Some sites and thoughts

Hello web mongooses, I'll just post some links to some websites that I have looked at so far:

• Aleph - previously known as Aum Shinrikyo; famous for the sarin gas attack at a Tokyo subway in 1995. I'm not sure what this organisation does nowadays, as their website is not exactly very informative -_-. All I know is that their website looks very, very happy and bright, and it has some articles about steps "to live a better life", meditation, yoga, and stuff like that. LOTS of articles where they try explaining and disassociate the new group with their past. Aleph is trying to show their new face to the public through this bright-looking website, but we leave the site still not knowing anything new about this mysterious organisation!
• Exclusive Brethren - a conservative Christian sect. Their members are not supposed to watch television, listen to radio, use the internet, or vote, amongst other things. Rule-breaking leads to excommunication, the loss of contact with all family members and the loss of business networks (quite Red Sun-like in some ways) Has powerful political lobbying power; recently they have won special dispensation from the Howard Government for their members in the recent WorkChoices law. Anyway, their website is really a boring site, looks like something done based on a template. At first glance it even looks like those placeholder content they put in websites that you go to as a result of typo. However, they have lots of content.
• Unification Church - website of a Christianity-based new religious movement (NRM). Again, this is quite boring.... I guess these people recruit more from real contact (face-to-face), rather than through internet....
• Scientology - everyone knows about this 'religion' already. This is professionally done, but looks very 'corporate'.
  

Of the sites above, only the first one (and prob. the second one) can be considered mysterious organisations (although the second one seems to be quite open to reveal information). Scientology's website is probably the only one that looks professional (this is the direction that we wanna go for Red Sun's site, right?)

• Peebs.net - an anti-Exclusive Brethren (EB) website. With forums, information on the sect, guestbook (for guests of the site but also for EB escapees who wants to leave comments), testimonies, news clippings. Reasonably packed with information.

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Some points:

• It's interesting to see that websites of the cult organisations don't necessarily have an inviting or professional look even though they are quite big and have been around for some time.
  
• Looking at some of the site, I think it's a good idea to have a 'library' or resource section, where we have (fake) news articles about Red Sun in either Red Sun's site or Eclipse's one, or even both. Of course the type of news that goes to Red Sun's site will be very different from the Eclipse site.

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Anyway I haven't planned the visual style exactly, but basically it should be:

• Red Sun's site: professional, bright, but still mysterious (not much info) - I think main page we could have photos of people with happy faces, smiling.... main colors: still depends on the final logo, but should be sth like yellowish, creamy color and some red... the history page will be important; the more detailed history we have here the better, especially the early history, then as we go on, there is gradually less details on the more recent history, maybe? (= more mysterious as the organisation grows, so less things can be revealed to public) ie. old history can be told in detail, but recent history is written in a vague sort of way ... also could have testimonials from happy members.... not so sure what we could tell about what activities the members do within the organisation (we cant really talk about the drug can't we?) any ideas regading this? are they actually using the site as a way to recruit or just so that people know of its existence? ...
• Eclipse's site: less professional than red sun; however, it wouldnt be downright amateurish, too. I think Eclipse's site must have been around for quite some time and their site could have developed along the time... colour will be black dominated i suppose .... it will have really LOTS of believable, authentic-sounding material for people to listen, watch, and read (this will be extremely challenging to pull off) videos, podcasts, newsp. clips... opinions from experts etc. .... then forums.. this is sth that I reckon we should do, however, do you guys think we should do a real forum, or just a simulation of a forum? forum needs lots of entries, and that could be a problem....

Well those are my random thoughts for now... will post later if sth else comes up... now it's time to sleeeeeeep....