dude i love the look of Yeti's site.  http://www.yeticycles.com/ .  Totally simple with one big stoke picture  pop-up navi bar.  The yeti website takes donkey's ages to load, but it's almost the wait...

i don't think the photo should be random though (for fear of a big shot of lloyd eating poo - no offense to lloyd, i know the little guy loves poo).  my 2 cents.

I have to back SNP, there are some pix on here that I wouldn't want as someones first impression of the site.

The random images are selected only from the Poach Album - which is supposed to contain only riding and mountain shots.  Although I noticed that FT put some lake swimming shots in there.  Good one fattwins.

I have also noticed that the random image has not yet changed.

That Yeti site is cool.  Keep in mind it is a pro level commercial site, it has pro level photos and isnt a community site like this with lots of different functions and dynamic content.  Their whole site is 'just' a collection of static pages that get updated from time to time (like all corporate style sites).  We could make a custom front page with one swesome image, but remember that you only see the front page if you are not logged in as a registered member when you land at poachninja.   If your browser is set to remember your session you should automatically be logged in the moment you arrive here and so should never see that welcome page.  poachninja.com re-directs a returning logged in user to their My Site page.

Also, the current front page for unreg visitors fits in with the visual theme of the rest of the site, which is important.

My 2 cents: it cannot be random.  I leave it to admin's discretion but we need stoke.  pic of he week/month or whatever but it needs to be screened.

I second this, another idea would be to select 3-5 pix per month and have the members vote on what they want to see.  I trust the PN admin's judgement and I'm sure hes not going to throw FT's faggy lake jumping pix up on our frontpage.  But I think it would be cool if our members have some say on things such as pic of the week/month/welcome pix. 

SJ's has pix of the month/year and shit like that but they are always selected by the admins, personally I think it would be cool if the members got to vote on who's shots they think are the best. 

This should be the permanent welcome shot

If you want to use that on the front page of the site, then you ll have to change its name to GayNinja.com

I agree with Hattori, the members should vote for the pick of the week.

^ Ban that fat bastard!

Non-random is great, I can set up some voting tool to allow members to rank pictures up or down.  Then select from that for the front page,  or some variant of that.  Its possible, I just have to work it out and test it.  I also have better ideas for formatting the front page.  I think very little welcome message text, just banner image, horizontal menu, STOKE pic and login/register link.

Actually, before we launch fully (after I have stickers, t-shirts and there is a bit more beta up) we should get the BEST japan sking shot we have and keep it up for a couple of weeks as the opening shot.  Then we can go on voted shots.

I agree with Ninjaman.  

In the meantime, i have set up voting on photos.  It doesnt influence whats on the front page so we can still run the best photo possible as suggested and then later switch to best pic as voted by members.  For the time being we just accumulate votes.  I can pretty easily make a page that reports the highest ranked images etc.

Please test the voting thing out http://poachninja.com/photo-albums/poach-album/happo-south-faces-2

I agree, we need to put our best foot forward and use a sick photo for the opening of the site.  Preferably the pic will be of or taken by an original ninja.

Can someone offer up a good pic for me to put on the welcome page, better if its in landscape.  Also log out and take a look at it now, I made a few small changes.

Totally behind the idea of going out with maximum stoke, at the very least for the opening period. I will have a look through my photos although as you can imagine not many my photos are that good outside of the irony/comedy genre...

Well I put up the only half decent photo I have but also realised there is a bunch of stuff I don't have on my flickr account so I will look on my home computer over the weekend if I have time. I guess the problem with a lot of our photos is that the skier is relatively small in the frame, unlike, for example, the awesome in your face photo from that bike site. But that is obviously just because we are weak photographers, not anything to do with the site.

Checking the current placeholder, I think it would be ideal if we could remove the frippery from around the photos (ie star rating, title, user), or at least move it to the bottom, and just go out with a big, clean, uncluttered image that is right in your face. At the moment it seems a bit like you accidentally accessed a gallery page. Apologies, this isn't meant to sound like whinging, just my honest thoughts on the page as it stands, although needless to say I haven't the skills to make a difference myself...

Thanks for the feedback.  The frippery was part of the random image setup.  I turned off random all together as it wasn't working anyway, plus it had the shitty frippery.  I also changed the image to a static one of The Man.  Logout to take a look.

Yes I think that definitely looks better. It will be our job to see if we can create some decent photos over the coming season to use on the site.