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Being an interested player based off reading a forum post about this game on another website, I can see why this game isn't doing well.

Here's a few suggestions:

I. Your main website and forum design is terrible.

- Aesthetic appeal is terrible. I do not believe you have a professional web designer involved, even students in my university art school has designed much better interface and web design than this.

- The font and text does not fit the graphics used. If you look at the footer, you can see the address overextending the borders.

- It's crude but it must be said, even porn websites have better layout than what is displayed. It seems cheap, and unprofessional. It puts people off, and does not even seem like an official website for any major OR minor MMORPG.

II. There is absolutely no advertisement of this game, at all. No where. I would not have heard of this game if not from reading a remote post, at an obscure section of the website 'onrpg.com' which isn't even a very large gaming/news forum.

III. Now that I have posted the first post, the forums layout is also atrocious. Just use the default phpBB layouts. The posts are cut off half way.

The website does look awful, especially considering it used to be nicer. However, I remember it having some ugly yellow text for a while, which is gone now, so it seems there has been some improvement.

I don't see any cutting-off. Please post a screenshot of this phenomenon.

You are welcome to support the team of volunteers responsible for most of the content we enjoy, forums, ingame web apps just to name two. I don't agree with the forum, it looks fine to me and seems to work pretty nice, but the homepage is indeed 1) misleading and 2) rather chaotic design wise. I don't think we use phpBB internally though.

I agree that the website is badly designed and not very appealing. Perhaps we could have some kind of competition for a full redesign?

I think we should have a competition just to choose a designer who will do the final version in cooperation with devs. Most professionals won't like to put weeks of work into something that might not be used eventually - even if they would work on the ryzom hp for free. So i'm suggesting a competition where everyone can submit a few websites they designed (for different purposes) and maybe add some concept artwork for a new ryzom hp. The winner gets the job and maybe a nice reward if the result is nice.

The forums and wiki is a different story. They need to work both in WebIG browser and regular browsers. The WebIG browser has a very limited feature set comparable to maybe IE5 or netscape navigator 3 (no, not firefox 3) without script support and css. And the result should somewhat taste good if it is served as a side dish to the game client.

Two different templates might do the trick, but i don't know how much work would be involved on the webserver side (most likely no template support at all at the moment).

You're right about that (as far as the public WebIG apps are involved)
They're all a lot of HTML code in PHP variables loading language strings from a gigantic array ;-)

But there's already a differentiation between IG and not.

templating is overrated ;-) it's all about final markup

try this forum css example for stylish firefox extension
(it's an example and not a suggestion to make forum look like that)