Here are some of the advice I want to give to webmasters and especially forum owners of administrators
1) BACKUP :: Always have a backup of your site in your computer and not the C drive or whichever is your windows drive because if the server goes down, along with it so will your site. Though most of the High-level control panels provide backup facilities, my recommendation is to have on in your home computer and a CD Rom-Drive if possible.
2) UPDATION :: Make sure you code new pages in your home, view it with a Browser to check if it is correct and then upload it to the server.
3) IMAGES :: Whenever you upload images be sure that they are as small as possible. Try saving the images in 4 or 5 formats like JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG and see which occupies the least space.
4) LAYOUT :: Always remember to select layouts such that they are best viewed in 800x600, but at the same time give some importance to other resolutions too.
5) If you are a guy who has absolutely no job and want your website to be on top of every search engine, try making your site fully HTML using as little PHP as possible.
6) Don?t just try to popularize your site if you only have Pokemon Games and Movie info. Around 250 sites in the net have the same stuff, so try making your site as different as possible. Specialize in another field like Digimon, Fake Sprites, Pen Pals or just about anything (not webmastering).
7) CUTENEWS :: Cutenews is an excellent script which allows you to enter news as fast as possible and it?s really simple to use. You need not have that much HTML Knowledge to use it and it can easily be edited to suit your web layout. Also if you do not have a comments page, please remove the Cute news Link called comments, it looks horrible if all the comments pages lead to 404 errors.
FORUMS
This single point is the main reason why I opened this thread. Nowadays we see more than 1000 Pok?mon forums, but how many of them actually make it to the top? Very few. Only a few Pokemon forums like PC, PE2K, Pokemasters & Seribii are flourishing today while others are lying in the dirt trying to emulate the bigwigs.
My Say is, don?t create a forum just for your site, if possible. Try affiliating with other growing forums out there or combine with webmasters whose sites don?t have forums and make joint ones. Never ever beg for members bribing them with mod positions, that will never work. Merge forums. If you are forum has only 20-30 members, don?t just stand there, merge it. Try combining more than 2 forums so that the joint result may even shake the big wigs.
If you badly want to start a forum for your site alone, my recommendation is always Vbulletin ? the best forum ever. After starting your forum, try getting community sites, as that?s the way to make your forum grow. If you can?t get a VB, get a MyBB or PHPBB or IPB and change the skin to something attractive.
I hope after reading this, you understand about forums and start merging yours.
Hope this helps atleast some of you
~ CC
