A few things NOT to do when stating a site

[Furaigon]

Nice post, Dragonfree. But for the people deciding on joining/not joining the forum because of what kind, I've had people tell me they wouldn't join mine when I had them because they didn't like Proboards or Invisionfree. So that does happen sometimes.

 

[PD Wooper]

Let me revise those tips of yours...

Stand-Alone Forums
Don't make them, period. I personally don't know anybody who would base the decision to join or not to join a forum on the forum system it uses, unless it was indirectly (such as if I thought "Well, if this guy bought vBulletin, he's got to be serious", but that would only tell me that said forum would be less likely to be deleted than a free one), but to have a decently active forum, one of its major members needs to be somewhat famous in at least a part of the Pok?mon community, preferrably you. If you're a nobody and all your members are nobodies, nobody is going to hear about it, nobody is going to join, and nobody is going to keep it alive.

Free Hosting
Learn HTML, and find a host where you 100% hand-code your layout. Make sure that if it has advertisements, they're just like Google ads or something, not flashy banners or popups since they annoy your visitors. If your site works out and becomes somewhat popular, you can move to a paid host - after all, why pay for a site that gets no visitors?

Pokemon Sites
There are 563,456,000 pages that mention Pok?mon on the net as of 1st February 2005. Out of them, we can estimate probably around 100,000,000 that are actually Pok?mon sites. Cut down the ones that are just pages of the same site, and we might have like 5,000,000. At least 4,990,000 of them are no longer updated, so we'll take them away. Out of the 10,000 left, maybe 100 of them are decent-sized, and about five of them are the "big ones" that 85 of the others have simply ripped off. The remaining 10 are nice, devoted Pok?mon sites with original content. Make one of them, since the only sites worth looking at out of those 563,456,000 are those 10 and then a "big one" of your preference if you want to catch up with news, and your site is not going to be one of the "big ones".

Whee! I'm the UK Pok?mon Champion, does that count? Anyways, for free hosting, use a subdomain etc of a friend/well known site, like pkmn-master.telpt.net was hosted by my friend telpt.net :/

There are way more than 10 of that kind of site. Of the 100, there are about 50 that sap off PPN and Serebii. There's one superpower (serebii), 3 bigsites (ppn, dadragonz, pok?mon dream), 30 or so 'nice sites' (including victory road, pokeden ;)), the other 16 are in different languages prolly.

 

[Furaigon]

Anyways, for free hosting, use a subdomain etc of a friend/well known site.

For that you'd have to know a friend/well known site that'd be willing to give you a subdomain to use. Not everyone has that.

 

[Dragonfree]

There are way more than 10 of that kind of site. Of the 100, there are about 50 that sap off PPN and Serebii. There's one superpower (serebii), 3 bigsites (ppn, dadragonz, pok?mon dream), 30 or so 'nice sites' (including victory road, pokeden ), the other 16 are in different languages prolly.

Yes, there are way more than 10 of that kind of site. But only like 10 of them are the real "Big Ones"; the rest just copy everything the real "Big Ones" say, and are therefore included with the 85 that are ripping off the "Big Ones".

 

[Trikip]

STAND-ALONE FORUMS
If you are going to make a stand-alone forum <without a site> it WILL NOT get popular by using ...

• Invision Power Board...

1. InvisionFree
2. InvisionBoard
3. ClickDev

• Proboards
• Any other free hosting/free forums

Not true. I know many proboards that have thousands of members.

 

[Golden Groudon]

Pokemon Sites
Enough we have EXACTLY as of February 1, 2005; we have currently 563,456,000 pokemon sites. They are NOT going to catch on anymore.

What a good way to discourage others....*sighs*

You just searched the word "Pokemon" on a search engine for that "big" number.

 

[Kipkip]

I'm just going to close this before an out of hand flane war starts. I don't want to handeld that stuff. Just to be on topic, I agree with everthing but the first one. The mod has spoken. *puts out thread's flame and Survivor's Theme Song plays*
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