Hmm... how about an RSS feed to alert us of updates?

I can't wait to see the new design, and the Articles sound like they'll be a blast, too.

Oh yeah, RSS will probably be there too! That was a suggestion from a while back so I'll definitely see what I can do about that.

Here is one suggestion that I have: use PNG instead of GIF. As long as it is properly compressed, a PNG will generally always be smaller than a GIF, and it is supported by all the major browsers (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers#Image_format_support for a comparison). And note that, while IE 6 and below can't handle alpha channels, they can still do single color transparency like GIFs.

For best compression, I recommend a tool from Ken Silverman, called PNGOUT. It's a freeware command-line program for converting images to PNG format (and optimizing existing PNGs). It produces file sizes smaller than just about any other program I know of, and its compression is completely lossless. You can find it at http://advsys.net/ken/utils.htm. I used it to re-compress some of the images on the site and got some nice results; for example, the first summary image in the Sonic 2 Aquatic Ruin page, s2-arz-summaryimg1.gif, was reduced from 23.5 kB to 11.1 kB in PNG format, which is less than half of the original size. It seems you can also shave about 9-10% off of your maps, just by re-compressing them.

And about those maps, I was wondering if it might be possible to reduce their colors enough to fit into a palette-based PNG. The Genesis can normally only display 64 colors at a time, and this is doubled with a single mid-frame palette change (such as the switch to the underwater palette to render the below-water portion of a Sonic level), so that gives a total of 128 colors in any given stage (and thus a theoretical maximum of 128 colors for a plain, unedited map, though 40-50 is more typical). Naturally, since you reduce the maps to about half of their original size, you must apply some type of filtering so that they still look pretty and that will add additional variations in color. Combined with the little markings, arrows, and the map legend, many more unique colors are added, but I still think you could take the existing maps and reduce them to a palette-based image in Photoshop without much loss of quality, but with a huge decrease in size.

Just as an example, I took your Metropolis Zone Act 3 map, which was nearly four and a half megabytes, with over 160,000 distinct colors, and reduced it to an 8-bit palette-based PNG, and the resulting image was only 842 KB (a reduction of nearly 82%!), with very little noticeable decrease in quality (I can email you the image if you'd like, so that you can evaluate the quality yourself). Getting those maps down to a reasonable size would not only make your users' downloads faster, but it'd also help with your bandwidth.

Thank you Reckoner, your suggestions intrigue me. While bandwidth isn't a problem right now, it's likely to be a big issue as the site gets more popular and I add more maps and other files. If it'll save me the cost of having to buy more, not to mention having to turn away visitors because I've run out of bandwidth that month, then it's definitely worth looking at. I'll check out the program you've suggested and in the meantime if you could email me that Metropolis zone map (just click on my name at the start of this post), I'll have a look at that too, thanks!

You could make a blue backround.

I just wanna say this: don't change the logo. That's a beautiful picture of Sonic.