I was just thinking, but shouldn't the index page for the site be cut and put in archives? Just a thought.
I think there are archieves. I think that they come from ports over to new sites though, not because it was getting too long.
The bottom line of it is that the main site is what the majority of potentially new players see when they first hear of Empires. It should be improved upon as much as possible, to increase the probability that a visiting user will download and try Empires. I remember for the 2.0 release there was the press site (it had a countdown timer I believe?) which I think helped a lot for hype.
You mean the archives linked at the top of main page? That's what I mean. Those look like the contents of past index pages. It should be about a 2 minute fix to shorten the current news list. Just split it at 2009.