| |
 Part One: Introduction by Martin the Warrior Welcome to Part One of The Long Patrol's Twelve-Part Series on creating and maintaining a website in the ROC! While these instructional essays are designed with a Redwall website in mind, they can really cover just about any subject. Feel free to adapt the advice to suit your own area of interest. The reason for this series is simple: I've been doing this for eight years now, making The Long Patrol one of the longest running Redwall sites on the internet. In the early days, I'd help out people directly by teaching them HTML tricks, giving them advice on their content, or coding their pages myself. Understandably, I cannot do so anymore as I have my hands full. However, there are quite a few tricks I've learned over those eight years and philosophies I've adopted that I think would be beneficial to the webmaster just starting out. There may even be something in here to help out experienced webmasters, you never know. A new essay will be posted on the 15th of every month until all twelve parts are complete. I'll take you through the various steps of creating a website-- from developing original content, choosing the style of your website, deciding on a focus, and maintaining it-- and examine some of the issues you'll inevitably face-- such as dealing with troublemakers, answering e-mail, and sticking with it. Obviously, you don't have to listen to the advice. It is offered, nevertheless. The first step is, naturally, deciding whether or not you want to make a website. This is actually a trickier step than you might think and many blindly rush in and slap something together. The desire to do something with a book series or television series you like, or a comic book or movie for that matter, is understandable. It forms a connection between you and that series and can strengthen your interest in it-- or it can kill it entirely if you're not too careful. It takes you from being a spectator to someone involved with the subject matter. The key when it comes to websites is to think long and hard and decide how much you want to make something about the subject matter. There are a great deal of impulse sites that are cobbled together because someone just read the book and was interested in it, but by the next month another book has been read and takes it place. With free webhosting around every net-corner, it makes it easy to simply forget websites rather than take them down (no loss to you). This leaves a heavy underbrush of inactive sites for the clueless websurfer to sift through looking for a place to share their interest. There are some who believe the answer is organizing a "government" to label these sites and provide a directory... among other things. Instead, I believe the answer is simply webmaster responsibility, which is why this is Step #1. Gauge your interest. Do you simply want to do a project related to the book because your interest is high at the moment, but might not sustain itself for more than a year? If that's the case, then I'd recommend making this project a section of an overall Homepage of yours devoted to all of your interests and not just Redwall. This increases your chances of sticking with the site (which we'll get to in a later essay) while not boxing you in with a single subject matter. If you don't want to do a website, then you might want to consider seeking out an established site and floating your idea their way. If they're interested, they might even host it for you (and the chances of your work being seen by the fan base will be that much greater). However... If you're passionate about the series, if you want to devote a lot of your free time to the construction and maintenance of a website-- if you're committed for the long haul and not just acting on an impulse-- if you want to spread your love of the series to others, then go for it. You've taken the first step towards building a website. We'll cover the rest later. | |