I hate to bring up this thread, but I had a thought and I was wondering what the rest of you thought of it. I know you've been using these templates for almost a year, and you've had the site for far longer, so you know what you're doing. I just thought I'd give you my 2 cents on the templates. They seem very restricting, to point where they don't even make sense. I understand the need for uniformity, but half the time the scales seemed all but useless.
TestTemplate by
~~@ Lord Malachi @~~ The Awesome Coon of Awesome, on Flickr
With this you'll still have the same height uniformity, oddly tall ships would still need to modify it for height, but I've noticed a ton of ships that don't actually fit the length because it was too restrictive. The proposed template will still have uniformity, but also provide a little more flexibility to the users. It also eliminates the need for multiple templates. A second, waterline only, version can easily be made, but I figured if you had no interest I wouldn't bother.
All I ask is that you think about it, and I'd love to hear your opinions.
I kind of feel like a twit for being here less than a week and proposing something like this, and I apologize if I offend anyone by doing so.
Edit: The Ship Badge location could even be shifted up to match the distance from the top with the Title area. (14px from the top) And by moving the Title information all the way to the left, it keeps that important info as something that will be seen first, instead of having scroll all the way to the end to find it.