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Sunday last week my computer was hit by an EMF wave from a lightening blast, taking out the power supply & motherboard but leaving everything else intact. About 2 minutes prior to this I had finished and saved the first three pages that were the beginnings of the AQ website.
It was the first week back of staff and students to the school where I work as Sys Admin - always the worst week of the year with demanding complaining staff and a continuous stream of students who can't remember their password from one year to the next - God help them trying to remember their PIN or phone number! A crash in Active Directory in the main server of our tree (14 servers) led to 2 late nights of trying to resurrect what we had, all the while putting up with the whining of staff who didn't have their computer yet, and the problems of staff who did but couldn't work out how to turn them on.
My computer came back after 3 days - rebuilt with the same basic chassis & mother board - XP kicked in without any problems and I set to work on this site. I had one simple goal - make a Fan site that fans could use to be fans in. It may seem simple - even laughable - but most fan sites are either for the author of the site only (visit, but don't touch), or corporate sites veiled as fan sites (come in, but whatever you want will have to be paid for). So I took this base plan and came up with the following 'requirements' as I saw them:
1) The site must allow interaction among fans so they get to know each other and realise that they are not alone.
2) The site should provide them with easy links to sites which answer questions that they may have.
3) The site should be totally unthreatening and (keeping that in mind) uncensored in what it allows members to say.
4) The site should be easy to navigate yet with enough colour and 'Queen Theme' to retain interest.
In order that I could achieve this, I sought out the three main things that assist with interactivity on a site: a Forum, a Chat room, and a Journal/Blog program. Although I had been assisting in creating a Forum on the last site, I found that it wasn't powerful enough to supply what the users were asking for, so I had to find and learn how to use a new forum and how to setup and use my very first chatroom and Blog. No easy task since much was new ground. I then added in file upload ability (another huge task which took 3 days to work something approaching correctly) and am now trying to allow email from the various areas.
I set up a basic working site containing these, added in a guestbook recently for some permanent feedback, the obligatory counters, and a few links to reference sites. I am now in the process of tweaking colours (ie: having fun) and working on better banners and layout.
I will soon be working on a Question/Answer page which is a specialised forum purely to enable fans to receive answers for the questions they always wanted to know. (Sort of an 'Ask Icarus' I guess).
Finally, I took the old forum and moved it across to the new to provide a history and background for the new Aussie Queens site to take off!
(And my old computer is still sitting in the room - dead).
Icarus.
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