required the content framework to be strictly defined so as to keep the grid-like structure that users are used to. While there are a few elements in the design that I had no choice in and was requested to implement I am largely pleased with how it looks.

I have ceased all development and support for Press Start and this has been taken over by new developers. They have added a few enhancements and made some changes since I worked on it, but for the most part it is still very much how it looked when I was finished with it.

Details:

• URL: http://www.pressstart.co.za
• Platform/Framework: None
• Javascript library: None
• Main features: All content managed entirely by client