Wizards of the Coast staffer Peter Schaefer has moved his blog to Gleemax.  Speaking of Gleemax, let me proceed to offer my thoughts on the Gleemax site and how I think it is a sign of things to come for Dungeon and Dragons 4th edition online content.  Warning: cynicism ahead.

Green alien bubbling goo background… check.
It looks like beer or soda, only green.  What the hell does this have to do with gaming?  I suppose it looks cool, but has nothing to do with the rest of the site’s theme.  Perhaps it was St. Paddy’s day when the designer was trolling google images for a background to use?

1980’s sci-fi logo font… totally rad!
We’ll leave the horrible name aside and just focus on the fact that you can’t look at it without doing your best to imitate Johnny 5 or Max from Space Camp when saying “Gleemax”.  I suppose it could go well with the alien goo background, but the sci-fi-ish flair doesn’t make sense for a primarily D&D buying audience.  Even Wizard’s other best selling products aren’t related to this sorta sci-fi theme.  I just don’t get it.

Gleemax… what?
I had orginally intended to not rehash the generally grumblings about the name, but… I… just… can’t… stop… myself.  It’s awful.  According to Merriam Webster, “glee” has two meanings:

Main Entry: glee
Pronunciation: \ˈglē\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English glēo entertainment, music; akin to Old Norse glȳ joy, and perhaps to Greek chleuē joke
Date: before 12th century
1 : exultant high-spirited joy : merriment
2 : a part-song for usually male voices

I think we can safely rule out definition two has being the inspiration behind the name.  I suppose they wanted to convey Maximum exultant high-spritied joy.  Yeah that makes sense and is *exactly* the feeling I get each time I visit the site, don’t you?  I did double check that “gleemax” wasn’t some cool word that I hadn’t heard before.  Turns out is just as irrelevant as I thought it was originally.

Randomly shaped bubble buttons with square drop down menu ... sweet.
Pure design genius.  Each button in the menu has it’s own unique shape… but wait, there’s more!  Hover over one of these buttons and you will get a nice square drop down menu that sorta just floats there and isn’t connected to the button in an obvious way.  My favorite floating menu is the “games” one that is so large it literally overlaps the “about” bubble button.

Impossibly small fonts… Squintarrific!
The actually blog text is a very small black font on alternating levels of grey backgrounds.  Holy contrast Batman!  How am I supposed to read this on a regular basis?  I have no idea who thought that the most important information on the page should use the smallest font on the page, but they clearly don’t spend much time actually reading the content themselves.  Why make something so hard to read?  It can’t be an aesthetic choice… could it?

Random Link Colors… like a rainbow!
- The menu uses dark green on day-glo green backgrounds.
- The calendar to the left of the blog posts green on blue backgrounds. 
- The blog post itself switches to perrywinkle blue links on grey.  We can’t stop there!  The hover color is yellow!  Yellow looks great on grey.
- The links under the search box are grey on grey.  Wait, you didn’t actually think the “topics” and “people” were links did you?!  Silly surfer, those are toggles.  You can’t tell because the javascript prevents your cursor from changing as it normally does when it hovers over a clickable object.  The search link itself is the same exact color, but through trial and error you’ll eventually figure it out, right?  Now check out the “login” and “help” links next to the gleemax logo.  They bold when you hover over them, but the search link doesn’t.  It got robbed or a perfectly good css bold statement.  Poor little guy.

Images… coming soon!
I just love it when there is not one, not two, not three, but four fabulous “coming soon” images.  What the heck are these for?  What’s coming soon?  Do I really need to know that some unspecified thing is coming soon?  These must be the digital equivalent of the Wizard of Oz… you suspect that there’s someone behind the curtain, but who?  Maybe if I click on it… nope.  Well, then what about the images that are here?  Perhaps if I click on this Arkham Horror image or this D&D miniatures game logo?  The great and powerful Oz says think again fools!

Alpha Beta
And to top off all this awesomeness, they slap on the word “Alpha” on the logo.  I guess this means that they are acknowledging that the site isn’t in it’s final stages of development.  In fact, it’s not even in beta which is the secondary stages of development.  No, they’ve clearly labeled it alpha which is the initial phase of development and one that the public should not see.  If the site isn’t ready, then don’t launch and certainly don’t call out the missing features with dead links and coming soon images if you do launch.  It’s bad form and shows a sloppiness that doesn’t fit the WotC print image.

On a serious note, the Gleemax site is further assurance that Wizards has no idea what it’s doing in the online world.  They failed with the 3.0 character generator and, in my opinion, barely got by with the main wizards.com site.  And now they put up a site like gleemax which completley crushes my hopes that the 4th edition online offerings will be worthwhile for gamers.  If they can’t get their websites right, how can they get interactive online gaming tools right?  I really want to like it, I just can’t get past the fact that I can’t read it easily.  Perhaps I’m being too harsh on a poor one-man band trying to do their best with the site… I just think Wizards shouldn’t do anything less than the quality of their print products.  This seems especially important now that their moving Dungeon and Dragon content online.