Hi everyone,

I finally designed a new layout for Aleris that I like a lot right now. There's still a lot of things to build out with it, but yes - a new design after about two years or so is on its way!

Some thing I wanted to ask of you all... is there anything you would like to see in this new layout, either in the forum or the website? If you find there's something that might improve the functionality of the forum/website or just make them that more interesting, please let me know.

Some "spoilers" about the new design:

• The background color will be mostly white. I wanted to do something a bit brighter and cleaner this time. So far - to me and Dystopia - the new design looks fantastic. Just throwing the background color out there in case you guys need to know for signatures.
• Speaking of signatures... I am finally going to be setting a width and height requirement for signatures via the user control panel in the forum. The max height I'm thinking may be 400 pixels. Not sure what the width is. I really don't believe there's any reason you need a signature bigger than 400 pixels! It just makes more scrolling for people. More details on this later.
• Better organization in the character sheet / member profile area. I'm planning on "tabbing" it out. Meaning, if you click on "Player information" you'll get info relating to the person. If you click on "Character Information", you'll get information about the character. It may be broken up further once I get into it.
• Hopefully expand/collapse functionality on the main forum page. What this means is, there will be a little minus or plus sign and when you click on it, it'll either expand/collapse the forum.
• A chat box? Does anyone want this on the forum? See http://www.rpg-directory.com at the bottom for an example.
• An update to the font BBC codes. Right now, there's no default font size set to them, which is okay for some fonts, but for others it makes for more difficult reading of posts, since their "natural" font size is smaller.
• Some better forum icons/graphics and weather listings for each continent, because let's face it... it's not always spring in Arthuran.

Those are just some ideas I have, but by all means, please suggest something you all have in mind and I will try to implement them.