The website obviously needs an overhaul. It should offer members and non-members different things, in a way that might be complicated to set up.
- An easy way for a tournament organiser to provide all the information that potential attendees might need, including an upload of the rulepack, a link to the forum thread, all on one page. This would improve this page:
- This would need to be accessible to all without paying membership, otherwise it would not be used by tournament organisers (one of the reasons at the moment).
- There should then be a Members section, where you can view the Matches that took place, download the Score file, and read a tournament report.
- The Library section should be a central repository for all things to do with tabletop Blood Bowl, with links to excellent sites like Plasmoid's playbooks, bbgridiron.com, bbtactics, GW and so on, a catalogue of suppliers of Fantasy Football models. This is particularly necessary as Googling Blood Bowl I suspect will hit the Cyanide version more often than not. This should be a Members only service.
- There should be a new League section, offering the service that stuntyleeg offers, or used to, in that any BB league should be able to get access to OBBLM without having to install it themselves. This would need people to be NAF Members if they are part of the league. Edit: This does already exist on the OBBLM site, which I didn't realise, but incorporation with NAF would/might make it more popular.
- The NAF Newsletter should go to Members, and all the content accessible to Members only. At the moment this isn't possible because of the functionality of thenaf.net, so content resides on nafnewsletter.com.
- The Rankings are excellent, I think, and don't need any fiddling with. If the doubleskulls analysis could be automated and incorporated into the website, that would be great. Rankings and all analysis should be Members only.
- The Forum should be part Members and part non-Members, with all the tournament threads in a non-Members section, but with frequent hints about all the lovely stuff that can be found in the Members section.
Now all of the above is website-based, but some of it should be possible under the current structure. If there were a new structure at some point, it should bear the above in mind. In terms of non-website things:
- The NAF should have a Recruitment Organiser, who organises and supports demoing by local people at non-BB tournaments and events such as Salute. Obviously, the NAF is not trying to sell the game, but is trying to get people to play it, which would be a very different take for demo stands. With a standard setup and a standard set of simplified rules for demo games, this would make organising demos a lot easier.
- Without block dice, the "collectable" bit of merchandising should be rethought - maybe different coloured badges or patches for each year of membership. These could become as collectable as block dice, possibly.
- The membership should be reduced to around $5, as this will make it a lot easier for people to make the decision to join, and without the draw of block dice something needs to be done. However, the point has been made frequently that there needs to be something you get for your membership. All the website stuff that I mentioned above would I think be worth this nominal member fee, but without knowledge of the accounts I don't know if this would make the NAF viable.
I may think of more later, but I think that's it for just now.
Mike
Edit: As people make good points, I will summarise them.
First summary - page 4. http://talkfantasyfootball.org/viewtopi ... 14#p679414
