Building a Community

This article was originally posted in my old and now defunct blog on January 21, 2008. Original text is in italics. Anything else was added.

Being that I have a fairly well-visited website called Manga Tutorials, I get the occasional site related inquiries. Most of them ask “how do I get people to come to my website?” And my typical answer would be to have regular content with consistent updates, adding your website to the search engine directories, and generally pimping your site at forums, blogs, and other mediums you can talk about it freely without breaking any rules.

But one of the most important to bringing people to your website is to set up a community. A community brings people back everyday rather than every week or whenever you update your site. It builds up relationships between you and the users, between the users themselves and generates an atmosphere that will be associated with your website in whole.

One of the most obvious community-building feature is to create a forum. If you pay for web hosting, you can set up your own board within your control panel, the board usually being phpbb. If that’s the case, it’s just a matter of entering some fields, clicking some buttons, and waiting a couple of seconds for the forum to be generated. You can also set up phpbb manually by yourself but it’s easy to set up and worse comes to worse, you can ask for help from your web host provider.

A forum was one of the first things I set up at Manga Tutorials and I’ll say right now that it is the main feature at the site that brought people back day by day. Of course, as your forum grows, so too will the problems arise. For example, these are what I faced during the forums growing pains:

• bad members – members who can’t get along with others and are generally unwanted within the community; we’ve had quite a number during the years and only about two were persistent trolls
• spammers – anything from members innocently creating spam to hard-core, full time viagra, porn site, donate a million dollars to xyz spammers.
• mods – there can be problems when members do not like a mod, feeling that they’re not treating them fairly or letting others go too easily. This can get a bit dicey but stick to what is fair and they’ll respect you for that.
• signatures and avatars – I was a bit lax about the avatar sizes and signatures in the beginning but there came a time when members began abusing them and set up images that were taking up too much space. You’ll have to take a stand on this eventually but a no signature & can only upload avatars of a and b specs has worked out for me

Also, a big disadvantage of setting up your own forum if you pay for web hosting is that if your forum becomes very popular, you may have to upgrade your account from sharing with others to having your own server. This upgrade costs a lot compared to the typical basic account most people begin with so be prepared. To go around this, you can find a cool a web host provider like Rydia which I use for Manga Tutorials who won’t pester you about the surge of surfers to your site or set up a free bb account like proboards and so on.

The second community-building feature I set up was an Oekaki Board. An Oekaki Board is a java-based drawing app which allows members to draw and color using their browser. It’s a fairly decent program with layers, swatches, many tools, commenting system and so forth. There’s also a nifty little feature which allows you to view how the oekaki was made from start to finish. Being a how-to draw website, this was a great additional feature to add and it has grown over the years to include lots of members. It was also something provided by my web host provider (and free to boot!) which was an added bonus.

A more recent feature I added was another Java-based drawing app called Groupboard (GB) but instead of only one person drawing on the canvas, multiple people can collaborate and draw together while chatting, playing games and leaving messages. It’s password protected so no unwanted users can come in. The price to use it is reasonable too. As with any chat rooms, there will be drama present and the GB is having it’s fair share of it. So far, these skirmishes are few but if they persist, I may decide to take it out or add another alternative.

One of the features I’m considering to add is a blog. So far, it’s running on the negative because blogs require time to type out things plus I already have this one so why make another? But on the positive side, it’s a nice regular feature you can use to bring more people to your website.

I’ve have also considered doing a newsletter but with everything else going on, I don’t know if I have the time for it. A newsletter, though, can help with those who only come to your site once in a while. This way they know you have something new at the site they can take a look at. Then again, I set up an RSS feed for the site so that works just as well I think.

As you can see, there’s a lot of options you can put into your site to build traffic and a community. Do your homework and consider what you can do with the time and the funds you have. You still have to do leg-work though to build up your community especially if you’re just starting but it’s a great thing to advertise that you have a forum or what-have you on your front page.

Starting Your Own Site

This article was originally posted on January 29, 2008 in my old and now defunct blog. Original text is italicized.

Some people have over the years asked me how to get started in creating their own websites. For those who are truly new to the whole web site design deal, I tell them to use sites like Tripod which will walk you through creating your own website. There are also software alternatives to Tripod via WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) programs such as Dreamweaver and Frontpage (which is no longer being supported by Misrosoft as of 2008) where you play around like a Word Document and it will translate what you did into HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) code for you.

For those who are not afraid of a little coding and are very particular on how their site looks, I suggest they go and learn the meat and bones of web site building and learn HTML. To learn HTML, all you need is a good beginner’s book (or books if you’re ambitious), Notepad or Wordpad and a browser (which doesn’t have to be connected to the internet, btw).

From there, it’s just as matter of practice and expanding your knowledge and skills. Go look around the net and look at sites you admire. View the page source and check out how they put their site together. Even if you don’t know how it was done yet, save it and take a look at it again in the future. Use search engines to call up how to do things. Go to sites that focus on web design. Most of all, don’t give up!

Another easy way to create sites is to use your Word, Publisher or what-have you and when you save it, go to Save As… then at the Save As Type box, choose Web Page (*.htm, *.html). This will save your document into a web page. Just double click on it and it’ll open up on your browser. Just note that if you’re going to upload this to the net, you will also have to include a folder with the same name as your web page and anything within that folder.

These days, having a blog as a website is also common. With a blog, it takes care of everything for you from the design, scripting and so on. All you have to do is customize your blog with you and your blog info and preferences. Two of the most popular blog services are Blogger and WordPress. If you have your own domain and hosting, you can set up WordPress on your site. If you’d rather not mess with a web hosting provider, Blogger and WordPress fortunately has an option where your domain can be pointed to your blog. Try each one out before you commit because each works different but all in all, they are both easy to figure out and use.

Last but not least, if you’re familiar with HTML coding, you can get ready-made templates where the design and layout are already made and all you have to do is enter your text and links. Credit for such templates usually requires a link back to the original creator along with rules such as not changing the graphics and so forth. Be sure you read the creators terms of use before you use their templates.

These are your options but stick around and I’ll cover more as time goes on. Till next time!

Plans for Petunia – Avatars First

Thing’s are shaping up at Pixel Petunia. I’ve placed a new custom header featuring some camping slimes in the spirit of spring and thoughts of summer when the outdoors beckons all. Our own little icon should now be visible too featuring a yellow slime and two p’s – short for Pixel Petunia.

I’ve begun making plans of what art assets to make and I will start with making avatars since they’re the easiest and fastest to make (at least for me). They’ll be customizable avatars at 96×96 pixels and anti-aliased. Since RPG art assets are the most asked for from what I’ve heard, I will start them with fantasy-themed clothing and features. These will be simple head shot avatars as you would see in games like Fire Emblem and Cute Knight with the head, hair and a bit of the clothes showing. Similarly, I will start off with making only quarter views but I will eventually expand them to include front view’s and profile’s.

From there, I’ll consider making present-day clothes and sci-fi clothing so be sure to come back here and mention your opinion on what I should make next (right now would be a good time, for example ^_~).

Save Time with RSS

I love RSS. It just makes life a little bit more easy. If you’re unfamiliar with RSS, think of it as your own little digital elf running around in the net and getting all your subscribed news and articles ready for you to read at your convenience (i.e. whenever you want, even in the middle of the night in your underwear! :O ).

RSS can be for blogs or sites. My RSS for this blog, for example is: http://pixelpetunia.wordpress.com/feed/ while for Manga Tutorials, it’s http://www.mangatutorials.com/mangatutorials_feed.xml

First, you need to sign up to an RSS Reader such as Google Reader or My Yahoo! Feed Reader. Then you can go surf around to look for XML, RSS, Feed buttons to add to your subscription of sites and blogs you want delivered to you. Just click on it and add it to your list. You can also look for the URL as I showed you above and manually add it to your list.

When it’s all done, you can sit back and relax and let your little elf do the work for you. Now, if only they can make something that’ll weed out news you’re interested or not interested in reading… ;)

Note: This post was originally written for an old, defunct blog of mine on January 17, 2008.

Presenting… Pixel Petunia Sez!

Welcome to the opening of Pixel Petunia’s blog – Pixel Petunia Sez! I hope to make this a regular part of the website where I can answer your questions, get feedback like what packs you want next, get freebies, web design tips, and show you guys what I’m doing next.

Finding ready-made artwork is something I notice is surprisingly hard to find particularly of the 2D kind. Being an artist longer than I have been a programmer, I don’t have as much trouble as the average game maker who lacks artistic skills or doesn’t have enough funds to commission artwork. To help my fellow indie’s out and build up art assets for my use as well, I thought I’d do something to alleviate this problem by opening up this service to all indie’s out there.

There’s still a lot to be done before Pixel Petunia is open but I hope you stick around when it does!

Did I mention there will be freebies along the way?