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YouGamers/Alienware Competition ResultsWell our homepage competition with Alienware was a huge success - over 900 entries! There were lots of fine efforts and we had great fun checking through them all but we could only pick three to win the prizes. We looked for homepages with style and inventiveness and the winners had them in bucket loads! And the lucky people are... Here we go then - congratulations to: Alienware Aurora M9700 First Prize: Alienware Aurora M9700 laptop
Winner - Jeroen Broersma, Netherlands 2nd Prize: Alienware backpack
Winner - Stephen Elmendorf, USA 3rd Prize: Alienware Headphones
Winner - Daniel Boothby, United Kingdom
Well done gentlemen! Your entries were superb and we're sure that you'll thoroughly enjoy your prizes. We would to sincerely thank everyone who entered the competition - keep visiting YouGamers so that when we announce our next contest, you'll be first to know! Finally, many thanks must go to Alienware for providing the prizes; Jeroen, Stephen and Daniel are lucky people indeed!
In time honoured tradition, we also had a quick chat with the first prize winner, Jeroen Broersma, about his homepage and to find what kind of a gamer he is! Your homepage shows clear skills in design and web coding. Where did you learn to do this? When did you start picking this up? Jeroen: Well, I started out making webpages in wysiwyg (what you see if what you get) editors when I was quite some years younger, I have to guess on this one but I think I must have been 14 years old or so. These were extremely easy to use, all you did is drag and drop some pictures onto a background, publish the HTML and you had yourself a webpage! Didn't require any HTML knowledge. After making some pages like this I started getting into it, I really liked creating stuff for other people to look at. Gradually I started learning more HTML and got better at creating graphics. In 2003 I designed and updated some websites for a company I was an intern at, here I learned some basic ASP and PHP.
YouGamers: We liked how your homepage layout was bright and very easy on the eyes. Do you do much design work at all? Can people hire you? :D Jeroen: To be honest I do not design that much, I was usually busy with school and just didn't get to it. However lately I have had more free time to spend on designing which lead me to reading some more guides and tutorials. In the past I have made some sites for personal use, mostly game related in some way or another. So far I have not done any professional work except for the intern thing, but I never got paid for designing anything yet. I might be making a website for someone in the near future, which will be the first site that I will be paid for.
YouGamers: What was the hardest part to get right for your homepage? The graphics, the Flash or recoding the style sheet? Jeroen: Although the style sheet took some time to fix to fit my needs, the hardest thing for me to do was actually the pieces of Flash I put into my site. I have never really done anything in flash, and about one day away from the deadline I decided I needed something to add to the page, it just didn't seem finished to me. I had that day to figure out how to use flash to make my crystals into the crystals they are right now, shiny and sparkly. :) I was quite pleased with the final result. During the creation of the Flash I did run into some problems which Tranquil rage, an online friend of mine, noticed. Thanks for that. :) He was using a different version of the flash plugin on Linux where it didn't show up they way it should have, background being all messed up. After sorting that out with his help I finally applied it to my site.
YouGamers: Do you have any quick tips for people just starting out making their homepages? What's the most important thing to get right? Jeroen: The way I started out was browsing the web for Photoshop tutorials. In my opinion there are some great sources for these on the web that can teach you plenty about the use of this piece of software and not just tutorials on Photoshop but on pretty much anything, tutorials, tutorials, tutorials. :) I also believe Dreamweaver is a good program to build sites in, it is quite easy to use and offers a lot of functions. A very good tool to quickly see what you are doing. This however isn't really necessary to build a webpage of course, in this contest I only used a text editor to edit the html and css. Another perhaps obvious but very useful thing to do is to check out other sites and to look through the source, a good way to familiarize yourself with HTML.
YouGamers: Can you remember your first PC? What was the first game you played on it? Jeroen: Wow, thats quite some time ago. I believe our first PC in this household was a 386 PC but I was like 8 back then and I'm not sure about the specs. :P I do remember some games I played on it back then (I looked up the titles for you guys, hehe): Goofy's Railroad express (first game I played), Donald's Alphabet Chase, and Prince of Persia. The first two being educational kid games and the 3rd being the awesomenest game ever.
YouGamers: What game(s) currently take up most of your time at the moment? Jeroen: Out of all the games I have played I have spend the most time on World of Warcraft without a doubt, however I stopped playing World of Warcraft which was mainly caused by the fact that I played it too much and got bored. I'm usually not someone that sticks too long to one game. For some reason though I came back to a game called Infantry that I stopped playing some years ago, which is a now free again after some time of being pay2play. Infantry is the game I play most right now.
YouGamers: What will be the first game you'll try on your new Alienware laptop? :) Jeroen: Nothing I play currently is really that 'machine straining' so I'm going to have to find something that really makes use of this new laptop. I think I might give Supreme Commander a go :) .
YouGamers: Will your "old" PC get used as much now? :) Jeroen: Well, very likely, just not by me :P. My younger brother can make use of my current PC after I gladly replace it with my new laptop, I really hate the space its taking up, especially due to my CRT monitor. I think I might have to get myself a wireless router to make sure I can use this new laptop to the fullest though, I'd love to be able to use it everywhere in the house.
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