In the meantime, here's a work-in-progress mockup of the advertising page. I had to wait to get back to the office and good old Windows to build this; I'm starting to get the hang of Fireworks, and the final version should be much better. Again, this is just layout; the colors are NOT representative of design direction. I will follow this post up within a day or two with the finished version, still grayscale.
An idea I'm toying with is making direct buys much, much easier. Visit our advertising page, upload your creatives, specify the durations you want, provide your account/payment info and wait for approval. The rounded boxes that read "Upload Asset" would be nicely AJAX-ified forms that you click in and get the file browser and can upload in-page, but it would be nice if they could also support drag and drop events. We'll see. Some of you might remember when Ethereal Darkness Interactive purchased ads on GameDev in support of the release of Morning's Wrath; this would have made it a snap for both parties (because we wouldn't have needed to process a manual transaction, nor would we need to manually insert their buys into the inventory, which is what I think happened then).
Anyway, feedback welcome. I'll be finishing this page up and then moving on to the Events calendar, which I think you will all really enjoy. [smile]
