Tips for new Webmasters

[the1chaos]

Hello everyone.

Being the nice person I am, I have decided to write a set of tips on webdesigning for all you potential webmasters out there. I’ll cover general tips for your site and forum, like content, layout etcetera. Here’s a small list with the basic things I’ll be covering.


Forums:
- Categories/Forums
- Guest View
- Initiative
- Forum Hosts
- Staff
- Rules and Stickies

Sites:
- Layout
- Font / Colors
- Content
- Spelling
- Host



Forums
Forums are always fun. Who wouldn’t want to be an Administrator on a forum with several thousands of members? This however is a lot harder than it might seem, and that’s why I’m giving you a few pointers on the most common mistakes with creating a forum.

Categories/Forums
A very common mistake is that upon the creation of a forum people try to think of all the forums that could be used, and that might be useful one day. This really isn’t smart, because you’re going to start with a low number of members. If you have 30 different forums and only 10 members, the place is going to look deserted. You have to target big areas at the start to get the discussion going, the posts racing, and the threads flowing. If you notice a big interest in one specific thing, and you have a decent base for it on your forum, you can create a dedicated forum for it. The forums I suggest starting with are: Announcements, Feedback, General chat, Spam/Testing. There is a lot of room to specify later, when you have a decent member base this way.

Guest View
Not that common anymore, but some forums still have it. This is a disaster if you want people to join your forum, because 99% of the people will want to be able to get to know what the forum is about before actually joining. After all, what if the forum has nothing to offer? The registration would have been a waste of time. You could have eaten a twinky instead. A disaster, I tell you.

Initiative
I’ve also noticed on several forums that the people who created the forum don’t realise that it’s their responsibility to make sure that the forum is active, and stays active. Start a few threads, have at least one sticky in each forum. Do anything to remove that god-awful zero, and to keep the ‘last post’ date fairly recent. No-one wants to join a dead or deserted forum, do they?

Forum Hosts
What a lot of people don’t seem to realise is that the place where you ‘made’ your forum matters - greatly! Free forum sites such as InvisionFree and ProBoards are widely used and easy to set up, but there’s a large number of crappy forums floating around on these. Due to conscious and unconscious links in your mind, people will remember those crappy forums when they see that you have your forum there. This lessens the chance of them visiting or signing up on your forum. Because of this, it’s best to get a cheap host and set up a forum yourself there.

Staff
An other pointer for forum-administrators to-be, don’t hire staff right away. We’ve all seen our share of posts offering administrator, supermod or moderator rights to the first X people to join. This is not just unneeded, it’s also pretty stupid. By giving someone you don’t know at all access to your forums’ vital functions, you’re asking to be screwed over by someone looking for a cheap laugh - the deleting of a forum - or something of the like. Wait until you’re absolutely sure that you can’t handle the load of posts yourself anymore, and then choose an upstanding member of the community. This way, you get loyal and trustable staff members.

Rules and Stickies
And my final piece of advice on making a new forum will be this: Never, ever copy the rules off an other forum. Same for the stickies. I know it can be a lot of work to write your own, clear set of stickies, and it can be very difficult to write a good set of rules. However, copying them directly off an other forum - especially one you're advertising your own forum on - gives people the impression that you're just too damn lazy to write your own rules. This, of course, gives a negative impact on the things people think of your forum, which in turn leads to less people joining.


Site
As a lot of you people probably know, having a personal site can be a challenge, a lot of fun, and it can give quite a profit if it becomes popular enough. However, this isn’t as easy as it sounds - not by a long shot. Making a website of your own is a lot of work, and there are several things you have to pay attention to. I’ll mention some of the points, but obviously there’s more to it than abiding those few tips to make your website popular.

Layout
A lot of people make mistakes with how the site looks. They use a heavily overused layout, they try to make one themselves but it doesn’t quite work out, things like that. A few golden rules are:
* Never, ever, use an image as a background.
* Better to borrow a good thing, than to make a crappy one.
* Home made is better, if it looks good, because it’s unique.
* People are lazy. Make the menu easy to use.
* Use CSS to make sure the links and such are changed in appearance, so they fit with the rest of the site.
The sites breaking one or more of these rules usually don’t live a long life. And the life they do lead, is filled with ridicule and laughter. All in all - bad choice to break these rules.

Font / Colors
Colors used on a site are very important. If you use clashing colors, people will often close the site right away. Also, don’t overuse the strong colors like bright red, purple or yellow. An other very bad thing to do is to use giant fonts, or barely readable ones. Always ask the honest opinion of multiple other people before publishing the website, both for the colors and the layout. This saves you from people whining about how the webmaster must be color-blind and things of the like.

Content
An other thing I often see is people grabbing a few (ranging from some, to dozens, to sometimes even hundreds of) links to videos, flash games, and news articles. This just won’t work. These sites are just leeching the content of other sites, and thus trying to become great with an others achievements. This is something you have to avoid at all cost. You need original content. Write it yourself, get someone else to write it, whatever. Just make sure you have at least some things that aren’t copied off an other site.

Spelling
I cannot emphasize this enough. Every website must be written in proper English. Phonetic, leet, shorthand, whatever. Those things won’t work. It makes you look like an idiot, and it’ll turn people away from your site as fast as they come around. Perhaps even faster. After all, would you trust the news if it was brought to you by people who appeared unable to spell words like ‘you’ correctly?

Hosts
Similar to the problem with the Forum Hosts, people have an aversion of some hosts and domains. Examples would be FreeWebs, Piczoo, and the dotTK range of domains. A lot of extremely badly made sites dwell around on these, and they give a bad name by association. Plus, a real host isn’t that expensive. Only a few bucks a month, tops.



If you just pay attention to these few points, the chances of your site becomming a reasonable success skyrockets, it's most certainly worth the trouble.


Thanks,
the1chaos


Based off this original post.