Guide to making a Fan Site

Welcome, I hope this guide will help you in creating a successful fansite for Roblox. If not, at-least get you started! :)

Roblox News, upcoming Milestones: 75 posts away from 1500.
Roblox News milestones achieved: 500K views, 1000 fans on official group and over 1200 followers on Official Twitter.

Table of Contents

• Intro
• Useful Sites
• Important Information
• Web Hosting

Intro

What is a Fan Site? Well it is a site created by fans of a particular product, in this case it would be Roblox. To create a Fan Site you don't need to know any HTML or any coding languages or anything like that, all you need is creativity. Why creativity? Well you need to stay fresh and new, different from what other sites offer. It should have the viewers craving to want more. NEVER try to copy another site, this can cause big arguments and fights. And it is always a good idea to avoid fights.

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Useful Sites

There are many useful sites out there which can help you get started. If you are someone who doesn't have money to buy a domain and pay for a host, use the sites that I am going to tell you about. For beginners Blogger (What Roblox News is using) is very useful, the controls and user interface is very easy to learn. Blogger is simply a blog, where you write articles and publish. If you know HTML and/or Java, you can write codes for your own widgets. Blogger also provides you with some nice features like "Permalink" where you can enter what you want the link to be.
For example: http://www.arbirator-robloxnews.blogspot.com/2013/01/cubeguide.html is the link of this article. "cubeguide" is the custom name I put, so that the link won't be too long (Normally link contains the title of the article) and it is easier if you want to keep track of things. You can also create labels for your posts and set a schedule for when you want it to be posted.

WARNING: Be careful about who you make admin on your Blogger site, once they are admins they can remove you and then takeover the site!

Another nice site is Wordpress I haven't used Wordpress since 2008-2009 but it is a site that has plenty of nice features and a lot of plugin support. It is, I would say a little more complicated than Blogger but still a very reliable site to blog.
The final blogging tool I will tell you about is, Tumblr. Tumblr is more of a personal blogging site, so if you don't want to go solo, tumblr is not very useful. Tumblr has some very beautiful templates and you can write your own in CSS if you wish.
Now if you want something other than a blog, more like a website. You can uses sites like Webs, Yola, Wix and Weebly. These are some of the most useful, easy and popular sites to use other than the three I mentioned earlier.

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IMPORTANT Information to know

• Roblox is an Intellectual Property of Roblox Corp.
If Roblox (employee) ever asks you to take anything down, please comply to their requests. I believe all screenshots and videos you put up of Roblox becomes Roblox property. [If you are a Roblox Employee and finds any false in this, PLEASE tweet me @Flingi2 for rectification]

• Employing
When you "employ" users to your site to do reviews, make sure to have them submit an article on a topic you choose. Look at their writing style, is it serious? is it humorous? is it both? Both is always good because you can get across a message in a humorous way, keeping your reader entertained.

• Protecting your Content
Although we don't do it to our Images, remember to watermark your images in an area where, removal of it distorts the image. The watermark should be in an area where it can hurt the image if removed but it is not the focus.

• Community
Involve your community, involve your fans through events and giving the opportunities to be part of your site.

• Promoting
Promoting a site is the best way to get views, there are many social media outlets in which through you can promote your site for free. If you have an YouTube channel that gets views, make sure to use it as a way to promote your site. The best way to promote is to use Twitter, there are sites which will let you auto-tweet your latest posts so your followers knows whats up. Submit your sites to google, bing and yahoo search engines for free.

• What not to cover
Please don't become like a propaganda site for a particular "war" group or any roblox group for that matter. Unless your site is made just for a particular group and not for the general roblox community.

• Copied Content
We here at Roblox News have had issues with certain users just copying and pasting, images and reviews done by our staff to their own site. PLEASE DO NOT plagiarize, be original and create your own unique content that stick out.

Web Hosting

If you are an expert or very knowledgeable about web designing and have some money consider buying a domain which you can get for very cheap price, which you would 1 year atleast. For example if I bought a domain "www.candypants.com" for $12.95 I own it for 1 year and if I decide to pay for more years I can and own it for however long I paid for. A site I can suggest to you for Web Hosting would be HostGator.

Web Host Coupons

$9.94 OFF your purchase - C994OFFHOSTING
25% OFF your purchase - C25PERCENTOFF

IF you have any questions at all, feel free to tweet me @Flingi2 or @CrypticCube. I hope you found this useful.

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