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RE: Suggestion: Website update
IE3 is completely unusable on today's Internet but, still, people put code in the web pages to support it. Somewhere around IE8 or 9 Microsoft seems to have given up on trying to define the standard and work with it, instead. If you're only interested in IE9 or later, you barely need any shims at all. Perhaps, in another year or two IE and Opera will get their acts together.
As to main pages .. yes, you can design around them. But most sites presume you're well knowledgeable about them and the subject. To my mind, that's a mistake. I like the way Second Life does it. If you have an account, the main page takes you either to your personal Dashboard, or asks you to log in. But if you don't it gives you a page where you can learn what Second Life is all about, and create a new account. That's easy enough to do .. if the browser has a PHP session cookie, showing they have an account, redirect to their Dashboard; otherwise serve up the default page.
I agree those huge images on the main page are a problem if for no other reason than they make it all but impossible to support iPhone and Android directly. I left it, as I said, because I didn't want to depart too much from the current style. I was mainly interested in making the page more useful to new and potential customers.
Personally, I get turned off by sites which shove news/blogs at me. I like a site which hits me with a lean/clean landing page and lets me drill down to the point I'm interested in. It's easy enough to bookmark a deep link so, for the sites I go to a lot, I'll often bookmark the point I'm likely to want to start at. The idea of directing the user to a page based upon having an account (or, better yet, let them choose one via a preference setting) does the same job, just from the server-side instead of forcing me to do it with bookmarks.
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