Rado S <rado at math.uni-hamburg.de> writes: > Then maybe you should explain what "good enough" means (for you). Many things can be good enough, but here's what I like about the geno site: Good background colors and fonts, especially light fonts/dark background; gives it more of a space/sf/startrek look. functional yet non-intrusive menus, nice banner art, good overall structure, rotating screenshots and hints, archives of articles about the game, no javascript required, no flash required. A wiki can do all of these things (except some need javascript), but we'd be building them from close to scratch when we already have them. Besides the old site, another site I think is good enough is www.memory-alpha.org; it's the only pretty-looking wiki I've seen to date. My standards may be higher than average, but given that we already have something that meets them, I can't think I'm being unreasonable here. And I'm not even saying "No Wiki." I'm saying "Old and easy to support site first, because we need something quickly and because I'm not sure we have resources to support a wiki." > Attraction should be done by functionality of the code and appeal > of the product itself rather than the website. Having some > screenshots on any website system should cover that. The website is part of the product. Documentation and support is part of a product. A few screenshots is not enough; if the world worked like that, the magazine advertising industry would not exist and web design wouldn't be a career skill. We are in a sales and marketing competition for people's attention. You may not like that, but it is true. You could think of it as evolutionary competition if you like. We're losing, badly, to the point where the game is a shadow of what it was seven years ago, even though the possible player population is probably ten times the size. In a world where a quarter-million copies of WoW sell in the first week, and the internet chess and Go servers are populated by world-class players, we probably don't have a thousand regular players, maybe not even three hundred. Evolutionarily speaking, we need every bit of plumage we can get. We need buzz/mindshare/awareness that we exist. We need friends to talk us up to potential players. Saying the game will survive on its on merits and doesn't need the best possible website to help provide outside-of-game support is like saying you are likely to be able to walk into a bar having not showered or changed clothes for a month and get laid just because you're great in bed. That might fly for a hot new first person shooter, but for a middle-aged average-looking dude like netrek, we need to look presentable before someone is gonna follow us home for a drink and find out how cool we really are. Lots of people will choose whether or not to download a client based on how the website looks, and on how good its support documentation is; the game's merits won't even enter into it until you get people interested. I'm not suggesting armani suits here; I'm just saying something that looking like we just came off a construction site is not gonna cut it. >> We should have a design that looks as good as the genocide content. > > (hmm, maybe I should turn back on all the fancy/ flashy things to > see what you mean which I normally turn off to save my eyes ;) I have javascript and flash off (noscript extension to firefox). My browser does obey style sheets, and will display animated gifs. Part of why I like the geno site is that it pretty straightforward. I'm very much about function before form; in this case, selling the game is part of the function. I don't think we need grotesque plugin or script stuff to do it, though a movie or two as ancillary content might be ok. >> (Do we even have anyone who knows how to make a wiki look good? >> And how long will it take them to do so? > > Wikis with stylesheets support exist, images can be placed as you > like, what else does it need? To be there, and to be supported. (Though the rotating images and hints plus download box on the current site are nice). Supported means backups, upgrades, passwords, people who know how to do attractive design for our particular wiki and have access to do so. > If the community can't sustain itself, then it need not be kept > alive artificially. Call me old-fashioned, but if I'm in critical condition, I'd rather be on a respirator for a few months than get kicked out into the street. The decisions we make right now may determine whether or not the community can support itself. --akb