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Splash Page Help

Splash pages! Everybody loves splash pages! Don't you love splash pages? Of course you do! So let's learn how to make them, shall we? Gather around in a circle, and get out your safety scissors and paste and glitter. It's Craft Time!

There are a number of different kinds of splash pages. For those of you who are computer-adept (not me), you can make very fancy interactive splash pages with lots of . . . special thingies. Image maps and . . . and . . . php's . . . and . . . things. Uhm. If you know how to do it, than you'll know the tech terms better than I. And if you don't know how to do it - well, neither do I, so you're in good company.

The thing to keep in mind, though, and I really must stress this, is that your splash will be loading every time someone enters your room. Keep this in mind before you go hog wild on the fancy-smancy graphics, OSS, and all those other goodies - if your page takes forever to load, then one of two things will happen: A) They will leave, and odds are they just might not come back. Or, B) People will enter your room without actually reading your splash. This means they won't know the setting, or the rules, or who the mods/hosts are, or any of that good stuff. And THAT means that they will be interrupting the roleplay in your room to ask you these things. Ick.

Your best bet is to go with a simple, standard HTML-style splash page. If you're in need of a template, then you can use the one at the bottom of the page. It's very simple, but simple is good, y'know?

Now that we've established that you need a splash page, let us talk about what goes in it. Specifically, you need five things:

1. Room description. Again . . . pretty self-explanatory.
2. Room Rating. You MUST have one of these, displayed prominently. This is so's your chatters know just what they're getting into when they enter the room
3. Room Rules. The . . . rules of your room. One of these should be the size limit for picture dimensions. I recommend 350x350 pixels, or 400x400.
4. A list of Hosts and Moderators.
5. A link to the AUP. Just at the bottom of the page is fine.

Some more stuff that you should have just 'cuz it makes your page all purty and fancy-pants:

1. We strongly recommend having links to the room homepage if you have one, and an e-mail address where chatters can contact you directly - you can always get one free at Yahoo! or Hotmail, or any of them dealies.
2. Room graphic! Purtify your splash page by placing your custom room graphic up there.

Not an HTML whiz, but tired of asking other people how to do things? Have I got a treat for you! Sort of. Some helpful links, at least:

Bare Bones Guide to HTML ( http://werbach.com/barebones/barebones.html#special) : A bare bones guide to HTML. Very handy for those of you who do not want to be webpage designers, but do want to learn some basic HTML so as to be relatively self-sufficient when it comes to your splash page.
HTML Color Codes - A Visibone Wheel (http://html-color-codes.com/): A handy-dandy guide to the six-digit color codes, in case you wanna make your colors extra special.

And now, without further ado, I present to you the simple HTML template for your splash page. This can be copy-pasted directly into your splash page field, although you need to tweak it a bit to customize it to your specific needs. All the text that is in bold white indicates fields that you can - or in some cases have to - change.

<body bgcolor="#000000"> <table border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" bgcolor="#000000" width="100%"><tr valign="top"><td width="100%">
<center> <img src="Your image URL here">

<a href="Your homepage URL here" target="_blank">Homepage</a> <a href="mailto:E-mail address here">E-Mail Us</a>
</center>


This is where you'll stick your room description. Such things include the genre, general setting . . . etc. It should be about a paragraph, maybe two.

 Rules: 
 
1. Room rating: PG-13
 
2. Picture size limit 350 x 350 pixels
 
3) Any other rules. (you can have just as many as you please, just remember to put between each item)

 Room Hosts/Moderators: 
 
Billy Joe Bob: Host
 
Joey Bill Bob: Moderator
 
Bobby Joey Bill: Moderator (etc.)

Please make sure you've read the SilverCrossings <a href="http://www.silvercrossings.net/index.php?page=AUP&action=View" target"_blank">AUP </a>
</td> </tr> </table>

This page brought to you by the letter "M," as in Merlin, who is now magnificently myopic due to meticulously making the above splash page template. HTML makes Merlin's brain go "ouch."