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New mudders benefit most from a website seperate from the game itself, containing the game rules, syntax, commands, environment, IC history, info on races and cities and all the rest of the "stuff" you would want to know.
It is ridiculously difficult though, if all those "help files" aren't clear, intuitive, and categorized logically. I've actually seen one game, where if you wanted to find out about a certain type of tree mentioned in the room descriptions, you'd have to be IN the game, and then:
help
>Please select from the following categories: General, Skills, Combat
general
>I do not understand that.
help general
>Please select from the following categories: Commands, Verbs, History, Races, Cities
(Thinking to yourself: Uh, trees don't fall into any of those categories. Hm, I'll try history.)
help history
>Please select from the following categories..
and so on and so forth until you decide not to bother even trying, and go stick your fingers in a blender for a thrilling change of pace.
One really awesome (and I mean AWESOME) website for a mud is the Inferno site. It's outdated but I've never seen such a gorgeous layout for a mud before (that's a hint to any web workers for muds). Here's the URL for the main page:
and here's the manual layout:
I think Inferno might even be a good game for you to try out; they're fairly newbie friendly, free to play, there are ongoing plotlines and a few "autoquests" for you to work on, and they have a pretty active staff and player base (though they have a -very- small player base).
Even if it turns out Inferno isn't for you, I think it is a REALLY great introductory game for new mudders to learn "how" to immerse themselves in an ongoing novel where they are one of the characters.
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