I clicked on the scrolling images, but they didn't get bigger and to a certain extent make it look like a low res browser game (especially combined with the domain name). Mouse over should probably stop them scrolling.
I couldn't find the "videos" or "screen shots" sections in the top bar or the side bar below the weird half fold with the spinney icons that look like they are from a 13 year old website.
The top half of the page is a pretty info less splash screen and the bottom half has information - it seems a little weird. The call to action button isn't very obvious. The whole of header_home I find to be very pretty space consuming noise. For some reason I just don't pickup on the important information contained in that section, perhaps it's because "FREE SPACE COMBAT GAME ONLINE MULTIPLAYER FPS/RTS" aren't really full sentences. Perhaps "Allegiance is a completely free space combat game that combines FPS and RTS game play".
Originally developed by Microsoft it is now opensource and actively updated" would be picked up better. Have the IGN quote off to the side somewhere, it's the first thing I look at on that page and I don't read it because it's a quote and doesn't tell me what the website is about (probably another contributing factor to me being thrown off and not absorbing the information properly.
Speaking of Microsoft, it probably should be mentioned that they made it originally and this isn't some crappy barley v0.3a opensource project.
Is a 13 year old web 1.0 website really the best place to start from a design perspective?
The game info link took me to a page called /allegiance/ rather than /gameinfo/ or /aboutallegiance/ - seemed weird since the home page is about allegiance, it's child pages should be named after their sub topic rather than the parent topic.
Do we need new forums? These ones have really nice software and actual users and aren't barren wastelands - having a low players online count and empty forums doesn't look good. I think I actually agree with Mastametz
. FAO has a better url for a free game called allegiance, but your site has a better one for what people search for, but is so generic I don't think it's a good name for the actual home of allegiance. As an mini introduction site it would work well though.Get some big pretty high res screenshots in a screenshots section, videos in a videos section.
Just clicked on the download button. Good god! 7 installation steps! Ok, it's not really but it looks that way. The first step tells the user to go back to where they were looking earlier. So many steps and so much little text.
[Download Allegiance] <--look it's a pretty button, and it's big!
[Create a Callsign]
Run the installer - honestly I think most people don't need to be told this last step, and if they do they probably aren't cut out for allegiance. Then after those two nice simple steps have a
Before you start
Checkout the Common Mistakes and the Allegiance Flight School - this is no simple shooter.
Also be sure to play the training missions before you try online play and remember to customize your controls.
