Welcome to the Features section - an area for Features on just about anything with any vauge association to the Warhammer or 40K universes. If you would like to send in your own feature for all to enjoy then please mail me at blackdwarf@lineone.net and I will be eternally grateful.

CONTENTS

Article Game Page Contributer(s)

How to make a great GW site - a complete guide 1 James

Inquisitor - a sneak Preview INQ 2 Anonymous

Games Workshop Market Strategy 2 James

PAGE 1

HOW TO MAKE A GREAT GW SITE - A COMPLETE GUIDE James

This guide explains how to make your own Games Workshop site, and includes design tips and promotion advice as well as explaining the HTML code you will need to know. Any questions or clarification should be directed to blackdwarf@lineone.net and I will be happy to expand further. I have split this up into several sections. Background to this site / Planning your site / The code you need / Advanced code / Getting it on the net

Background to this site
First a bit of background to this site. I first decided to make a site almost 6 months prior to there actually being a site on the net. This was partly because I'm lazy and partly because it took me a long time to get everything written and organised. I first sat down and planned what the categories would be, and how they would link together. Then I tried to build the basic structure in Microsoft Publisher. I gave up on this eventually due to it's lack of flexibility. A while later I got some help from my friend Thomas, who got me started using Notepad to design everything in raw HTML. While this was initially a bit daunting the greater flexibility eventually got me hooked, and it really isn't that hard. It wasn't long before I had a basic structure built, but without the content. From about October '99 my brother John and I were slowly writing articles, until we felt that there was enough material to finally go online in March 2K. We then signed up for a domain (I'll tell you where later), uploaded the whole lot, and (after a little tweaking) started listing it with various directories and search engines. Articles keep on appearing (when we have nothing better to do - so quite frequently) and the site gets updated whenever we have time and articles. This is pretty much the story so far.

The reason why I have bored you with this is just to give you an idea of what making a site entails. I won't lie to you and say it takes no time at all. Quite a bit of effort is required to get a quality site on the net, but if you've got the inclination then go for it! Hopefully I can try and reduce the overall time for you by telling you how I did it.

Planning your site
Now you need to have a little think. What content to you intend to display on your site? How are you going to organise it? The way I see it, a comprehensive Games Workshop site has a couple of ways of organising the material it holds. First you could arrange it into army categories, I.E. have a page for space marine stuff, a page for orcs etc. This method works quite well when there is a lot of content, but you might want to consider instead arranging into game categories (IE, a category for Gorkamorka, a category for Warhammer, etc) This allows you to concentrate the material into broader categories. The way I have done it is to organise the material as to it's type. (Ie Battle reports, painting tips, etc) Once you have some top-level categories you need to think about whether there is a need for sub-categories. (Ie Space marine battle painting tips, Eldar painting tips, etc) This may or may not be necessary. Black Dwarf has NO subcategories. This means that anything on the site can be accessed from any other part of the site with only 1 click (except the guestbook entries because of the way the CGI script works) The advantage of this is reduced loading times, and fewer non-content areas, which are likely to bore visitors. Remember a web site is not much fun if you have to click through about 5 different menus (which all have to load) before you actually get to some content. On the same note I would discourage an "Entry" page, (I.E. a page which says "click here to enter this site",) because again this means more clicking and more loading for visitors. On the other side of the coin a certain amount of menus are necessary because you can't fit everything onto a page. It is up to you to decide on this issue. A menubar visible on every page is a good idea, but if there is not enough room for that at least put in a link to the "home" page of your site on every page.
The Code you need

Webpages are written in HTML code (Hyper Text Markup Language for those who care.) Webpage creation software such as Microsoft Frontpage can generate these tags for you, and depending on the quality of the software can be a useful tool. The advantage is that you need to know nothing about HTML, but unless you have a very good package you can be limited by what you can do. I designed these pages for the most part in raw HTML, and you can view the code for this page (and any other page on the net) By clicking "view" and then "source" from the menubar in your browser. For pages which use frames such as this one you can also view the source of each part by right clicking on the part in question and selecting "view source" This can be a good way of learning, as you can find out how it is done on any site you like.

Just to explain a little bit about how HTML works. Everything inside the < and > is a tag, and won't be displayed by your browser. Tags describe how the rest of the text is displayed. Many tags have a beginning and end: the beginning marks the point from where on the tag applies and the end marks the point from which the tag no longer applies. An ending tag will have a slash in it, eg marks the end of a paragraph. Tags often contain parameters which have an = sign, but the tag is only the first word. Parameters will end when the tag ends. Eg This is a tag (start of paragraph) with the added parameter that it is aligned in the centre of the screen. Only the bit before the first space is the actual tag name, ie the P in this case. Not all tags have a start and end, eg forces the text to go onto the next line so is the equivalent of an enter. This has no ending (obviously.) HTML tags are not case sensitive. They don't have to be entered in capitals, but in this guide I have done so for clarity. You can put as much space as you want between tags, and there is no difference. To make the HTML code easier to read why not put in a few blank lines here and there (but don't split up a tag - unless it goes onto the next line due to word wrapping). Note that HTML is spelt using American spelling: Ie colour => color and centre => center.

So now down to business. Open notepad (from accessories in the start menu) and you will be presented with a blank text document. As you go through these instructions, the things to type down are the things I have written in blue. Where I have written something in red you will need to replace it with some content of your own choice. Don't worry: I will explain it all as I go along.

Start by typing:

<HTML>

This is a required tag at the start of top of every webpage.

On the next line type:

<HEAD>

This tag marks the start of the section where you put in a few general parameters for your site. You only need one of these on each page.

Now, on the next line type:

<TITLE>This is a cool website</TITLE>

This gives you the title for your site, which is displayed in the bar at the top of your browser The <TITLE> tag marks the start or the title, and the </TITLE> marks the end. In between these two tags is the text that is actually displayed at the top of your browser window, and you can replace it with whatever you want to be displayed there. Try changing the red text to the title of your choice. I will point out at this point that this line is not required. If you omit this line then there will be no title displayed at the top of the page.

On the next line down type:

</HEAD>

This tag marks the end of the head section of your code.

Now things get a little more interesting, as you can actually get something to display on the site. Type on the next line:

<BODY BGCOLOR="00FFFF" TEXT="000000" LINK="FF0000" VLINK="FF0000">

BODY marks the start of the Body section, the section which contains the whole content of the website. In fact you could just put in <BODY> and leave out the rest, but allow me to explain. BGCOLOR="00FFFF" gives the colour of the background, TEXT="000000" gives the colour of the page's text. LINK="FF0000" gives the colour that links will appear in, and VLINK="FF0000" is the colour that links will appear in after they have been visited. These are global parameters, and will be used as default throughout the whole page unless specified otherwise. The actual colour in each case is the 6 digit hexidecimal number inside the quotes, which can be changed to whatever you like. The colours are in the format RRGGBB Where RR is the amount of red, GG is the amount of green, and BB is the amount of blue. Altering these quantities in different amounts yields different colours. Each digit can be one of 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F. where 00 is none of that colour and FF is all of that colour. 77 is somewhere in between.

Eg. 000000 = Black (no red, no green, no blue)

FF0000 = Red (full red, no green, no blue)

00FF00 = Green (no red, full green, no blue)

0000FF = Blue (no red, no green, full blue)

00FFFF = Cyan (no red, full green, full blue)

FF00FF = Magenta (full red, no green, full blue)

FFFF00 = Yellow (full red, full green, no blue)

FFFFFF = White (full red, full green, full blue)

FF9999 = Pink (full red, some green, some blue)

Well…… you get the picture….. hopefully…..

Next we need to put some actual words onto the screen, On the next line type:

This is my cool website, I hope you like it.

This is a small chunk of text that will be aligned in the centre of the screen. The starts the paragraph. In fact you could replace this tag with , ignoring the align part. If you did this the paragraph would be aligned to the left, which is the default. You could also have it aligned to the right by replacing the word CENTER with RIGHT. The part marks the end of the paragraph. In between is the text that will appear on the screen. You can make this as long as you want, and write whatever.

Now we shall finish off this page and take a look at it in the web browser. On the next line type:

</BODY>

This completes the body section of your page, and should always be the 2^nd last tag on your webpage.

On the line below that type:

</HTML>

This completes the code, and should always be the last tag on the webpage.

Just to check, what you should have typed is:

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE>This is a cool website</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY BGCOLOR="00FFFF" TEXT="000000" LINK="FF0000" VLINK="FF0000">

This is my cool website, I hope you like it.

</BODY>

</HTML>

(You might have changed the red text)

Now click file> save as, and save the file as "index.htm" Make sure this filename is all in lower case. Now use windows explorer to find and open the file index.htm which you have just saved.

It should look like this:

Now right click anywhere on the page and select "view source". This will cause your HTML code to re-appear. Have a fiddle around, and change the text and colours to whatever you fancy. Each time you make a change then save it, switch to your browser, and then click the refresh button, and see how it looks!. If it doesn't look right then change it back.

You can add more paragraphs to your site simply by including a tag at the start, and a at the end. As above, if you wish to change the alignment you simply put an align= paramenter inside the first tag.

Now suppose you want to change the font, colour, or size of your text? Well that is easily accomplished by an additional tag after your tag.

View the source of your page up till now by right clicking on the page and selecting view source. Now make a new paragraph by typing on a line below your last paragraph, but above the </BODY> tag:

This is a new paragraph!

In the above line the and tags mark the start and end of the paragraph, the <FONT….. > tag marks the start of modification to the font style. FACE= is the new font, COLOR= is the new colour and SIZE= is the new size. You don't need to put in all these parameters, just the ones you want to change. The tag ends these font modifications, and further text will be in the default style.

Want it to be bold, italic or underlined? Easy: Before the </BODY> tag type:

Bold Italic Underlined 

Or all three!

As already explained, and mark the start and end of a paragraph. and mark the start and end of a bold section, and mark the start and end of an italic section, and and mark the start and end of a underlined section.

Now to check. Save your file, and refresh the browser. The file should look like this:

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE>This is a cool website</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY BGCOLOR="00FFFF" TEXT="000000" LINK="FF0000" VLINK="FF0000">

This is my cool website, I hope you like it.

This is a new paragraph!

Bold Italic Underlined 

Or all three!

</BODY>

</HTML>

And the browser like this!

A couple of other basic tags you will need, type before the </BODY> tag:

 

<HR>

The tag is the equivalent of pressing enter, as it goes onto the next line. The <HR> tag adds a horizontal line.

Next you might want some images. Be careful with the file sizes for images, because the larger they are, the longer it takes for your page to load. The best image formats to use are GIFs for diagrams or animations without too many different colours. For photos JPEGs give a good compromise between quality and file size, although you might want to use them for other images as well. To actually get the images is up to you. There are websites out there which provide libraries of free images which you can copy although you should consider making some yourself, i.e. make the buttons in a painting package, scan in photos etc.

For experimenting you can use this picture of an ork Weirdboy Warphead (which I painted myself) Right click on the picture and select "save picture as"

Save the image in the same folder as your webpage, and then type the following on a line above the </BODY> tag:

<IMG SRC="ork_warpheadsmall.jpg" HEIGHT="120" WIDTH="90" ALIGN= "right">

In this instance the <IMG defines this as an image tag, the SRC= gives the location of the image, if it is in the same directory then you can just leave it as the filename, if it is in a different directory you will have to provide the full URL (unless it is a subfolder of the webpage's folder - in this case type "../subfolder/image.jpg" replacing subfolder with the path to the correct subfolder and image.jpg with the filename. Use forward slashes) The HEIGHT= gives the height, and the WIDTH= gives the width. ALIGN= gives the alignment. *Note that text will wrap around an image. Aligning the image to the centre (spelt center in HTML) puts 1 line of text next to the centre of the image and further lines below. No Alignment puts 1 line of text next to the base of the image and further lines below. Images can be included in paragraphs if you want. If you align the paragraph instead of the image then the text will not wrap around at all.

Also essential to any site are links - either to another site, subpages of your own site, or another part of the same page of your site.

Make a new site in notepad (by clicking file new) Add the following HTML code to it:

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE>Page 2</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY>

Welcome to the second page of my cool site

 

<A HREF="index.htm">Click here to go to my home page</A>

</BODY>

</HTML>

Then save it as page2.htm

The <A… defines that the text from now on is a link. The HREF= gives the URL of the page being linked to (where it is) If this page is in the same directory as the one being linked from then the filename will suffice here. If it is not then you will have to provide a full URL (of the form http://) If it is in a subfolder of the directory in which the index file is you can type the link as "../subfolder/page.htm" where subfolder is replaced by the subfolder's name, and page.htm is replaced with the page's filename. The </A>ends the link text, and any text between the two tags forms the link that you see on your browser.

You can also modify your index page by adding before the </BODY> tag:

<A HREF="page2.htm">Click here to go to my second page</A> 

<A HREF="http://www.blackdwarf.co.uk" >Click here to go to Black Dwarf, the Ultimate Wargames resource</A> 

Ok - you can leave out that 2^nd <A HREF… line if you want to. Can't imagine why you wouldn't want to though…. Note that I have put in tags so that a new line is started after every link. Your completed index.htm file should then look something like:

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE>This is a cool website</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY BGCOLOR="00FFFF" TEXT="000000" LINK="FF0000" VLINK="FF0000">

This is my cool website, I hope you like it.

This is a new paragraph!

Bold Italic Underlined 

Or all three!

<IMG SRC="orlock.jpg" HEIGHT="120" WIDTH="90" ALIGN= "right">

<A HREF="page2.htm">Click here to go to my second page</A> 

<A HREF="http://www.blackdwarf.co.uk" >Click here to go to Black Dwarf, the Ultimate Wargames resource</A> 

</BODY>

</HTML>

Save this page and then refresh it. Click on the link to the second page. Notice how the link is in a different colour on the second page. You can change link colours by specifying LINK= and VLINK= parameters in the BODY tag, as already discussed, or for individual links by the same method as normal text: ie by putting in <A HREF="?">Click here to go to…. </A> Make sure the font tags are inside the A tags though.

If you want the link to send an e-mail instead of going to a website then type the link like this:

<A HREF="mailto:your_email_address">Click here to send me an E Mail</A>

and simply replace "your_email_address" with your actual e-mail address.

And that's the end of the Basic HTML code you need to know. Try and get a bit of practice in before you go onto the advanced stuff. If you want some further explanation on any of this stuff then send me an E-mail at blackdwarf@lineone.net or check out a site dedicated to web authoring. A good one is http://www.bignosebird.com
Advanced Code

Presumably now you will be familiar with the basics. I am now going to describe how to make frames and a few other things.

Frames are the method by which you can split the page up into sections which scroll independently of each other, such as I have used on the sidebar on black dwarf. If you want frames then you must create a webpage for each section, as each frame is a separate page. You must also include a "frameset" page to tie them all together.

First lets create the frameset page. Start by making a new document in notepad. Type in the following:

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE>The Frameset page</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<FRAMESET cols="20%,80%" BORDER="0">

<FRAME SRC="frame1.htm" NAME="leftframe" NORESIZE="true">

<FRAME SRC="frame2.htm" NAME="rightframe" NORESIZE="true">

</FRAMESET>

The tags we are interested in are the <FRAMESET … > tags These specify that the browser window is being split into two sections: either rows or columns. The tag <FRAMESET cols="20%, 80%" BORDER="0"> tag specifies that there are two columns, the first occupying 20% of the browser window, and the second occupying 80%. You could have rows instead, and any size split you like. To make rows instead, simply replace cols= with rows=. The BORDER="0" parameter is to prevent there from being a border around your frames. (of course if you want a border then just increase the number inside the quotes.)

Now to define the actual frames. there is a <FRAME …. > tag defining each frame. The SRC="?" parameter defines where the HTML page for that frame can be found. Put the URL (the filename) of the page between these quotes. The NAME="?" parameter defines what the frame is called. This is important when providing links within your page, as the browser needs to know what frame to put the new page into. You can put whatever you want for the name, but they must be unique, (and should reflect something about the actual position of the frame) The NORESIZE="true" parameter stops people from resizing your frames, and should usually be included.

You need a <FRAME …..> tag for every frame, the first one you list will be displayed on the left (or top for rows.) Alternatively, if you want more than 1 frame you could replace 1 (or both) of the <FRAME … > tags with a further <FRAMESET ….> </FRAMSET> section to subdivide the frame.

Delete the last <FRAME SRC= ….. > line and replace it with:

<FRAMESET rows="15%,85%">

<FRAME SRC="frame3.htm" NAME="topright" NORESIZE="true">

<FRAME SRC="frame4.htm" NAME="bottomright" NORESIZE="true">

</FRAMESET>

This has the effect of splitting the right frame into two, the top one using 15% of the previous frame, and the bottom one using 85%.

At the bottom (under the 2^nd </FRAMESET>) type:

<NOFRAMES>

<BODY>

This is what will show up on a browser that can't support frames

</BODY>

</NOFRAMES>

The reason for this section is that some old or specialised browsers can't support frames. You should put something in between the <NOFRAMES> and </NOFRAMES> tags for these applications to see, either a whole webpage (the body section anyway - the HEAD section is already at the top of the page remember), a link to another part of your webpage: maybe one of the frames, or just a message as I have done above.

Finish off your page by typing:

</HTML>

Just to check: The page should look like this:

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE>The Frameset page</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<FRAMESET cols="20%,80%" BORDER="0">

<FRAME SRC="frame1.htm" NAME="leftframe" NORESIZE="true">

<FRAMESET rows="15%,85%">

<FRAME SRC="frame3.htm" NAME="topright" NORESIZE="true">

<FRAME SRC="frame4.htm" NAME="bottomright" NORESIZE="true">

</FRAMESET>

</FRAMESET>

<NOFRAMES>

<BODY>

This is what will show up on a browser that can't support frames

</BODY>

</NOFRAMES>

</HTML>

Save it as whatever_you_want.htm, although the frameset page is usually used as the index page, index.htm ( which is the home page or first page a visitor sees)

You should then make up 3 pages in HTML to use in the frames. This diagram shows how the files will relate to the spaces in this example. If you have changed the filenames in the framest page, or the number of frames then adjust the filenames for your pages accordingly.

frame1.htm

frame3.htm

frame4.htm

When you have made the 3 pages with the correct filenames, and saved them in the same folder as the frameset page then you should have a look and see if the pages all display correctly, and in the right position.

When making links in your pages contained in frames you will need to add an extra parameter to make sure they display in the correct frame. Eg:

<A HREF="newpage.htm" TARGET="bottomright">Click here to go to my next page</A>

The TARGET= parameter specifies what frame the linked page will be displayed in. Simply replace the bit inside the quotes with the NAME of the frame (from your frameset page) that you want the new page to be displayed in.

A couple of special targets:

Supposing you want the linked to page to be displayed in a new browser window: simply put "self" as the target, eg:

<A HREF="http://www.blackdwarf.co.uk" TARGET="self">Click here to go to Black Dwarf!</A>

What about if you don't want the new page to be put in a frame at all, and you don't want to open a new browser window? Easy: put "_top" as the target eg:

<A HREF="http://www.blackdwarf.co.uk" TARGET="_top">Click here to go to Black Dwarf!</A>

O - and if you don't put in any target then the linked to page will be displayed in the same frame as the link.

And so concludes my bit on frames. As you can see they are a bit more complicated than the basic HTML.

Tables are often used instead of frames to create a menubar without splitting up the page into lots of frames. Obviously the menubar will then scroll along with the rest of the page. You can use tables to position pictures and text just about anywhere, by putting them inside the cells of the table. If you want you can put the entire page within a table so as to align everything. I have to admit that I usually don't bother to program in the HTML for tables. What I usually do is to use Microsoft Word to do it for me, and then I just copy and paste (after it has been converted to HTML) I suggest you do likewise, but for the sake of completeness I have included a quick guide to making tables.

Make a new page and type:

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE>A page with a Table!</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY>



<TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0">

<TR>

<TD>Column1</TD>

<TD>Column2</TD>

<TD>Column3</TD>

</TR>

<TR>

<TD><IMG SRC="ork_warpheadsmall.jpg" WIDTH="102" HEIGHT="124" BORDER="0"></TD>

<TD>A fine army of wierdboys, Don't you agree? </TD>

<TD><IMG SRC="ork_warpheadsmall.jpg" WIDTH="102" HEIGHT="124" BORDER="0"></TD>

</TR>

<TR>

<TD><IMG SRC="ork_warpheadsmall.jpg" WIDTH="102" HEIGHT="124" BORDER="0"></TD>

<TD><IMG SRC="ork_warpheadsmall.jpg" WIDTH="102" HEIGHT="124" BORDER="0"></TD>

<TD><IMG SRC="ork_warpheadsmall.jpg" WIDTH="102" HEIGHT="124" BORDER="0"></TD>

</TR>

</TABLE>



</BODY>

</HTML>

The <TABLE…. > tag marks the start of a table. The parameter BORDER="0" specifies that there is no border around the table. The parameter CELLPADDING="0" specifies that there is no padding around each cell, and the parameter CELLSPACING="0" specifies that there is no spacing between the cells.

The <TR> marks the start of a new row, the </TR> ends the row.

Inside the row there are a number of columns. The number of cells must be the same in each row. (if they are not the same then the rows with fewer cells will have gaps on the end!)

The <TD>marks the start of a cell, the </TD> ends the cell.

Now here is the real power of tables. In each cell (between the <TD> and </TD>) you can put ANYTHING. It can be a picture, a block of text, some hyperlinks, even another table! You would put in another table if you want to subdivide a cell further.

The width of the cell will stretch to fit whatever's inside, unless you put in a WIDTH="?" parameter inside the <TD> tag, eg <TD WIDTH="100"> Unless you put in these parameters you should make sure that all the pictures have exact sizes specified, and you put in a after every line of text (equivalent to enter)

After the last row the </TABLE> marks the end of the table.

Save the page and have a look. The image I have used is the Orlock from the basic tutorial. As you can see this example is a 3 by 3 table. Note that there is no need to indent any of the lines, it just makes it easier to keep track of what's going on.

Another good trick is to have a link which links to another point in the same page. This can save scrolling. To do this, type the following at the point you want linked to:

<A NAME="furtherdown"></A>

You can put whatever you want for the name. You don't have to put anything in between the <A NAME… > and the </A>. This creates the anchor at that particular point in the document.

Now you can link to this point from a different part of the same page. At the point where you want the link type:

<A HREF="#furtherdown">Click here to go to the marked point</A>

basicly this is the same as a normal link except that you put in the name of the anchor with a # in front of it instead of the normal URL.

And that concludes my bit on advanced HTML. Obviously there is a lot more to be learnt, but I can't tell you everything! (besides - this about the sum of my knowledge on this subject anyway) If you want some cool special effects like mouseover effects then you will need to insert a bit of javascript. I am not going to go into that, because I know nothing about it. It is not necessary to learn Javscript anyway, as you can just cut and paste scripts from one of the many excellent resource sites out there. A good one is http://www.bignosebird.com (where I got my mouseover script from.) If you want to make your site interactive with such features as a guestbook, a web poll, etc then you will need to have access to a CGI bin (which is a place on the server for CGI scripts) If your ISP does not provide one then there are sites with free guestbooks and stuff out there which use a CGI bin provided by the site.
Getting it on the net

This is very easy. First you need a some webspace to put your site onto. Very often your ISP will provide you with some free webspace, or you can get webspace from one of the many free services such as Fortune city or Geosoft.

Then you need to upload your site to the server using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) You can do this with dos commands, or by using an FTP package, many of which can be found on the web. Obviously check that the site is working on your own computer before uploading, and please make sure that all the filenames and links are in LOWER CASE ONLY.

Once on the net you should be able to find it using the URL given to you by your webspace provider. You can if you want sign up for a domain name. (such as mysite.com) which makes your site easier to find, but comes at a hefty price. For a .com address you will have to pay US$35 per year (and pay the first 2 years in advance!) There are compromises that you can make. Certain providers are offering addresses such as http://www.surf_to.yoursite.com The compromise you have to make here is that you are likely to be lumbered with banner adds popping up all over the place. I got the domain http://www.blackdwarf.co.uk provided free by my ISP, http://www.freenetname.co.uk (only available in the UK) Check them out if you are a UK home internet user.

Ok, all sorted? All that's left is to try and get some people to come to your site. The best way to do this is to get listed in some search engines. All the major search engines have add URL links, where you can add your site. With most search engines however the indexing is not actually done by a human, it is done by a program called a spider. The spider will crawl your site automatically, but you will need to put in some META tags for it to look at. I have listed the most important ones below, which should be included in the HEAD section of you index page. (between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags near the top of your page)

In the head section type:

<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3">

This is a list of words which are relevant to your site. Type in your list of words and phrases and separate them with commas.

Also in the head section type:

<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="A short description of my site">

Describe your site here.

There are a number of cunning ways to get search engines to rank your site highly, most of which are way beyond me. I know that if the most important keywords are included in your title, description and first paragraph of text it can help. Spiders look through the whole of your text and search for keywords, and if there are a healthy number of them throughout the text it gets you a better ranking. If there are too many however the search engine may count it as spamming, and refuse to index your site altogether!! You can see its all a bit confusing! There are some search engines, most notably Yahoo, where a human looks at every single site before it is indexed. As you can imagine this can take some time, and you may have to wait months to get indexed in Yahoo.

If your site is a Games workshop site then there are a couple of directories you can join for instant hits. I have provided links to a couple of them on this site, and I suggest you check them out.

Also available are webrings, where you add a little bit of HTML to your site and your site will be added to a ring of similar sites. It's called a ring because the HTML includes links to the next site and previous site (as well as the complete list and often a random site link) The sites are linked together in a ring, so if you keep clicking next site you will eventually come back to where you started.

The other tried and tested method, is to send an e-mail to existing webmasters and ask them (very politely) to add a link to your site. Make sure you offer to return the link on your own site. Most Webmasters are more than happy to oblige, as the links mean more traffic for all concerned.

And finally make sure you tell me! I will be happy to add links to any good GW sites (but I would like return links)
To Conclude

Well, as you can see that turned out to be a rather marathon article, and I don't know whether it will be any help or not. Please tell me if you found it helpful or unhelpful and why - I would really appreciate this feedback.

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Article	Game	Page	Contributer(s)
How to make a great GW site - a complete guide		1	James
Inquisitor - a sneak Preview	INQ	2	Anonymous
Games Workshop Market Strategy		2	James