Welcome to Project Odyssey.

This reinvented website design is the culmination of a good two month's work. In late November I had a spark of inspiration, designed the title logo for this page and the rest came quick when I finished that. You all got a peak in Sarin's report in December. Since then we've made a lot of changes, and this is the final product. I have to say, I'm normally not pleased with my website designs even when I'm finished, but this one I am quite thrilled with from both a design and coding perspective.

Before I go into some of the benefits and features of this new design, let me say a few words of thanks to people who helped me get this up and running. First, a gigantic thanks to Sildrin and Orv who helped immensely with ideas and coding. Sildrin is responsible for the awesome menu system and Orv helped a lot with organizing and doing the important news spotlight. Both were great to work with: I'd go to sleep and ask for them to do something and it'd be done when I woke up. It was great teamwork all around.

Special thanks also to Raken, Muz, Sarin, Kir and Halc. Raken had been talking with me about various design aspects every night while I've worked on this; his insight has been invaluable. Muz also helped with ideas and was a great help in getting the design of the content boxes ready. Sarin, Kir and Halc were a great source for feedback. I appreciate the help.

The best thing about this site is not the graphics, but rather it is the flexibility. The wider base design and the drop down menus give us valuable screen real estate with which we can do more cool things. I'm sure you've already noticed that a few little features have popped up on the default page for the site. We've built this in a way that doesn't constrain us to one box of content for each page like the old layouts, meaning we can add sidebars for extra information to make other pages more intuitive and useful. We can also do some cool custom design elements, as you will see with the upcoming character sheets.

There is a different version of this layout for each clan! I put that in bold so you guys know to go to the layouts page and check out what you have for options. I spent a lot of time making those backdrops, so I hope you like them.

When you set your layout to match one of the clans, the "Join the Brotherhood" logo in the top right of the default page will turn into a "Resource box" filled with fun clan-specific links. I hope this helps you out.

Watch the "Dark Jedi Brotherhood" logo at the top for a while. Yay for JacFlash (tm).

Change your bookmarks to http://www.darkjedibrotherhood.com/! Most of us have the news page set to be our bookmarked page, but the new default page will take that over. We've dropped the splash page -- just go straight to the website now. I've put a temporary redirect on the news script to entice people to make the change. Enjoy the new "Important News" box.

This layout completely replaces the three old layouts. Given the nature of the website's progress and the need for the website to be upgradeable, the old layouts had to go. The coding, organization and designs weren't conducive to what we want to do. Rest assured, there are plans to rework those designs and bring them back eventually, but that will not happen for some time.

The site is built for 1024x768 monitors. We simply cannot justify the constraints of 800x600 support when those users represent an eight of a percent of our user base. Sorry.

For those of you using IE6, you will notice a delay in the site load as the images are forced into transparency. Upgrade your browser! Use Firefox!

The menu (thanks Sil!) is a much better solution than the old Exodus Layout version. I've added some more links to it and reorganized it some. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for more links. Special note: we fulfilled the request of many -- the links on the drop down menu are right-button clickable!

Project Odyssey is only completed in part. Part 1 was the launch of the Odyssey layout. Part two is well underway. It involves a process called Templating. Long story short: we are re-writing a lot of the way the site draws a layout so in the future we can have a very flexible website.

As with any big site change, there are sure to be some hiccups. Please email me with any issues you encounter.

Jac