Site Design/Graphics

1. Site Design/Graphics

   #1

   Hola Friendly Strolen :)
   
   Well I think the return of a sly looking dragon is in order. With any luck I'll have something for you by Monday banner and award wise. This is all in hopes that my weekend doesn't take a turn for hectic hehe
   RPG Citadel sounds like quite a cool idea :)
   
   Now don't go thinking you have to pay me, that's silly! I haven't forgotten that you kindly give my (not so) wee webpage much appreciated hosting (freeloader eh? hehe). It does rather break the non-commercial rule
   but I don't charge friends and that rule trumps :) I have a cunning plan though.. lets see how this strikes your fancy...
   
   Would the RPG Citadel be interested in a group of arty farty types bearing a selection of free ready to go web designs and graphics for hosted sites in exchange for a small corner and a bit of suggeting that people
   pay for commissions? See 99% of my commissions are for RPG players and their characters and this is the case for every artist I know, infact my last commission came by way of the Citadel (yay! thanks). It would be
   great for artists and make finding us loons easier for players, could also be an extra bonus to the Citadel by way of something like a referrer percentage on those commissions. Something like what we talked about
   when hashing out the reunion ideas only here there's the plus that character portraits add something more to just custom designs.
   So that's the idea, could be good or bad... thoughts?
   
   -Kate

2. Site Design/Graphics

   #2

   Monday, Friday, next week, no matter. Your schedule is my schedule. I like your trump rule, but it is an open offer. And if we actually start making some money, my honor will demand some kind of payment to you for all your help. Especially with this latest idea of yours.
   
   What do I think of your idea....Well,
   
   Offering ready made webpage designs in the roleplaying genre would greatly boost the marketing value of the hosting site to begin with. (Is that a business statement or what? :wink: Cheap hosting plus ready made webdesigns make it a sweet deal. I am thinking they may not even have to be free. Say, $4-5$ a month for the hosting, and maybe if they want a design, tag another dollar a month. What is $12/year for some cool webgraphics. That money would go straight to the artist I would think. Each artist can set their price depending on the web design. It is their work after all. If they want to give it away for free, great. If they have something they spent more time on they can have different price ranges. Myabe just ask that each person offer two designs/graphics for free to citadel hosted sites in return for a place on the site to advertise their stuff. (Just ideas, you know how open I am to pretty much anything as long as it is fun). See what the others have to say about this.
   
   On the main rpgcitadel pages I would guess that each artist could have their own page(s) showing their offered designs, pictures etc., each one can have their own thing going, require links to them for using the graphics, policies, whatever. They can advertise whatever they want to on that page as well. Probably have to be some talk between them to standardize some stuff so one doesn't do something that harms the rest, but that is more your domain then mine :-). Also would benefit everybody if we had some uniform design of those pages so people can go from artist to artist and be familiar about how to navigate and look for what they wan to see. But I think it is a great idea all said. A referrer percentage would be nice, but the added mutual value and benefit is payment enough for me and I am not sure that is necessary. Everybody is taking a chance with this so depending on how we work out we can hash all those details and get some kind of agreement later. See what the others say about that as well.
   
   I will post this to our webhosting forum thing and see what the others have to say about it. If you sign up and give me your registered name I am sure everybody would agree to give you access to our ignorant ramblings trying to figure this thing out ;-) Then as this idea blossoms you can let us know what you think and how your end is going to work.
   
   Pretty cool getting a commission from our site!! Hope there will be more. I have started a push to try and get the site out there more and the hits say it is working.

3. The artists

   #3

   As far as hosting the artists (Kate and friends) I am all for it.
   
   I say no to the free hosting though. I would have no problem to selling the space at cost; it is only $3/month at cost. As it stands I plan to pay for my own space, and I am a partner. I figure that is better than you two sucking up the cost of me having my own space. Now if either of you two want to continue doing what you are doing now (letting Kate occupy space that you already have) I have no objections. But the long and the short is we pay for a reseller account and then we pay for each account. I am doing this more for the experience than anything else, so making money isn’t my biggest concern, but loosing money is not big on my list of things to do. As I said I plan to buy an account and I could give up some of my space for the cause (e.g. 10 MGs for Kate and friends stuff).
   
   I am not sure what the built in designs that you and Kate were talking about, but it sounds interesting. I’d like a little more clarification on what it is before I vote one way or another.

4. Site Design/Graphics

   #4

   I don't think they are looking for free hosting, but just some pages to try and get to steer some customers their way for commisions. The pages for them would be updated by us, or perhaps a subdomain shared by all of them and they can just trust each other and have one ftp password to the site or something, but it would just be on the reseller account and only a few pages each to show their products, free and commissioned.
   
   The built in designs is basically what you see around the net where people have generic web designs with all the graphics and buttons premade for people to just download and use. Basically fantasy webpage templates. For instance, the strolen.com header graphic and the color scheme and the menus. They would offer that to people to use on their own site and customize or be customized to their liking. They would also offer to do custom jobs by commision and offer a couple free ones. They are our own personal roleplaying webpage designers. We sell the hosting, the sell the creative good looking webpage design.

5. Free wares

   #5

   Offering their wares sounds fine, even like a good idea. I don’t think that anybody needs access to the main reseller account password(s). Unless FTP password can be different from the administration password they will need to buy space or one of us would have to ftp their stuff to the site.

6. Site Design/Graphics

   #6

   Each subdomain can have a FTP that is seperate password. My main site, alchemy.strolen.com, and kate.strolen.com all are different FTPs and different passwords. kate.strolen.com only has access to www.strolen.com/kate/ and cannot go anywhere else but there. Don't worry about access to the main control panel, nobody will have access to that except the three of us. Just like the strolen subdomains, each person only has access to their portion of the site and no farther, nobody has access to a control panel unless they buy their own account, then it comes with it obviously.
   
   The sharing I meant is that all the graphic sites will be in the same subdomain so they will share the same FTP password and will have to trust each other to not mess with others webpages. I don't plan on taking on the maintenance of their websites everytime they want to do an update. I have a feeling we will be busy enough. We don't have enough subdomains and ftps to give each graphic artist their own subdomain. Wish we did, but we don't.

7. kate and friends

   #7

   Sounds good
   
   Then your plan sounds like it will work. You are a nice guy, so it would not have surprised me if you were going to allow Kate (who you have been dealing with for a while now) access to the main site. After all you gave me access to Strolen…
   
   But a sub domain sounds excellent, and pro bono does not sound bad either since we will presumably be reselling to ourselves for the company page, we sound have the sub domain to share.
   
   To summarize
   Kate and friends get:
   -Free sub domain
   -Customer referrals
   
   We get:
   -Graphics for our site(s)
   -Ready made graphics for (at least one of) our site(s)
   
   Have I missed anything?
   Mike - (Seems to lean towards Yes) :lol:
   Dan - Yes :)
   Bob - (Has yet to vote) :x

8. Site Design/Graphics

   #8

   Put up www.rpgcitadel.com just for kicks to remember the old look.
   
   Thoughts:
   1) We can basically use this set up as is but change the heading to whatever we name the roleplaying hosting site.
   
   2) Kate can probably gen up something similiar but unique.
   
   3) Do we like the colors? For some reason RED kept coming into my head when thinking about the hosting site. Maybe the Maroon color or something??
   
   4) Still think once we get the rpg site the way we like it, we can can most of the content to the more generic site with just some word changes and obviously a new webpage setup, but that can be worked on once we settle on a graphic style (and name) for the rpg site.
   
   Just up there for some brain storming. If we don't use it I am going to port it over to the strolen.com site and use it as an options (something I have been wanting to do for awhile)

9. Site Design/Graphics

   #9

   Any other thoughts or does this sound good.
   
   

   
   Stole your dragon to give me a head start on http://www.rpgcitadel.com/index.php . Just wanted to let you know I was borrowing it and making sure it was OK.
   
   Not sure of colors, not sure of design, not sure of anything. That is all your job anyway. hehehe
   
   Saw this on another site and I like it. (the dude on the right)
   
   http://rpgsearch.virtualave.net/
   
   Was wondering if those musical goblins are still available to make some appearences on the pages. I like the idea of them crawling around or climbing over the tables with some fancy borders like you make so well. Maybe the dragon with a claw wrapped around the title looking down and then goblins infesting the main content portion of the sites crawling around hiding or just investigating things.
   
   I write as I think of it. Like I mentioned before, this will be a couple months before we are really ready to get serious about it. We still haven't come up with a company name yet. Three pages of discussion on it so far but no decision. Waiting on paperwork though as well as other legal manners to figure out. Put this in your archives from me :-) unless you can't wait to get started.

10. Site Design/Graphics

    #10

    http://www.rpgcitadel.com/rpgmini.php
    
    I think:
    the tables should be the same width (and fixed).
    the font should be smaller, at least in the descriptions.
    
    http://www.rpgcitadel.com/tech.php
    
    I think:
    for a consistant look and feel, the data should be put in a table with a red header.
    
    http://www.rpgcitadel.com/aup.php
    
    I think:
    See above. (http://www.rpgcitadel.com/tech.php)

11. Site Design/Graphics

    #11

    Changed it all.
    
    Bob said the background blurred the text. I thought it was just me after staring at a computer screen all day, but I agree.
    
    Maybe we can find some sites that have some nice color schemes that we use or at least incorporate into the site. I will do some looking today.
    
    (I converted the pages to use the PHP include command. Makes it much easier for the header, menu, and footer to be seperate so if we/when we change it we only have to do it in that file one time and it updates the whole site. Got sick of changing all the menus every time I wanted something new or different. Starting to use CSS throughout the whole thing too to make the color changes easy and fast.)

12. Site Design/Graphics

    #12

    In response to the email I sent here (I talk to her on ICQ)
    
    

    
    indeed quite doable :) the goblins could probably use an upgrade as well really too but it's a fun idea. I like it
    

    
    
    Unless there are any thoughts against this idea it is going forward.

13. Site Design/Graphics

    #13

    The site looks good. I like it the way it is.
    
    The left side seems kind of tight. The left side could use a space or two, maybe we could build it in a table and give it a border.

14. Site Design/Graphics

    #14

    Made some more changes and additions. The colors are starting to grow on me.
    
    If anybody cares to compile a spreadsheet of the more popular free hosts and compare it to our offerings that would be helpful. hint hint nudge nudge
    
    I don't even know the difference but the popups and forced ads and stuff could be listed. You know what we are looking for.

Strolen's World · All categories · Guildhall