With the rollout of EFU:A, we were nearly unanimous in wanting to redo our old website. At the same time, this was a chance to upgrade our forums software to vBulletin, something we've been sitting on for about a year now. This was all an exciting idea and sounded great, but it didn't come out exactly as planned.
Despite the months and months of time we used to build EFU:A, the website was only really seriously considered about a week before the end of the countdown. As a result, and what some of you are probably already seeing, things were rushed:[LIST=1]
- No time to QA and test forums, links, and content
- No time to build a few custom skins tailored to the new server
- No time to spice up the stale content pages which came from the old website.
With that said, now there is time to tackle these three problems. And seeing as we are public now, we can tackle these problems faster with your help. Here's what you can do:[LIST=1]
- Send me problems you find.
These might be broken links, mispellings, are out of date content. PM me (//%22http://www.escapefromunderdark.com/forums/private.php?do=newpm&u=190%22) the page address (copy it from the top of your browser) where you find these, as well as a brief description that can help point it out.
As a small amendment to this, some forums posts were taken from the old forum and reposted here. Some of them might have strange/unreadable formatting. If you find these, PM ScottyB (//%22http://www.escapefromunderdark.com/forums/private.php?do=newpm&u=250%22), he's the man in charge of that for the moment.
- Keep your eyes peeled for custom skins.
[/B]There are hundreds of good, free vBulletin skins out there, as well as tons of skins you have to drop a few bucks to get. I have no interest in adding each and every skin that's out there. However, I would really like to have a few core skins, well tailored to our gameworld, that enable people to have a choice. I'm interested in about three categories:
- A light/bright theme that gives off more of a 'tropical island' feel
- A darker theme that gives off a more 'mysterious island' feel
- A bare, crisp, and clean theme that has almost no frill, suitable for browsing in a work setting without giving away the fact you play an online roleplaying game to your coworkers.
Once again, send these to my PM box.
I'm not asking anyone to take the time to make a brand new skin from scratch, but if you'd really like to show off your design skills, go wild. I'm not garentueeing a DM quest or anything, but I'll see what I can do.
- Modify the content pages
There are two things that can be done here. One is to rewrite portions of the content pages on the website that you feel could use some touch ups. If there's a section on the website you feel is missing and would be really useful to have, you can take a crack at it too.
The second is a little more technical and more similar to number two above. The content pages have very little in the formatting department. Just simple H2, H3, H4, H5, UL, OL, LI, and P tags were used to create most of it. For any of you with CSS experience and solid design skills (and probably Firebug skills too), I would love to see some suggestions that could make the bland look and feel of the content pages a little more interesting (while not going overboard).