Getting CR back online again, it got me thinking back to the early days of CR, back when it was on Croik.com/PW, and how I suggested to the mysterious webmaster that they install some forums and how we just EXPLODED from there.

Well, what if there are other prospective future admins out there? What advice could I give to people who want to start their own fan site.

Well, here's a guide based upon my own observations and thoughts about what made CR the giant it is today.

#1 Fandom

So, you're considering starting your own fansite. Congratulations. Got any idea what sort of fandom you want to start?

First let me say ultimately, it has to be a game that you're interested in. There's nothing worse then suffering burn out because frankly you don't care about the games your site is centered around.

Second, I strongly suggest a nitch or upcoming game series. Love Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, Smash Bros, Street Fighter, or Megaman? Too bad, there are a ton of older and more complete fansites then yours. You're going to have an exceptionally hard time garnering any sort of following. It's not impossible, by any means, but it helps a ton to have a unique product. Perhaps jumping on the Kid Icarus train before it leaves station might be a good idea? Trauma Center is a very nice game series, but I'm not aware of any major fansite. Something to consider.

#2 Stuff to put on your site

Let me also say, it's not enough to like a series. You need to have some content that no one is just able to find at generic big sites like IGN.

Here's a list of some unique content types CR's managed to grab. It's not exhaustive, but rather, as selection of some of the hard stuff.

Offical Art: http://gamespress.com
Anyone can go to IGN and get press art, but no one can get the same art without the watermarks. At least, not unless you're a member of gaming press. I highly recommend to any prospective or current fansite webmaster to have an account there. Depending on the publisher, stuff may or may not cost money. Capcom's stuff we get for free, but Gamespress is still a very useful source for anything you may even be casually interested in. Note it's a paid site however.

Flash Rips: http://www.flash-decompiler.com/
CR has manged to nab a TON of goodies off of Capcom's press sites via this little goodie. A lot you can find in the SWF files are absent from even official press kits, and it's an excellent method of grabbing some unique content. 'Course, if the mother ship doesn't create flash sites then this thing is useless, so your milage will vary.

Overseas News and Rumors: JapaneseGIRL, Croik
Having an understanding of the native language is a MAJOR plus. We owe JapaneseGIRL a TON for all the news she's broken to the west. That said, if you know Japanese, that helps a lot for getting the meaning behind a lot of the localization. If not, I highly recommend hiring a linguist to your team. Getting someone who knows Japanese on your fansite helps a lot for breaking news. We owe these two women our deepest thanks.

Game Rips
First let me say this, CR DOES NOT SUPPORT PIRATING. It's wrong because it cheats the developers out of the money they would've earned that goes back into feeding themselves and developing more games. You wield a lot of influence as an admin. You don't want to be even indirectly responsible for the topic your fansite is based on for floundering. Make that clear, as an admin and as a fan.

On the other hand, it cannot be denied that a game's ROM contains a ton of juicy stuff. Sprites, Music, Scripts. Fan-content GOLD. Hacking yourself, or finding someone who's a good hacker is very very sweet. But this also dives into a grey area. Be 'very' careful.

#3 Tips and Tricks for managing your website

There are two major ways these days to manage your website.

A: Using plain HTML pages
B: Power your site with a CMS (Content Management System)

Each have their pros and cons.

HTML pages are static. So it's really difficult if you aim to change information in bulk. On the other hand, HTML pages are 'really' easy to create new layouts and content types.

CMSs are dynamic. So they can ebb and flow with changes you might make in a structured system. On the other hand, CMSs can be inflexible compared to what you might be able to make at a whim in HTML.

I suggest, in your early days, make your site in nothing but HTML pages. You can code by hand if you're confident enough, or even use a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor, like Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expression Web, iWeb, or Rapidweaver.

Then, once you've established what your site is, and what you'll offer, you can migrate to a CMS. I periodically see some fansites running on a CMS, that offer a lot less, both visually and content wise then some sites running statically. They became limited and defined by the features of the CMS instead of the other way around. Know what you want to be, then give your website a power-boost. You'll have the magic best of both worlds.

#4 Money and Weird Observations

CR.net was CR because of the prominent "Court Record" button in the game. But, it oddly overlapped with a real world product known as 'Court Records' of the judicial kind. We've periodically had offers to sell the domain to. Just politely say no. There's integrity to think about.

On the other hand, a website isn't cheap. CR went from free(?) to ~$10 per month, to currently $50 per month. And I don't doubt that we'll be paying more potentially in the future. So it was a weird twist of luck that CR got asked by some generic unscrupulous websites that wanted a piece of CR's traffic. They were willing to pay CR a particular amount per month to have a link on our main page. Considering we haven't figured out how to make CR profitable on our own, those links are a convenient yet lazy way to keep us running. But if we ever do figure out how to get ourselves to be profitable, those links are the first things to go.

We then use our paypal donations to cover other expenses. For instance, the Flash ripping software, the smilies categories on the forums, and contest prizes! Remember to be responsible with the money.

And, don't bother with google ads, Google Ads are ugly, and only really get clicked on by people a generation or two older then us. They'll never be your bread and butter, so don't do something that'll hurt the design of your site for pennies and moths.

You might want to try making money via something you know your fandom would be interested in, like Amazon or Play-Asia affiliate links, to the games the fandom is centered around.

So, uh, I guess my point is, pick a name for your website that's easy to rally the fandom around, and topically ambiguous?

#5 Understand what makes the games loveable

If I were to ask a random CR member here, what makes the Ace attorney games great. They might answer with something like Maya, Phoenix, or Edgeworth. Therefore in their mind, for the next game to be great it needs to have their favorite characters in it.

This is a fallacy.

People only really want what they know they like. And they only know for a fact that they liked some things they were given in the past. But they forget why those things were dear to them in the first place. So they're just going to ask for second servings of what they were already given. And by then the plate is stale.

This is why CR has our annual OC contest. The Ace Attorney games are mysteries at heart. And you can't have a mystery if you know all the characters inside and out. At no point has a returning character in the GS games ever turned out to be the who-dun-it. Thus an important part of the mystery is withdrawn. The fandom needs to be aware of the importance of new blood in the story. So to fix the problem we make new blood a focus. It gets the fans excited, and it's a perfect excuse to hand out swag to the winners!

This is just one example, but my point is don't just be a fan, be a super fan. Think about what makes the games, the developers, and the fans tick, and then play it to your advantage.

#7 Have FUN!

Sure, being the head of a fansite basically makes you the emperor of your own small little world. But you don't have to be a stick in the mud. Have fun! Don't ever get into a loop of same ol' same ol'. WHAT A?! was birthed because Croik felt like it. Nothing more or less (Other then Hotel Dusk is one AWESOME game). We have April Fools day because "messing with your head is never a waste of our time" (Trivia: During the year we were 'Apollo Justice only', a fan in South America tried to give Croik with a musical instrument in exchange for Phoenix back on. Croik joked to me in private: "Musical Insturments are the best bribes") . And Croik and I always LOVE making new banners for the forums and main site. I can't remember the last time we've done a 'serious' banner. We've been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and never looked back. Besides, in our proactive silliness, we learn new tricks that help us, most of the time in design, that make CR better.

Summery

Well, I cannot say CR has done everything right. Prolonged down time, busted RSS feed, the odd broken link, are a few that come to mind. But we've done a lot right too. Hopefully this'll inspire someone to start their own project.

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As a fellow guide writer I gotta say I like this guide.

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Gamepress site will come in handy for a book I'm making.

About the third tip, can't you use PHP and MySQL to organize the content? You can write one script and reuse it for other pages. I've been using PHP and MySQL to organize content for my own abandoned site.

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Yo guys, got any tips on webhosts?

I know BlueHost is great (an old community I somewhat still go to uses it, I forget the price, but the service was near perfect because there was never any hiccups for the years that it was used).


What about for people on the cheap side....Or the *free* side? :p

You can easily. And there's nothing saying you shouldn't in the event you have that level of knowledge. The goal was to give yourself a level of flexibility in designing your output. If you're home brewing your database and output, then all the power to you.

As for hosts... You get what you pay for. I can't recommend a single free host. If you're lucky you can bum off a friend who's already paying. But that's it. For smaller websites, I'd recommend lunarpages or dreamhost; They only get funky when you get huge. But there's rarely a large difference in service between web hosts.

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I've been using Nuzoka and 000Webhost for my free webhosting. And you're right, it's kinda hard to decide between hosts when they're all practically the same except for the fact that some might give you unlimited bandwidth and little disk space while others give you unlimited disk space and little bandwidth.

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Oh WOW Battery, I was checking out ooowebhost, I've set up some test forums with it...pretty great so far.

May I also recommend http://www.co.cc to get a free domain-names (if you're lucky the name you want is available) that ends in .co.cc format?

You got to register, but that's also free (also, make sure not to put some random info like I did, if you forget your password, you're going to be in big trouble if you registered for a free domain you wanted for a year ^^')

Sorry to bump this topic but...:

So I'm pretty much convinced on switching our forums to the new host (well I pretty much DID :p).

But I'm not going to lie when I say I don't really have any experience or know-how in trying to get a simple home page up (and atm, I just really don't have time to learn).

I was interested in setting up a blog (much akin to Wordpress) to integrate with the phpbb forums (Which is installed as the site root).
Integrate might not be the right word...I just want the main url to point to the blog, and I want a simple navigation bar that will point to the forums if users so click on that area.

I've tried adding portals, but they look messy and not really what I want :x, actually, one I installed recently totally screwed the main theme files up...

Is there any advice/assistance you guys can provide me? I can gove the link to the new site in private if you want to check it out. (right now, the main link is just basically pointing to the forums).

The rules are, for double posting and thread necromancy, if you've got something new and relevant to add, then there's no problem. In fact we almost prefer it to creating a new topic.

Anyways, Wordpress is, by far, the best blog software on the planet.

Unfortunately, it was never honestly designed to be more then that, so I'm telling you in advanced, you'll likely run into trouble down the road if you try to bridge the two.

That said, what you want is for phpBB to be in a subdirectory, and wordpress in the root. I don't know if phpBB will get cranky if it gets moved, but that's what you want in the end.

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Like Wooster said, making a subdirectory is the best way to go. To do that in 000Webhost, just go to the site's account and click on the sub domain section. If you name it forums, it'll be forums.yoursitename.co.cc (like how Wooster has done for this site.)

When you do that, it'll make a folder in the root directory. Just move all the phpBB stuff into the folder and make a link to your blog going to it and you'll be golden!

But you know, you should probably learn how to build your own websites. It is hard at first, but it's much more fun than just implementing other codes. :)

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Oh I'll be sure to note that next time...I thought there might be a bump limit I had to wait for too, so good thing I waited at least xP, thanks for the heads up!

I've also been told numerous times in the past (by my tech savvy entrepenuer bro) wordpress is the best regarding blogging...I've tested it for the past few hours...other than the fact it's really confusing what some of the functions do (like link categories and such), I'm sure there are tutorials to make the best of it.
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And I had decided to actually wipe out everything and start over, (you were right in that it got pretty erratic, but I didn't realize that the .htaccess in the site root was force redirecting to a nonexistant directory/files at the time...:X), so I took both of yall's advices and installed wordpress for the site root, and phpbb in a subdirectory...Everything's going well so far.

Also I have another question:
I did the subdomains as you said Battery, but I'm still able to access the forums like this:
www.zzzz.zzz/forums and /forums/index.php.
I can access the forums.zzzz.zzz

Do i use 000webhost's url redirect feature to force the first /forums and /index.php to the subdomain one? Will any harm be done?

May I also ask what's the best way to ensure security (aka not allowing any random person to access the site files/write them in any way) relating to the site roots and such? Would a simple CHMOD of certain directories do without messing anything up?


Also, I agree, building your own website is the better path, well that's what most web developers tell me :p, but I think I understand why: You can control the look and feel exactly how you'd want it...if you got the skills for it IMO xP

And excuse the pesterings...This is my first time I'm actually being in full control of the site files and such (I'm a forum admin always at first :p)

Nah, we can all use help. I most certainly did when trying to get the dedicated server to heel.

Go to your website's admin panel. There should be a section labeled domains or DNS or something similar. Look in that section for subdomains. You 'should' have an option for labeling both the subdomain itself, and the directory it points to.

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1) Yes, that's normal. If you want the address to come out as forums.yoursite.com, you have to make the links come out that way.

2) Yes, CHMOD should work just fine.

3) Once you learn PHP, you can already do many things for your site. I used this tutorial series and I've been building sites ever since. :)

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I've been putting off learning PHP and MySQL for far too long I think. I'm willing to learn both (preferably free of charge) if anyone wants to give me a private lesson ^_^

When I first started making websites 13 years ago (at age 14--I'm 27 now) I used free host sites such as Angelfire, Tripod and Geocities (the latter two no longer exist). Of course Geocities is well known to many people here as you had the freedom to do all kinds of stuff for free. As Wooster and a few others already said, if you want to make anything decient you're gonna have to pay for it. Whenever I see people who want to make a website for free and expect it to be as good as sites people pay monthly/anually to run, I can't help but laugh. SOMEONE has to pay for the server space you're using so...yeah.

I use Yahoo Small Business personally so I can only speak about that. It does allow me to use any coding I want plus a nice amount of disc space and bandwith to play with. I use the Site Builder client for all the work I do (which allows me to preview the site in real time and all that good stuff without applying the changes), which helps me greatly with my somewhat limited coding knowledge. For those wondering what the cost is, I pay $13 a month (WOOT!) which is pocket change no matter what your budget is.

As for why the site's offline right now, I'm kinda inbetween jobs this summer xD

...Truth be told, I did make a Pokemon Fansite 10 years ago. It's still up, actually: www.angelfire.com/pokemon/Mewtwo64. I officially "closed" the site when I launched Serene Adventure's forums in 2003 and the main site two years later.

To me, Fansites offer a place for people who share common interests to hang out on the internet. Of course Court Records is a fansite as well--in fact, it's THE authority on all things Ace Attorney (WOOT!)! I've made Fan Pages on my own site for several Animes (site's currently offline due to financial reasons) but I've been thinking of making a fansite for a few years now. I've decided for sure it'll have to be something that has a considerable fanbase but not a "Fan Base", if you know what I mean ^_^

Right now I'm chosing between the Anime Clannad and the Tales of Series. In the case of the latter I'd add content for each game gradually. I'm sure it would be a controversial move but I'd also host R0Ms for the games that weren't released in the U.S. with fan translations. Sure, some of the Tales games themselves have a huge fan following (ie. Symphonia) but the majority of them are holed up at the Official Tales Forums. There was a fansite somone set up a few years ago but the site died 2 years back I guess.

Clannad, I figure I might as well seeing as I haven't really seen any North American fansites. It might be easier to do at this point now that the English Dub for After Story was released earleir this year and it can be streamed via Netflix (and other stream services such as Hulu) as well. I'd go out of my way to make sure people don't get tempted to use the site to pirate episodes, etc. as well ^_^

...Of course whichever I go with I'd get a team to help me out. I learned when I tried to make an RPG a few years back I can't do everything myself xD

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Well Brendan, I'm gonna be entering college in September and I'll be majoring in web development. I can probably share some of the things I learn in class here.

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I hope your web classes will be better then mine. Mine was bad. Bad bad bad.

• My web instructor was ASTOUNDED that I was typing CSS by hand. Like not only was it the most crazy thing he'd seen since sliced bread, it was sliced bread.
• Thought Microsoft Frontpage was the standard tool for web development (It hasn't been updated in almost a decade? And it was never good even while it was popular)
• Encouraged table based page layout, (shudder)
• Brought in clients to give us a taste for fulfilling what they want in a website. The clients asked for a CMS, secure log in, paypal integration etc. Professor thought that a simple set of HTML pages would suffice.

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My brother had some web development classes in the college I'm going to when he took Tech in highschool. He tells me that the teacher is a crazy, cool guy. After one class, my brother was able to write basic HTML by scratch, so you don't have to worry about me. :)

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HAHAHA that's awesome Wooster xD

I write my web pages using raw HTML for the most part. I think I'm ready to try learning PHP next. I figure between PHP and Japanese, PHP is probably the more difficult to learn =O

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Nah, I'd say PHP is much easier. I couldn't pass my second semester of Spanish in high school and that's at least similar to English. PHP is a relatively easy language to learn... it integrates well with MySQL, and you don't have to remember or set variable types. Plus, since every variable is prefixed with $, it's easy to glance at what's a variable and what isn't.

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Sorry for not responding earlier:

1) I've done the subdomain redirect thing, works nicely!

2) I've made sure to CHMOD files/folders properly, making sure AutoMOD especially has permissions to write into necessary files/folders

3) Maybe I should learn PHP as a side-project for things-to-branch-out-doing-when-I-have-spare time...Though I don't know what personal use I'd need for it at the moment xP

Just wanted to inform you guys, that aside from figuring out how to get organized with categories and all, the blog itself is good to go (for now :P).
Hell, even the forums are pretty much ready to go for the most part, so I'd like to thank you guys for the help and advice ^^

Oh I even credited you on one of the blog posts...I forget which one though, so I decided to put a link up to your site in plain sight :) [...Unless you don't want it linked and taken down?]


Good luck with your college courses Battery :p

Oh snap Brendan, I remember the Angelfire host...Seemed pretty nifty for its time (I remember Yahoo talking about shutting down the service few years ago, seemed like a sad state for some people xP)

That's a cool story Wooster, seems like that teacher was way too old-school and didn't adapt to the times :?

If you want my two cents on how to learn php... I learned most of what I do know about php via phpBB 2 (And also the story behind why we moved from Invisionfree to the current forums running phpBB3). phpBB is notorious for not having a good module system. That means that modifications have to be done by editing the source code. Version 2 of phpBB was quite bare bones so adding things like custom titles became an adventure. From there I learned the difference between server side content, and CSS. And I actually dabbled in creating my own modifications and modifying others modifications.

Although, I must admit that, when we got the forums originally on CR, phpBB was making the transition from 2 to 3, so we figured might as well jump into 3 to avoid migration headaches. But phpBB3 is very solid in its feature set... so I was kinda disappointed that I never modified it as much as I did my previous fandom's forum.


As for my professor... I think he did a whole lot more harm to me then good. Going semester to semester at different local colleges looking to learn something about web design and development; I got used to knowing more then my peers. And I got arrogant. I'd put as much effort into my projects as I felt I was being challenged. And my grades became an anti-reflection of my skill.

I mean, look at the theme for this message board. I'm no slouch.

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This place ain't spambot safe... :(

EDIT: Now that the spambot's gone, I agree with Wooster. PHP is much easier, maybe it's just because I've had a lot of experiance with scripting before taking on PHP, but I've tried learning how to read Japanese and all I can remember are the vowels in hiragana... あいうえお

The first two characters together means love.

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