OK, here goes my thoughts. I warn you they are in no particular order.

The front page should be

1) SMALL - It should fit in a single 640x480 window (possibly going up to
800x600). It is unbelievably annoying to have to scroll left/right to read
text.

2) SIMPLE - The front page should be easy to understand and have links to
other sub-pages of various different sections. these sections can then have
nice javascripts, etc on them

3) LINKS - The page should basically be a collection of links to various
sub-areas. I would suggest the following links be provided (not necessarily
in this order):
- Birthright News/Site Updates
- Birthright Netbook (Rules additions
- The Adytum
- Campaign Material (eg. OCP stuff, etc)
- Birthright Links
- Information/Introduction to BR (info to get on this list)
any others?

From a functional point of view, the page should not be graphics heavy
(that's not to say it shouldn't have any graphics). My personal suggestion
would be some sort of image map which has links to all of the various
sub-sections on it.

I would also like to see the page officially "endorsed" by TSR. I don't know
whether this will ever happen (Ed? Carrie? care to comment?).

Some other [related] matters:

* Campaign Material Sub-page: this page should contain all campaign related
material that other people may wish to use in their campaign. For example, I
know Mark VanderMeulen posted some maps of Proudglaive city (Roesone) to the
Adytum - this is the sort of stuff we need here. In other words, locations,
specific NPC's; the kind of stuff on the OCP homepage, but for all of
Cerilia. I would like to see a nice map of Cerilia as the front page, with a
click taking you to each of the main areas - Anuire, Vosgaard, Rjurik,
Khinasi, Brecht and also Others (eg. Aduria, etc).

* A recent survey of hits to the homepage of our University showed about 90%
(of 23,000 hits) of browsers are CSS enabled, so we shouldn't be to scared
to used them. But, the main page should also be sensitive to text. Perhaps,
since it is the very first page people will see, it could even be made a
little different for each browser (run a small detection script, and then
send the user to the appropriate front page - much like microsoft.com does).
That way you could take advantage of the unique features of each, and ensure
that the page looks like it should.

Just some ideas. Hopefully someone will add to them. Cheers,

Simon

Simon Graindorge
E-Mail: simong@iinet.net.au
ICQ: 9222846
http://www.iinet.net.au/~simong/
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