NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gargoyle" data-source="post: 269650" data-attributes="member: 529">I'll throw my 2 coppers in.  Morrus, I think a site design is a good idea as long as it's something you are interested in doing.  You've got to get enjoyment out of running a fan site, because the worst thing that can happen is that updating the site starts to become a chore.   Even if your site is a business, it shouldn't be something that you don't look forward to.  I would humbly suggest making the site design simple, without much in the way of fancy graphics or animation, and heavy on content.  As far as the name, I would resist the urge to change it.  If you get a great idea for a new name, sure, go for it.  The idea that you should rename it whenever you do the site design doesn't make sense to me.  You can rename it anytime.  Doing so during a major redesign might confuse new users even more.Eric has some good points.  When it comes to relationships with publishers and fans, I'm glad to see that the fans are the priority.  Yeah, I'm a publisher (barely!), but I've been an RPG fan much longer.  Even if I manage to become a full time game publisher (sigh...some day)  I'll still be a fan.    ENWorld's news reports are valuable real estate for publishers because so many fans view them, and as long as the site caters to fans and keeps advertisements unobtrusive, it will continue to be so.  So publishers win from a focus on fans as well.  Some random thoughts on improving the site:  (I'm sure some of these are impractical or just aren't what you want to do, just throwing stuff out for thought)- Promote online play of D&D on the messageboards and chat rooms.  I'm not certain about the best way to do this, but I do know that there are a lot of players on the site without DM's and vice versa.  Nothing promotes a D&D fan site like getting people to play.  - Keep up the updates at all costs.  Nothing kills a site like inactivity.  You may want to set up a script so that messageboard moderators can post news bits on the front page.  - Post more links to interesting messageboard threads on the front page, not just celebrity posts.  This will get the people who just read the news into the messageboards.  You can do the opposite by posting announcements in the boards linking to news items.  I've noticed many people on the boards are unaware of the news because they've found it through a link from somewhere else.  Perhaps the messageboard moderators can be given the ability to post news as well for this purpose, or you can use a script or something to automatically post a popular thread in the margin.  - Create an open content section where publishers and individuals can submit free OGC material.  If you can give publishers and fans accounts and let them upload materials themselves, all the better.  I've always thought ENWorld should be the one place where you could find all the free d20 material that exists.  I'm sure there are other websites that are attempting to do this, but since I don't have time to surf the web, like many of your other visitors, I haven't discovered one that I like.  - Rename the website to "Morrus' 4th Edition D&D News" and post a press release from Peter Atkinson with info on the upcoming 4th edition of D&D.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Ok, I'm past two coppers, and up to electrum pieces...I'll shut up now.</blockquote>

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