| From: | Steve Eley <sfeley@***.NET> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | FASA Site updates (was Re: Item List Tables) |
| Date: | Tue, 25 Aug 1998 10:57:59 -0400 |
FASAMKTG@***.com, since it's a suggestion involving FASA's Web site.)
Autonomous Zone wrote:
> [Regarding a complete Equipment List for Shadowrun Third Edition]
>
> We put together an updated table as we did SR3. Because of the fact that
> it's so huge, it likely won't appear in any upcoming books. Considering
> that, Mike said he would like to put it up on the FASA website. Maybe in
> a few months?
Q: Given the massive fan support FASA has behind all three* of its games,
why is "resources" considered an acceptable reason for FASA's website to
be so disorganized and out-of-date?
You have here what equates to a volunteer army. Hand-pick two or three
list denizens as "Official Shadowrun Webmongers" or whatever, e-mail them
the raw material, and let them do the page designs and HTML conversions no
one seems to have time for. Once you get back polished individual pages
from them, putting links in from the main FASA page is just a
several-minute job for some employee or paid contractor. You could even
assign entire subsections to specific volunteers, for the sake of
organization.
The benefits are:
1.) A richly developed, up-to-date Web site, greatly enhancing FASA's
reputation; and
2.) Reduced costs, since there's plenty of HTML-proficient people here
who'd do the job for bragging rights and the chance to see this stuff a
few days ahead of everyone else.
The risks are:
1.) Reliability, since you can never *make* a volunteer do something; and
2.) Quality, which you can't be assured of until you see the finished
product come back.
Risk 1 can be managed simply by limiting the offer to people who are
long-time supporters of the game and whose own Web sites show a great deal
of work and dedication. Risk 2 can be monitored easily by taking five
minutes to review the Web pages that are sent back before putting them on
the FASA site.
Setting up the program might take some time early on, since someone at
FASA would have to come up with a standards document (page backgrounds,
font sizes, headers and footers, etc.) for volunteers to follow to
maintain a consistent look for the site. And someone at the FASA end
would still have to do minor editing on the pages that come back in. But
that's still *much* faster and cheaper than having to do the work
in-house, and once FASA sees what Web volunteers can do there might be an
opportunity for them to provide more creative input, taking even more load
off people whose real job is game development.
What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? Or an idea that's been proposed
already and rejected, ignored, or under lengthy consideration?
Have Fun,
- Steve Eley (management consultant, in case you couldn't tell) >8->
sfeley@***.net
