IC site

[Aloys]

Following our interesting RP thread, I’ve been expanding on a potential IC site; this is something I am pretty interested on working on. So I have started putting together a quick site plan. Excuse the raw look, this is just a starting point to sort out what can/should/needs to be done.

The biggest problem I have currently is the separation of IC and OOC.. Since they are two very distinct things we should have two distinct sites; our current OOC one and the new IC one. At the same time the current OOC site is very nice but a bit irrelevant an And I fear having two distinct sites might be confusing to some. If we do two different sites we should make sure they are visually quite distinct. (although it’s a detail at this point). Another option would be to have a splash page with a warning message saying ‘You are entering the OOC twilight zone. Proceed at your own risk’…
For now I have considered the site to be fully IC, and I have added notes where needed.

- - -

Splash page ?
In the case of two distinct IC/OOC sites this would be a front page separating them -- so they can be both accessed through the same GoW.com address.

Homepage

• GoW Logo. Weee. (Shouldn’t we have some D’ni writing somewhere in there? This is an IC site about D'ni Writing.)
• Intro Pitch / short Mission statement (this would be the first text on the site, and it would be a pretty important one)
• Age of the Day random rotating picture (much like we have now)
• Latest News (newest Age released etc..)
• Other Guilds links.
• Link back to the OOC site ?

‘About the GoW’
(IMO the most important page of the site)

• Mission statement - Should explain : who we are ; what we do; how we do it (IC), how we are (un)organized; how everyone is welcome etc.
• IC history (currently being discussed in the ‘Roleplay’ thread)
• Our relation to the 4 other Guilds and how we work with them (or at least how we are supposed to).
• Other importants points that are underligned in the RP thread might go there too.

Age Writing FAQ
A quick IC FAQ outlining the joys and difficulties of Age Writing to set expectations correctly for new comers (without discouraging them). A while ago Hoikas had a similar OOC one on his site (can’t find it again..). This is something that is sorely missing currently.

Documentation ?
Should we have a direct link to our (very) OOC Wiki? Should we have an ‘OOC warning’ splash page? Should it be a simple link at the end of the Writing FAQ?

Ages List
This is a pretty important (and pretty self-explanatory) page. The fact that we don't have such a list on our site confuses and baffles many people ((legitimately). I agree it does it does look like quite a bit of extraneous work on top of existing lists over at Alcugs; but it is necessary to have it on our site, and writen from an IC perspective.
The content and goal of this page seems fairly obvious, but the shape isn't too important for now.
Each Age entry could include something along the line of : Name – Author – Release date (IC) – Restoration Phase (in case of an ongoing project) – At least one screenshot – Description - Download link? (that sound a little OOC)

Writers Blogs ?
I may go slightly off topic here, but this is something that has been discussed a couple times already: should we provide links to IC writers Blogs? Should we host them? (Hoikas? Does that sound doable or even reasonable?)

IC Forum link
When/if we have an IC forum that is.

‘Contact Us’ page
“We are nowhere, we are everywhere; don’t look for us; we will find you”. Hmm. Maybe not. But since we do not have an official representative (do we?) we should at least have a small text mentioning it. “We are an unstructured Guild, we have no official contact person, if you want to contact us your safest bet is our forum -- if you have a technical problem with our site please contact our webmaster here” etc..)

- - -

Again this is only a work base to get us started..
Creating the site once we have agreed on the content won't be too much work, what's important is to get the content right.

[Trylon]

I'd say some IC blogs from a few characters could be nice too.

There shouldn't be too much links to OOC stuff though. One link to the OOC area should suffice. A FAQ containing e.g. about our linking books would be nice too.

What do you think about using the "www.guildofwriters.com" site for it? It's not like it's currently heavily used.
In that case there'd need to be a link to the IC subforum and a separate linkto the OOC main forum.

I also have a few vouchers for a free domain name (one year) in (among others) the .info and .net top levels. It's valid 'till march 31 if we're fast I could register one for free.
(the other tlds are .uk, .eu, .be, .fr, .tel, .com, .me and .mobi, but I didn't think those'd be appropriate)

[BAD]

What about GOW.org? If this is going to be a non profit group, that may make more sense.

[Tsar Hoikas]

What about GOW.org? If this is going to be a non profit group, that may make more sense.

GuildOfWriters.org is taken, and the owner wants approximately $2,000 USD for it. We've already been there...

I was planning on redoing the web site. I guess I have more motivation to dust off the replacement template that I had (it's actually quite nice) and figure out that weird side scrolling bug on 1024x768 resolutions.

[diafero]

We already have a complete list of fan ages at http://alcugs.almlys.org/UAM/Ages which is kept up-to-date by Dustin - doing that again sounds like a huge waste of effort (the GoMa also tried that, copied some information from Alcugs and let it bitrot).

[Trylon]

I disagree!

From a hackers perspecive the alcugs list makes some sense. But from a visitors perspective it makes absolutely no sense.
I think a list of ages here (preferably IC) would be a very welcome addition.

[Aloys]

GuildOfWriters.org is taken, and the owner wants approximately $2,000 USD for it. We've already been there...

That also reminds me of something but it must have been another domain because I just whois'd www.guildofwriters.org (here) and what I suspected is correct: this was an Uru site from a couple years ago. It was a very nice IC flash site with great graphics and sounds dealing with the Art and explorer-written Ages in the form of public journals. There was also a forum attached to it where people could register journals. It has been down for a while though, and I'm not sure whether it's author is still involved in Uru activities.
And believe it or not the domain registration just so happens to expire tomorrow. If we want to take a decision regarding this domain we will have to do it quick before it get squatted..

We already have a complete list of fan ages at http://alcugs.almlys.org/UAM/Ages which is kept up-to-date by Dustin - doing that again sounds like a huge waste of effort

From a hackers perspecive the alcugs list makes some sense. But from a visitors perspective it makes absolutely no sense.
I think a list of ages here (preferably IC) would be a very welcome addition.

That's my point too. If you want to check out Writers Ages where do you go? To the Writers site obviously. But we don't have a list of our own Ages on our own site.

[kaelisebonrai]

indeed... march 24th 2010... Looks like its up for grabs, chaps, so, yeah, here's hoping one of us grabs it. <g>

[Trylon]

well, it's still a whiel before it can be grabbed.

.org .info .biz:

• Expiration Day to Day+1: ACTIVE Status: Domain active and renewable
• Expiration Day+1: HOLD Status: Domain deactivated but renewable
• Expiration Day+2 to Day+30: PENDING DELETE RESTORABLE Status: Domain deleted but restorable
• Expiration Day+31 to Day+60: PENDING DELETE SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE Status: No operation possible
• Expiration Day+65 or more: The domain may be registered again

still 65 days more to go..... possibly it won't be squatted sine it wasn't a heavily used name

[diafero]

From a hackers perspecive the alcugs list makes some sense. But from a visitors perspective it makes absolutely no sense.
I think a list of ages here (preferably IC) would be a very welcome addition.

Why doesn't it make sense for a visitor?

Sure you can go ahead and create yet another list of ages, screenshots, descriptions... but at the current pace of our writers keeping that up-to-date is a noticeable amount of work. Just my 2 cents, don't let me stop you, but don't say I did not warn you