The Saint George Squadron is a highly organised gaming guild focusing on the MMO Pirates of the Burning Sea.  First established in 2004 is has followed the game though development and into, at the time of writing, the 4th year of release.  The Squadron has had several international meet ups in New York and London, has met with staff from Flying Lab Software, the game developers and had Squadron created content added to the game.

The brief

To provide a web presence superior to our competition and on par with the official game site.  The site should focus on long and short term communication including text, images and video content.  Content should be community driven as far as possible so the site does not have to rely on a small group of authors.

The Project

I have been managing this site for 4 years now and have published a number of skins.  The original concept was to keep things visually similar to wikipedia so that users of that site would be familiar with this one.  However requirements have changed with the advent of smart phones and table computing and so a new skin was recently published to improve usability on those platforms.  The skin uses a small top menu with a fixed width main page.  Greater emphasis is placed on the search bar as a primary navigation tool and so this has been moved to the top of the page.  Both wiki and forums share the same layout (although each has a unique CSS template), this makes navigating between the two seamless.

Mediawiki is used to run the wiki and PHPBB3 takes care of the forums, with a single sign-on system simplifying the user experience.  Google Analytics runs in the background to monitor site usage and visitor IP’s are logged to help prevent malisious behavior.