I am looking at redesigning my website and was wondering if I could get some opinions. I know that the rule is usually to design with users without JS first and foremost, but having looked at the stats, it appears 95% of the users online have JS enabled.
Would you recommend designing the website using JS and not bothering about people without it?
I would suggest going with a library like jQuery. It will fail nicley if there is no javascript. however, looking at the stats, there are very few people with javascript turned off and most are organizations. Such organizations have limits as to what websites they can go to anyway, and shouldn't be on your site at work.
You would be safe to use javascript, especially since this is a gaming website. I imagine your audience likes cool stuff. We are developing a site that is entirely dependent on javascript. Our analysis shows that practically everyone can view our site fine.
I suggest you make you make your JavaScripts degrade gracefully. Not only to make the site's content available for indexing by search engines, but also to make your site accessible to people who uses screen readers.
but having looked at the stats, it appears 95% of the users online have JS enabled.
Remember back when 95% of users used Internet Explorer and web developers designed their sites accordingly?
Given your gamer audience I doubt you will have too many complaints if there are parts of your site that are inaccessible to those users who have JavaScript disabled.
That said, you should still consider taking some time to learn jQuery and the concept of unobtrusive JavaScript. It will require more time initially but you will also learn a marketable skill and the site will likely be easier to maintain in the future.
People who turn off javascript have to be used to dealing with a broken internet. It is like worrying about the people who monkey with your css, if they choose to browse your site in a non standard manner, their experience is not really your responsibility.