(Link to site in image)

Every now and then I look around for site’s my friends have made, and like to have a browse of what they’ve done. One brilliant site I’ve seen is Epyks, a site made by Jon/Skype. (Get the joke anyone?) Epyks is similar to BridgeNinja, in that it provides a portfolio of creations, as well as a forum and blog. So now, I’m going to look at the site and each of the sections to it, and introduce you to a new, magical, wonderful world. A more grander world. A more epyk world.

Epyks.net forums is a great, laid back group, similar to our own forums, but with way more people in it. (But you guys are going to bring up the activity, riiiiight?) Epyks Forums also run on PHPBB, which is possibly the best freely available forum software to date. There’s a clean, attractive theme to the forum (but its just as unrelated to the site’s theme as our forum is to the blogs. Which is shabby by the way) and bright, contrasting colours for staff members, so you know whos who.

Epyks also has a great music player, like ours, but has it’s own homemade music. (While we have a collection of songs from my playlist. I should probably start making my own music too. ) The player has simple navigation, with a minimalist approach to design, and shows off the cover art of each song to the left of the song list. The player looks a little out-of-place, being a contrasting white to the site’s black/blue theme. There’s currently 15 songs to listen to, so head on over and have a listen.

Another attraction of Epyks is the gallery of themes on offer. Jon creates brilliant pieces freely available to the public, which vary in style, colour and shape. While not drastically complex, the templates are clean and effective ways to show off site content, without making the surrounding page look unattended. However theme’s that Jon has made for Epyks don’t ever appear in the templates section, which is somewhat disappointing for me, as they’re some of the most beautiful works you’ll find.

As well as tutorials, Epyks has a Photoshop gallery and several gaming servers that run Minecraft and Counter Strike: Source. Unfortunately though I haven’t tested these servers, and thus can’t review them. However, I can report the tutorials are well presented, and easy (very easy) to understand. The Photoshop gallery is decent work, but mostly just forum tags and the like. There are a few more impressive works in there, (such as his ‘cloud’ tag) but most of it is somewhat mediocre.

One other interesting feature of Epyks is the blog’s update system – the blog posts are in fact made from the forum, and are presented on the front page under a different template. (So basically, the front page is a pretty version of the updates forum ) Strangely RSS isn’t available as of now, but I’d imagine this is only a temporary issue.

Overall Epyks is a nice site, and if you want to waste time on something for a while, it has plenty for you to do and see. The forums also allows you to voice your thoughts and opinions to Jon himself, as well as other members of the Epyks community.