Bleedman. Yes, he's rather famous. That's why we commissioned him. I'm not sure it was a good investment (and I wasn't sure about it at the time either) but the rest of the staff thought that having the first thing you see look like that would be a good way to catch users' attention and therefore bring in revenue.

The strategy was sound, but the commission was too expensive to pay for itself.

I have never joined any site because of a cool banner.

(User profile, yes. But only once. And that was NaNoWriMo, way back when they still had their little flash books. And I don't even like flash.)

I’m kind of curious how much the commission cost, but at the same time, I kind of do not want to know...

We didn't expect anyone to JOIN because of the cool banner, but high-quality graphics definitely do help RETAIN users because it gives a feeling of overall value to the site. It's not necessarily even a conscious thing.

I think it was something like $300. I don't remember for sure. As far as commission prices are concerned it's not bad for something with that many characters in it, but I don't think we sold $300 more in runes than we would have sold otherwise.

Mhh. Not everything needs to be a 1:1 ratio in terms of actual money. Perhaps you got more than $300 back relative to donations and user retention, which generates income from donations gradually.

I was taking that into account, though. The bump to retention is a fairly subtle thing, and I think that if we had something more like the banner that replaced it from the beginning that we wouldn't have seen much difference. Obviously this is only speculation, since I can't set up any experiments to compare the two, and there's SO MUCH MORE that goes into what makes the community successful that it's hard to measure in the first place, but I think the fact that we don't HAVE character art in the header right now and our user retention is based primarily on community interaction and item releases is a sign that the same has probably been true for most of our history.

the cool banner being the shop owners?

Both cool banners have been shopkeeps.

I mean the one with the phoenix: http://web.archive.org/web/201110061...ee.com/forums/

So awesome ;u;

Well, again I can only speak for myself, but what makes me stay on a site is the community. I've joined a few other avi sites that (in my opinion) had better art than Trisphee, and still this is my virtual home of choice. Community aside though, I think overall value also comes if the color scheme matches, whether or not there are ads on the site, and how easy or bug free it is to use. So the decision makes no sense to me, but then again I don't even need to understand every decision some old staff made years ago *shrug*

Community is a main part for me, too, and if I can easily get used to the site's overall design, plus if it doesn't take forever to load is also a key factor.

TRISPHEE HAS RAINBOW ON THE PALETTE THEREFORE IS THE BEST SITE

if it didn't... hm... well... not sure...

Pfft, Tattered Weave has Prism Party, which is an entire event dedicated to rainbows :P