Fangamer

Over the past week or two I’ve been working pretty hard on a new design for the Starmen.Net Forum. (Incidentally, Ryan made a lot of progress on some new code for the forum over Thanksgiving Break… more on that later.) I’ve been uploading mockups for the staff/mods to look over, and the reception so far has definitely been lukewarm.

My first mockup (pictured) is pretty crappy and definitely unfinished, but I wanted to get people talking more than anything else, so I threw it up for the staff/mods to review. Some people liked it, but the general consensus seemed to be that it was too different and too cluttered. And there were lots of things (namely the header and footer) that I simply didn’t include in my hurry to get it posted.

The second series of mockups is a completely different design, much more finished/polished than the first. The reaction has been better, but there still seems to be a lot of reservations. I might post some screenshots later, but for now I’m going to keep it under wraps until I get something more finished.

Speaking of which, a few days ago a stalker kid found one of the forum design mockups I had stupidly uploaded to my personal directory (which was publicly-viewable, but isn’t any longer). He is, apparently, telling everyone who will listen about how he discovered this top secret file that he’s not supposed to have. Ugh. I’m not trying to keep it top secret, but at the same time, the design isn’t done and I’m still talking with the staff/mods about it, so I don’t really want people to see it yet. Like I said, I’ll probably post a preview in a few days for you guys to check out.

I’ve been trying to create a third series of forum mockups from scratch, but every time I sit down with a blank slate in Photoshop, I end up staring at the screen unable to think of anything new. I even went browsing Google for forum designs in hope of finding some inspiration. I wasn’t really expecting to find anything new or groundbreaking, but I was still surprised at just how awful most forum software acts/looks. phpBB and vBulletin remain ultra-popular despite all the useless graphics/information they cram into their templates.

While I was in the shower today I began to realize that the data structure and usability features of my second (current) forum mockup are pretty solid, even if the design leaves some things to be desired. If I can’t think of anything worthwhile for a third iteration, I may end up just cutting my losses and running with that #2 design, because these iterations could go on forever if I let them.

Investor Ninja Attack

In business news, I’ve already got someone interested in investing in Fangamer! That’s good, especially since I haven’t even talked about investment possibilities with the staff yet, so I’m pretty pumped.

I can’t move forward with an investment discussion until I’ve gone over the nitty-gritty details of incorporation with Mr. Gunsnroses Axelrod, but I’m hoping to be able to accept investments from lots of different people. More on that Wednesday.