The graphics and logo on the main site (
http://www.planetarion.com ) are cool, very cool even. However, nothing on that page can give a new visitor a good impression what the game is about. It may even not be totally clear that planetarion is a game after all, unless you clicked through from one of those game sites where planetarion might be listed .
So I would like to suggest some additions to the entry page. There should be at least a top10 rankings of planets/galaxys/alliances with scores next to it. Small graphical stats of score-evolution of the top alliances from the past few days would be nice too. None of those should be so detailled or extensive that excisting players would actually use it to see who is winning what. It should just tell new visitors that this is a game, with a hard competition, and it plays in a universe where planets are part of alliances and play in galaxys against eachother. And every day is a new war. They should be able to see that after a quick view of the entry page. This is a general rule with developing sites, if a new visitor can not even determine what your site is about, something is failing and you are probably losing that visitor and can not turn him into a possible client (or player).
It should also be clear that this game is about ships and numbers and timing. So it would be nice to have pages that for example shows recent battle reports sorted by day. The most recent ones could be linked from the main page too. How should battle reports come onto the site ? Well, maybe the controls in journal page ( Status: 'Private' 'Change to Public' 'Delete Entry' ) could be extended with a 'Add to portal' link. A small textfield form could also be added, so that the player can write a short description about this battle. Allowing players to brag about their battles on the portal in a simple way, would surely motivate them enough to garantee a daily batch of new public battle reports. They could be automatically spread so every hour a limited amount of reports comes online with a small delay, or that battles with bigger ship values can get publishing-priority over smaller battles.
With all respect to the people who are planning to use the yet-unfinished blog system, or who wrote articles for any of the previous versions of the portal, but those systems hardly produce enough interesting content. Those type of things are mostly used by only a small amount of people, and dont have enough connection with the game. Automated publishing of battle reports will require very little human effort and will create a lot more public content that is directly related to the game. Maybe we could allow other players to post comments on published battle reports, but that would probably depend on a login system outside of the game, or linking forum accounts to it in some kind of onorthodox way. Publishing other type of events would be nice too, but I cant think of much of those at the moment. Scans or covop results are mostly not that exciting as battle reports.
Another important thing is to show new visitors that everything is happening right now. This site and its game are not an abandonded piece of the internet that hasnt been updated for years ... no, the game is running while they are visiting it. So every mention of a 'tick' in battle reports and other game content, should also have the caption of ' xx hours ago '. That way visitors will realise everything is very recent, and they will be more likely to get involved too.
A galaxy browser on a seperate page would be nessary too. Just to let visitors look inside the game universe and see the galaxys, planets, scores, races and maybe some rank information too. This page should have almost the same layout as the ingame 'galaxy' page, so that once they sign up and play the game, tis part should already be familiar. The same could be said about the manual pages.
And the last thing I can think of : a public page that holds some of the 'misc' stats we have ingame too. Especially the part with ship stats (maybe simply grouped by class , because we dont want to overwhelm with data and stats too) and the stats about the races. This is another important piece of the game, and it can very well be demonstrated with some simple stats. And ofcourse here and all other stats should get the caption of ' updated xx minutes ago', to once again show that the game is happening now.
more game content on portal -> better portal -> turning more visitors into players -> bigger universe -> more fun