mvi Posted July 24, 2005 Share Posted July 24, 2005 There must be thousands of GTA sites across the globe, this guide is how to distinguish your site and make it stand out. This is the first part of your site the users will see and in a large number of cases it will define whether the user will come back. The following are likely to be avoided because of the plain tackiness and widespread use. Domain cloaks such as .tk subdomains or /domains on widespread free hosts. s#.CRAPPY IF SITE/domain Unless you have some exceptional content and a nice design people probably won't come back to the site. Once you've got people onto your site, it's the hosting that matters, the five things that are really important on hosting are as follows, bandwidth, space, FTP access, PHP, MySQL. The bandwidth is the limit of the total downloaded content of your site, for instance if you have a main page which is about 200kb in size and 10 gig bandwidth, you can have 50000 viewers in a month. The space is the ammount of storage you can use on your site, so a 512 meg limit allows upto a total of 512 meg in files, though actually quite often a fewmeg are taken up by CP files. FTP access allows you to use a FTP client such as smartFTP, turboFTP and cuteFTP to transfer bulk files, do edits and generally use your storage in an explorer like way. PHP is a very poweful language, this entire site is coded in php and so are every IPB forum. PHP really has two sides, the side you can see in your browser by viewing the source - generally html, and the actual source code which can do many things such as detection, file inclusion and complicated formulae. MySQL is basically a database system, all the members on this forum, all the posts, topics and categories, pretty much everything are stored in this database. So just to recap you want a high bw, high space and the other 3 enabled. Forums are a great way to keep users coming back, the key to getting lots of people to register is all in the look and features. A nice skin, lots of mods and well thought out categories and forums. Also the best for forums has got to be IPB 1.3 or 2.0 Designs in my view are important on a site, they can help draw the users eyes to certain points and present your content well, the nicer the design, the easier it is on the eye and your visitors will begin to like the site even without the content yet... Content, if you want people to use it as their number one place you need lots of content, and the best sort of content is unique content. There are many sites which have similar content. The things below are on 10s of sites, best to get something else. Introduction Our Reviews Characters Vehicles Weapons Tips And Tricks Maps Radio Dating Easter Eggs Gangs Gang Wars Car Mods PS2 Cheats PC Cheats Xbox Cheats Official Screenshots Picture Perfect mini games odd jobs checklists respect storyline swimming weapon skill eating clothes artwork trailers pc specs soundtrack properties and assets snapshots horseshoes oysters tags unique jumps Done everything, used the tips? Then your site is well on the way to acheiving more than a bulk of others. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Posted July 24, 2005 Share Posted July 24, 2005 Good guide, useful to newbies here. And everywhere actually. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spaz The Great Posted July 25, 2005 Share Posted July 25, 2005 The deserves PINNAGE. Awesomeness. I can't stress enough that GTA IF boards always suck. And actually, .TK is pretty good. It's URL masking, without gay crap like http://go.to/domain. That's just stupid. And you can get actual .TK domains, the domain masks are the free ones. Either way .TK doesn't work for me, or a few of my friends. Weird. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mvi Posted July 25, 2005 Author Share Posted July 25, 2005 that's a good point, which I forgot but I don't think the post needs updating as the .tk is mentioned in a domain cloaks line, actual true .tk domains would be a tad better than the tk domain cloaks but would also be burdened with the false belief that the site is just a cloak. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris82 Posted July 25, 2005 Share Posted July 25, 2005 Very good mvi. That's pretty much the awesomeness every site needs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeeWee Posted July 26, 2005 Share Posted July 26, 2005 Great tips thanks mvi! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mvi Posted July 26, 2005 Author Share Posted July 26, 2005 No problem and isn't your location USA, America Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Please sign in to comment
You will be able to leave a comment after signing in
Sign In Now