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Creating a website for your clan? - January 10, 2004 - Rellik |
Creating a clan website is a simple thing to do but there are a few mistakes I see people make over and over again. Here's what you really need to do:
Find a home for your website:
I suggest NOT using a place like Geocities. Instead there are much better places like FreeWebs whom I use for various things. With freewebs there is only a monthly bandwidth limit of 100 to 500mb and a storage limit of 50mb. This should be WAY more than adequate for a clan site. Also there are no pop-up or banner ads, that in itself is a huge bonus.
There are really only two mandatory things your website should contain:
- A contact information page so that other clans have a means of contacting / challenging you
- A simple about page telling people what if any kinds of games you specialize in. If you only play Sourceport X then there's no sense in a clan challenging you if they only play on Sourceport Y. ( Of course specializing is NOT a good idea. I recommend playing all ports and just going where the competition is. )
Once you have those everything else is gravy. All a clan site really needs are those two things, but there are lots of other things you can add like pages for map downloads, demo's of your games are always cool to watch, maybe a list of all the people in the clan, etc. You might also want to set up a single unlinked or hidden linked private forum for the clan to discuss things and coordinate games and practices.
Designing your website:
First off there are a couple important notes about websites that I'd like to make on behalf of all surfers everywhere:
- FLASH SUCKS - Don't use it. Period. Flash is lame 99.99999% of the time.
- Don't put music on your webpages. Just because you can do something that doesn't mean you should. Did we learn nothing from those Jurassic Park movies?
- Don't over do it. All you need is some info, maybe a member list, and some means of contact. Forums work better for this than email so I suggest you go that route. See the next point for more info.
- If you decide to set up a forum just have ONE forum with ONE section. All you need is one place for folks to make challenges, talk about challenges, and for the clan to cooridinate practices and games. Don't set up a massive forum with twenty seven different sections for talking about other games, dogs, bugs, or anything else. Just one will do. There are already major multiplayer forums at Skulltag and ZDaemon and that's even more than enough. Anything else is just a waste.
- Go easy on the graphics and don't use a crazy background that makes it hard to read the type. A plain site that loads fast and gets us the info quickly is infinitely better than a slow ass flash loaded hurts-your-eyes-just-to-look-at graphics whore of a webhole. Websites are about getting information across to the visitor in the quickest and easiest way possible. Everything else is secondary.
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