Actually, exlibrisauro30.gif
I think you needed to turn on the anti-aliasing for the text in whatever tool you were using, it’s a bit pixelated.
Do you want it to link to the Ravenholme website or the thread? Is the site ready to be announced?
Yeah, Microsoft Paint isn’t the world’s greatest image editting tool. But it’s okay, I’m installing Photoshop today. Yay.
Thread, please.
I just talked to Brian. He’ll announce the site. Could you make the Ravenholme links from the nzlarps.org website go to the website instead of the forum?
Sure, will re-direct everything when it’s announced.
Banner is up.
I’ve updated the mini-calendar, projects, and news.
Looking at the NZLARPS home page, we now have a rather long column on the right from all the events, projects and affiliates.
We could put in an image in the left column, say a large rectangular one under the definition of larp, that will fill out that column a bit vertically and also do what Adam wants in giving the page a bit of visual appeal. Any thoughts on images? Something like a montage of photos might be easiest, but is quite easy to do badly too. But people really are looking for photos. We could make them look like actual developed photos and have them higgledy-piggledy, or just tile them.
Suggestions for alternatives, or suggestions for photos to use?
I’ve redirected the banner ad, project listing, and event listing in the mini-calendar to the Ravenholme site.
Craig, can you maintain the min-calendar on the NZLARPS homepage while I’m away? I think I’ve seen one event announced, and suspect more will happen.
Craig is away until the 18th of June…
Oh yeah. I’ll see if there’s anything to round up.
My word, that’s eye-catching.
Eye catching good, or eye catching bad?
After it gets into rotation, I’ll need to clear it from my account, because it’s a blatent breech of ToS.
Eye catching good, or eye catching bad?
After it gets into rotation, I’ll need to clear it from my account, because it’s a blatent breech of ToS.[/quote]
Julianne likes it. 
I’m experimenting with a scattering of photos on the homepage. It turns out they need to be much bigger than I thought so that their detail can be visible, otherwise they are just little blurry smears. Which in turn means I could only fit three photos in withotu using too much screen space.
The photos I chosen for this example are just some from across the projects & affiliates that I thought were attractive snaps of nice costumes, I haven’t asked anyone for permission yet.
The main thing I feel is missing in that sampling is more “action” shots where characters are interacting or clearly doing somethig, but I couldn’t find any that were really attractive photos. Action shots are harder to do well that portraits.
If we want to show a greater variety then maybe we could make about three of these scatter images, and show them randomly. Requiring 9 photos in total. This will slow down the load time a bit for people who visit just occaisonally, but allow us to show
Adam, could you point me to smaller online versions of the pics you’ve gathered or something? I just want to get an idea of what they’re like.
That scattered photos effect could probably be used on the “Show me the larp!” page as well, when I get to that. Each larp description could be accompanied by a couple of photos in that style & size.
Hey Ryan, I finally got around to making Wolfgang banners. Since Wolfgang’s access to the server isn’t working, I’ve temporarily lodged them on Ravenholme’s, the file names are wolfganghalfbanner.gif and wolfgangfinalbanner.gif
The former is the half banner for the Projects page and the latter is a banner for Diatribe.
Those are pretty funny, I’ve put them up.
The animations might cycle a bit fast, could be a little hard on the eye.
Also for future reference, the full banner is slightly oversize at 34k, normal size is 20k. Except for Nibelungen, which was like 100k. Size can be reduced most easily by reducing the number of colours in the palette.
I think 34k is fine - even on the slowest connections it will only take one second to be cached. The better way to drop size is to have fewer frames.
One second is kinda a long time when browsing, and new users have to cache every banner slowing down their first hits to the site.
When you’ve only got two or three frames and they all convey information, dropping one generally isn’t an option.
It would have been a good idea on the Nibelungen banner though, as that had a lot of frames that were just there for smoothing.
Yeah, I’ll bring Flash up again, but with no commitment whatsoever to implementing it. We’d have to re-write the ad-server because Flash isn’t served in the same way as images.
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