The website is getting a little better all the time.

Ginseng is helping me to make even more improvements.
Apparently he actually knows how to do computer stuff.

Check out the site and keep an eye open for updates.

And if you are looking to join a
fun Alliance guild, click below:

ThoughtRobots

If you join and you do not see your name on the guild list, please let me know your: player name/class/race and I will be sure it gets added.

Bump

you define creating a freewebs site as doing computer stuff?

hmmmmokey
(then again, with all the nice CMS-like systems out there who in their right mind is going to create a site from scratch unless it is a corporate website or something that should have a unique look and feel or etcetc)


[[no offence ginseng it turned out nice (although im not a big fan of the mouse icon and personnally i feel a site should have the same look and feel on every page (in other words yes im refering to the background changing :P) ]]


ill shut up now trying to be a comp-savvy cozzy :P

Coz, blame me not Ginseng for the look.

Ginseng was mainly gonna help with admin issues, the actual look of the site was what I created.  I am sure if Ginseng had designed the site it would look more professional.

And comments are always welcome.  As I had said, I had never tried this before so feedback is good to hear, as long as it is constructive.

It's a good start. Reminds me of my first site. Black background with flames on the left border. I have found that using lighter shade backgrounds creates less problems for viewers and subtle background changes will be noticed less.

Most will not prefer the mouse icon. I think there are good applications though. For example, I built a page for my spouse on our site. This page has butterflies following the mouse. Certain pages may call out for extra goodies, just don't put them on the home page.

Are you wanting to learn about websites?

Excellent! Ginseng and Coz are both experts. I can tell by your language you're way beyond me. HTML scripting is where i'm at. It's a necessary hobby for me.

I was thinking of using http://www.guildportal.com
Is there any reason not to? Do you know of anything better? They offer a free limited access site.

No, actually I'm going to use Wordpress and skin that accordingly.  I'll also be putting that on my own host since it offers much higher cache memory than any previous host I've been with.  I thought of WP because it would be a lot easier for Madrushian and anyone else to add material to the site by just logging in. 

Sections can be created by two clicks and of course, content in between.  Those can be "About", "Roster", etc. 

If the guild makes it and the site is popular enough, I can add either an external forum (PHPBB, Invision, etc) or install the forum plugin for the WP application.  Mind you, I'll have to take a look into that later. 

I considered using Mambo CMS or a WoW CMS, but those are complicated and a lot of tuning will need to be done.  Since installing WP, creating the SQL database, and configuring the system takes roughly 30 minutes for me.  It's not a big deal.  Skinning on the other hand, may take a bit of work.  Good thing the system is CSS driven, or it would have been hell to try to change all the HTML elements inside the PHP files. 

As for Madrushian's existing site - it's not bad.  For someone who doesn't have much experience, it's a site that works.  Everyone starts out somewhere.  I'm sure the industry's top tier creative directors and such started out creating simplistic or over-cluttered material at one point in their working career.

^_^

^_^

I've used Guildportal about three years ago for the first guild I joined.  Personally, I would not recommend it because there is a lot of clutter.  Clutter being advertisements, other features that you might not use, navigation seems so unfriendly, etc.  Skinning feature on that portal is very limited.  It's very tedious.  Sure, it gives some options but for me, I rather spend a little more time on the content itself than to spend time on the content management system. 

Look into Wordpress.  It's a very easy to use CMS.  It might not be tailored to World of Warcraft, but it's a blog application that will do the job. 

Of course, if other people have better suggestions, that would be great.  Then I can probably use something else instead of WP as well.

See why I talked to Ginseng for help with the site now?

He just used a whole lotta language that sounded like binary code to my ears.  I am happy with starting with a simple site and 'seeing what happens', that is why I uses freewebs.com

They have some 'thingys' you can add that are nice and they were a simple site to understand and help the site get going.

I can tell you how to solo Hogger as a level 9 or 10 player, but I can't tell you how to do fancy internet stuff. ~_^

huh,.. whats that ?
i've heard of scripting with flash or javascript or php or perl and html website tags you can use to create a site with, but actually scripting with html seems new to me ;)

(yes, jk jk)


whenever i run into someone nowadays that just needs a basic site to start with.
i usually build or refer them to googlepages ;)
word like wysiwyg editor. a couple of default themes to pick from. simple, not cluttered. at most 4 adword ads nobody will notice.. and google keeps expanding features on googlepages.

i dont really have experience with wordpress. but from what ive read its more of a blog geared tool.

i once made a website on a blog, but i found it to be somewhat annoying since you can not really keep a nice box on top with all the info you want to show - unless you haxor the template a bit.

a cms is usually a nice idea. but each and every cms i tried so far are just to bloated for a normal user. none actually starts with asking 'what do you want to do with your site and which feature do you think might be usefull' .. all ive seen from cms systems so far were those that required a fair understanding of php and css and databases to get it to work in the first place ... and once you got it working its all feeling default and all had loads of features your site was never going to use... in other words 'here you go; try and get it to work then have fun stripping out the features and reformatting the css'




what it ussually comes down to is asking a couple questions before you start

- what do you want it to be for a site, advanced (loads of features or a full flash thingy), just informative (as long as the info is online), customized, clean (none or little ads), highly maintainable by everyone with little web knowledge. do you want shared access, etcetcetcetc

-how much cash are you willing to throw at it
(if you have your own domain its more attractive (a url that people can remember), if you have your own domain you can always access and change the code but you or other people will need to maintain it, you dont need ads on your site if you hate ads - etcetcetc)




ps. im not trying to push you in any direction. just wanted to show some ideas and options and limitations of each idea.

Wow. I can see you guys would hate any mention of IIS and SQLServer and .NET, wouldn't you ?

I usually set up User and Data Services on separate servers, usually with ASP.NET at the front and SQL Server at the back.

I work in industry, so many of the applications I build are for councils connecting to Government Gateway and such like (read boring applications).

I personally hate anything that builds websites based on templates, such as Dreamweaver (shudder!) and the likes. The code they produce is horrendous.

How are these CMS systems you talk about, in terms of resulting code. Are they readable ? How easy it is to have CSS-based page formatting ?


Sorry, going off the topic for a bit.

<~html>
      <HEAD>
            <title><big><b> Thank you Coz </b></big></title>
      </HEAD>

      <body>

<p>  Thank you for the information and advice. It was August 1999 when I ftp my first site. It was a fantasy football league called SCUFFL. I used a program called FFLM to manage the league. It created the bulk of my site. I learned to build a home page and called it the Pigskin Palace. I was level one.</p><br>

<p>  As mentioned this is only a hobby, I work on the production of high frequency radio equipment, i.e. satellites. Our guild leader mentioned the other day they wished we had a website. I didn't want to promise anything. I wanted to know what was available first.</p><br>

<p>  Ginseng and you have been most helpful. You think I'd be used to that by now. I'm guessing you like action movies. Have you seen Once Upon A Time In Mexico or The Replacement Killers with Chow Yun-Fat?</p>

      </body>
<~/html>

p.s. I know the tildes don't belong.

Made a few small changes based on comments.
The mouse no longer has the flame trail.

And the backgrounds are all similar in color now.

Well, I'm not a programmer myself.  I work in a firm that supply solutions to large organizations.  We have to customize those solutions to the individual parties.  The things you've mentioned like .NET and ASP are terms I am familiar with, but as far as actually knowing how to code in them, wow, I am like a jellyfish in the middle of an ocean trying to be taught what a computer is. 

I personally use Dreamweaver, but what I do is after saving the pages, I use Notepad to edit out all the extra elements that DW add or I would go into the Settings and turn off all the things I find useless for me.  I use DW because I am a visual designer.  After I've made all the adjustments, I then pass the pages over to the guys doing the back-end stuff.  Of course, I need to know Javascript, CSS, enough of PHP, and the basic knowledge of SQL and such to get through the day to day work environment. 

ANYWAY, as Coz had mentioned, CM-systems are packaged web applications that you can run a file usually called "install.x", after you've created a database and configured some other file like config.x, etc.  For the most part, it can be quite complicated because most CM-systems that I've come across are pre-made for certain things.  If you want to make it into something for your own specific purposes, then a lot of work has to be done in order to make it look and function that certain way.

To answer Coz about why I used Wordpress is that first and foremost, WP is an easy to use blog CMS.  Second, I have experience in skinning and editing the system.  Being CSS driven for the most part, I can simply edit one file and that will reflect all the necessary changes I want throughout the site. 

Regardless, it does the job.  It is highly customizable and not too complicated.

I had thought of just shoving a bunch of HTML together manually, but in the long run, it seems like a lot of unnecessary work just to have it updated. 

well, to answer that question about .net/php
.. php is more available to a random person who just wants to make some budget website for someone in contrary to .net
(from a legal point of view anyway)

apache+php+sql is in a nice bundled free package

i havent coded a site in ages tho

oh and dreamweaver creates cleaner code as frontpage - just to name something ;P


lol!

Actually, I don't see how Frontpage has even made it all the way to this day and age.  It is the worst ever possible web page design application.  My gosh.  I remember playing around with that in the late 90's, then digging into the code view and realized how disgusting it was.  It was worst than the Netscape Composer application. 

Never underestimate the will of Bill Gates. I used Frontpage to build a photo gallery page once. It was horrible trying to personalize the code to my needs. One of the slowest loading pages on my site.