This was all i used for shard listing...
The green bar showed if the server was online, the gold bricks were for server up time, that starts with iron bars, silver and eventually gold. That way any shard with gold bricks was a sign that the shards online generally most of the time, so many new shards come and go or at least used to. The small blue button was in fact for a web launch but due to the usual RL comes 1st thing i never actually got that sorted. I kept away from any type of vote system because yeah they can be cheated i guess. The list that was shown could be viewed in alphabetical, max players or just current players online.
My thoughts were if your going to get someone looking for a shard to play they'd spend at least a few minutes looking at the shards own website, which if you clicked the banner you'd get to.
From what i can gather it sounds like Ryan's just wanting a link, be it a graphic type or link address on the site to fire it off straight into the shard in question which in the long run makes sense.
As far as everything else like patching, thats probably got to be handle'd via a forum account somewhere, which was the direction i took. Theres a million and one ideas out there for what you could put into a launcher application, personally if i ever want to check out a new shard my first choice of search was usually player numbers or client version. As far as votes go... i've always ignored them.