I've been wanting to do something about these pages for a while now, and have gone and done things! Before I bulldoze the rest of the prize box pages with this format, I'd like feedback on how the following pages look:
Solstice Prize Box
Hunter Prize Box
Nemesis Prize Box
Reasons:
1) the Costumes (Groups) page that I maintain is, well, annoying to maintain, but people like the visual impact. I figure that most of this page is actually encompassed by prize box releases, so why not just do the visual impact on the prize box page? Anything not prizeboxy is generally taken care of with categories and on individual costume pages, as well as the sortable column on the main costume page. This would also remove the "need" for pages like Costumes (Recolors) and Accessories (Recolors), which I've already redirected to "recolor."
2) prize boxes tend to have too much individualized, circumstantial information to cram it all into a single list. Putting prize boxes on their own individual pages with calendar and content info doesn't seem like a bad idea. It's work, but it's copypaste work for a lot of them. This has been debated in the past, but things change as the game moves on. But I also care. So here I am on the forums again!
3) trying not to use weirdly formatted templates. I've generated about a billion of these trying to make things look "just right," and ended up just using the "gallery" format. It's easy to plug-n-chug this, just use a text replace program function to replace "Hunter" with "Surge" etc. and then copypaste into the new page. One issue I see is the horizontal width, but I figure, if you want visual impact...don't browse on a tiny monitor? Or just sidescroll? another option is to try and organize things by subgroups/sets but eh. The large number of whitespaces also bother me - anyone have a solution that isn't a super complicated weird template? EDIT: I have thought about it, but I am too tired from swatting off tentacles to do it tonight. Still want to hear ideas.
4) provide a sort of "true" advertising. IMO, news images are awesome, but can be...misleading. Like what even is this helmet. I want a Prize Box page to essentially be a visually prettier, integrated-via-links version of the type of post Thalia makes, without us having to update things if sensitive information like billing/odds change. All we have to do is pop in and add something to the calendar section and perhaps expand the gallery, and modify the main prize box page as needed.
I plan on doing something similar with lockboxes, if people like these changes.
Based on a brief viewing, the pages look good. I don't know or care much about these boxes, so I can't comment much more than that.