VGC Buddy suddenly appeared for me.

As much as a central office would help, it has to be mentioned that offices cost money and imply a paid position. On slightly smaller scale sites like this, staff positions tend to be unpaid voluntary things. I'm part of a site with a similar sized community that I'm a part of the staff for, and it follows the same idea that even though the site isn't necessarily small, it isn't big enough to actually offer legitimate work to people and be able to deal with an office environment.

An entirely new mobile site is, along with an overhaul of the desktop site, on the cards somewhere down the road, but for the time being the best we can do is work on improving the functionality of the existing site.

In order to change the site in any meaningful way design wise, we would need to re-code from scratch because the codebase currently in use relies heavily on old modules and scripts, updating these scripts to utilize new features and proper CSS3 integration results in the current site breaking in multiple places.

There are a few more reasons why we can't put into effect a massive overhaul just yet but those are best left off the forums.

The last and most important factor here is that neither me nor trucks get paid for the time we put into the sites coding and thus our normal jobs put a damper on how much time we can actually spend working on the site, since any time spent cuts directly in to our own personal free time, I can't speak for trucks here as I'm unaware of the hours he works but for me it's a 60 hour work week (mon-sat), Sunday and late evenings is the only time I have to myself and it's currently being spent on working with the current codebase.

An app would be better IMO, but of course having a mobile-friendly version of the website site means not having to write code for 3 different mobile platforms.

That is all understandable. Coding a site from scratch with so little time is extremely hard, especially with how the site would respond to said changes. Especially how finicky CSS can be. But still, it's great that a site re-coding is being considered for the future. 

No mobile site please. I'd rather have a dedicated app.

Well obviously both would be ideal, but you have to walk before you can run.

Just for clarification, this isn't a demand that this should happen tomorrow. This is a suggestion of what progress should be prioritized. I understand that these things take time. All I wanted to bring to light was the specific importance of a good mobile site.

I also wasn't trying to imply that the VGC team isn't aware or already working on this. I just thought it was an important discussion to have. I don't think you guys are just idly sitting by. I understand the realities of the working environment here.

When I said to the sides, I literally mean physically to the sides, like where the forums are now on the front page. I actually think the forums are stealing real estate from the weekly sales. The reason they shouldn't be in the middle is because, unlike articles which are updated daily, sales are updated only weekly (ideally). Putting them on, say, the left side of the site would allow them to have the same prevailent real estate on the page that they need, while not stealing real estate from the more regularly updating info, the articles.

And since we already have writers writing more indepth analysis' about the sales through these articles, they'd still be getting indirect more important focus in the center as well. I think the intellectual discussion of what the sales mean are far more important from a real estate point of view than the literal documentation of the sales. If all we do is keep track of sales, we're missing out on a lot of potential.

I don't think you need a centralized staff to get the ball rolling, though. VGC is already a commonly referenced site as it is, and this is in it's, what I'd consider an extremely primative, stage. I think there is a lot that can be done now to get the site to a point of traffic where it can afford to get a small building somewhere, etc.

Maybe I'm using a different site then everyone else. I force desktop versions when I browse the internet. Outside of add issues and redirects, which are hit or miss, I'm using the exact same site as I do on my pc. Sure buttons are small and sometimes the text editor glitches on me, but since I don't often post I don't see much of a problem. Just zoom in to click things.