Quote:
|
Originally Posted by wakey
The portal has throughout its history been the single biggest waste of space this game has ever seen. More time has been spent on redeveloping thsi every couple of rounds than have been spend on the game and even when the portal was the first page of the game no-one really bothered to read it because any official portal is bland and boring and over restrictive.
|
Has any portal actually looked good? Most of them have looked awful and cheap, instead of being well designed and appealing to players.
Content is vital, as well as regular news. Also the content shouldn't be duplicated everywhere to give people a reason to visit such a portal. The forum currently gets the full content of every news posting, instead it could get the first paragraph of a news posting from an RSS feed (vBulletin
supports this). The ingame MOTD should point to portal news items instead of pointing to a forum thread. Doing these two things should encourage people to visit the portal. An important thing to remember is that it still needs to be a good portal, forcing people to view an awful site isn't going to do any good.
As Kal mentioned, most of the effort goes into the game. Usually any website/portal development takes time away from game development - which it shouldn't. The main website should be an important part of Planetarion, it should get enough time and effort to make sure it gets maintained well.
There still is a potential to make a decent portal/website, however the mistakes from every other portal needs to be taken into account.