Article: Personal Websites

Personal Websites: A Guide to Creating Your Own Website

Introduction

For many players, painting, modeling and gaming with their army is enough. But for those of you who like to document the successes and failures of your army/s and have produced articles, stories, tacticas and battle reports, these things can pile up and get scattered, posted all over numerous forums and various documents scattered around your computer or perhaps multiple computers. For those of you in such a situation there is a solution. Years ago when I was begining to pile up a great many articles and other written works and reports for my Or'es Shi Tau cadre and had been posting them over two forums I realised that a place to centralise and organize those works was what I needed. Thus enters the provence of personal websites. Now many of you may not be technologically adept, may not know HTML or other web formats... well neither do I, but that's ok. You can still create a quality website for yourself and your army and you can do it without shelling out a single cent. You can of course spend money on web space and buying your own domain if you wish. However there are alternatives.

Free Web Hosting

A search using Google or any other search engine can quickly produce a great many sources of free web hosting. The one I use and that I like is Tripod. Some irritating pop ups but not in immense quantities. Tripod offers quite a bit of free space and is fairly painless. However there are many free sources of hosting that you can choose from. A few I'll now list:

https://www.tripod.lycos.com/
http://www.bravenet.com/
http://www.mister.net/
http://www.netfirms.com/web-hosting/web-hosting-basic/
http://www.freewebspace.net/
http://www.100best-free-web-space.com/
http://www.absolutely-free-hosting.com/

Those were produced by my typing "Free Web Hosting" into google and just from the first page. A few look dubious but some look good. In any case it's simply an example, there are so many free web hosting services out there, a little time and patience can produce great results.

Creating Your Site

For those of you who know HTML and other formats creating a website from scrach is fairly easy. For those of you who do not, like me, know such things. You can either spend a lot of time learning, or there are easy webpage creation tools. Tripod for instance has a decent one which is another reason I use it. Basically you choose a template and scheme and the page design and you are given a page with all the boxes and titles and you then plug in the text, images, whatever you want into those spaces. It's a simple and painless process. For instance I currently have four websites, and I'll use them as examples.

Or'es Shi Cadre- https://squaliix.tripod.com/
-This was my first website, it's based off of a simple blue template with a left aligned navigation bar. It's a very simple layout and I like it for that. The main page shows the stats of my army, honorable kills and it's win, ties, losses listing, as well as a news update. Following that I have a legal disclaimer, some personal pages about me and the army, some various background and fluff articles. Then there are a number of stories, battle reports, articles and tacticas grouped by their type.

Ultramarines- https://squaliix.tripod.com/
-Same template, different content.

Blood Ravens- https://squaliix.tripod.com/bloodravens/
-A red and black template with top aligned navigation bar. Includes the same basic content as the other sites, just not as much as it's a newer and less experienced army with less content so far.

Raven Guard- https://squaliix.tripod.com/ravenguard/
-Black and Orange themed template, my newest site and the one with the least content. The best feature of this site is it's links page which includes links to quite a few other fan based sites.

So now that you have some examples you have a general idea of how it can be done. Based off of a simple template and requiring no coding skills.

Other Applications

Of course while a website for your own army is one option there are others. For instance a website for a club, for a store or independant retailer. On such a site you can display events, advertisements, campaigns and many other forms of news and events. Such websites are also a great way to draw in new players, organise meetings and events at various hobby shops and expand your local gaming circle.

Legal Issues

Of course there are legal issues, and this is a rather easy aspect as well. Games Workshop does provide disclaimers for fan sites to use: http://uk.games-workshop.com/legal/disclaimers/1/ you simply chose the disclaimer you need and post it on your site, the disclaimer makes sure you aren't breaching GW legal properties.

Personal Comments

For me having my own websites allows me a place where I can keep all the material on my armies centralised in one location, keeping them organised and allowing an easy place that people interrested in what I've written can use to see everything I've created for my armies. An organisational tool if you will and a place to showcase my achievements and my written works. What a personal site might mean to anyone else is purely up to personal oppinion, but in many ways a personal site can go a long way towards organising and enhancing your hobby.

With that said some more examples of personal fansites you may or may not have heard of right from the links page of my Raven Guard site:

Howling Griffons- http://www.howlinggriffon.co.uk/links.htm

Scythes of the Emperor- http://www.the-scythes.com/

Salamanders- http://www.vulkansforge.org/

Imperial Fists- http://z11.invisionfree.com/THE_PHALANX/index.php?

Dark Angels- http://fortressofunforgiven.homestead.com/temp_Homepage.html

Flesh Tearers- http://www.flesheaters.net/