Improving Roleplayer's Haven

I can give a full critique of the site, if you like.  I can't guarantee that any of these ideas would bring in more traffic, and I can gaurantee that they'd be a lot of work, but here goes.  :)

All this said, I enjoy the site and would like to see it improved, but do think there is significant room for improvement. 

1.  The look of the site isn't very inviting.   This is a big topic so I will break it down into further points, but this is one area which could be improved.

2.  The theme isn't very appealing or Conan-esq, imo.  As I remarked above, the WoW rp-haven is far more attractive and has a more 'diary' feel.  In contrast, they middle of the range grey is bland to look at, has no real contrast between the text section and the background, and at no point in any Conan artwork is medieval battlements used. 

3.  I just spoke about  colors.  The all grey is a significant problem as there is no contrast between the background, the columns or the text section.  This is a BIG problem from my perspective.  The thing I think of when looking at this site is concrete. 

4.  The text font needs to be improved.  Even after your eyes get used to the wall of grey, you need to squint to read anything.  Readability of the text is the big reason I do not frequent this site as often as I could. 

5.  Front page of the site needs to be dramatically cleaned up. You load into the front page and it just hits you - there's way too much information, and it is all very confusing.  On the official forums someone wrote 'Man that site is confusing' and that is a bad first impression.  Like the other points, I will break this down into yet more points.  However main point is there is too much information. 

6.  Columns are out of control.  Professional site designers often recommend limiting columns to what is necessary, and importantly, columns need to contain no more than 5 links each.  Otherwise there is just too much choice - becomes confusing and people don't click.   Columns like 'recent blog posts' and 'recent comments' need to be trimmed from ten dot points to 5 dot points each. 

7.  Columns are in odd orders.  Recent blog posts should be at the very top, and recent comments should be below.  Thesse are the two most commonly accessed areas of the site and they should take prominance.   In particular, comments are the lifeblood of the site, so these need to be readily accessable. 

8.  Events need to be toned down a little.  For one thing, there are not that many, and so the 'upcoming events' and calender serve little purpose most of the time.  At the least, these columns need to be placed below blog posts and comments.  For another, I have always regarded the stickying of events as a big problem.  One of the reasons I decided to start my own website (aside from the major reason of wanting full creative control of the format) was that I got a little tired of my posts being buried to the bottom of the page by repeated stickied full page advertisements for events. 

9.  On that note... people need to lose the ability to post full pictures to the front page.  Done tastefully, it is good.  However, other times it just gets annoying.  Unfortunately, the main culprit to my last point was the stickied Thursday Nights at Tesso banner add that just took up the entire page and I had to scroll to read new content I was interested in.  Yeah, am sure it was good advertisement for the event.  But the sheer size of the advertsiement buried everything else.  Some kind of control on this would be good, if possible to limit home page pictures to thumbnails.

10. Many columns are completely redundant and simply take up valuable screen space.  The following columns could be deleted entirely:

- Who's online (this is pointless, as you can see recent comments to get this info better)

- who's new (nice info, but not worth the space it takes)

- new groups (I can't see the point of this, as a guild listing is not the main purpose of the site)

- poll (used for spam - am yet to see a serious poll)

- Events Calender (redundant due to the upcoming events column)

By removing each of these columns we could then get a bigger benefit.  Namely, could convert the site to a two column theme, and move the main content that everyone looks at (the stories) to the left side of the screen.  When people visit a website they usually look first to the left side, and so this is where you want your main content. 

11.  Would recommend considering a 'portal' home page that offers a clean and simply overview at a glance of all the major content.  A big thing that could be done is to have a home page with a list of 'featured blogs' or 'featured authors'.  To become a featured author, people would need to post reasonably regularly, and be rewarded for that a reasonably prominent place on the portal page.  This would help simplify navigation greatly. 

12.  More cross posting could be done.  Encourage people to post on this site as well as the official forums, and encourage guilds to post the RP stories on their own guild forums to hear as well. 

Anyway... these comments are meant to be constructive and helpful.  This is a valuable site, but think it is held back by design issues.