The Price of Building a Site

With social media gaining momentum through sites like Twitter and
blogging software, creating a website to help combine these features
to gather a user base is an ideal goal.

Reaching this goal is far more difficult than just beginning a site and spamming the site’s link around the Internet. This is especially true for websites that plan to offer a variety of content, where the issue of web space and the cost of maintaining a server comes into play.

“To be honest, it was really a process of growing within our means,” said Courtney Grimes, preferring the use of her handle “Scarred Sun”, site administrator for Sonic Retro, a fan site dedicated to the video game character Sonic The Hedgehog.

The site originally began in 2004 as an online encyclopedia cataloging the series and its characters. Through a series of agreements with administrators of other sites, the website began to grow.

“The hard part of growing as fast as we did was having the money,” Sun said. “With all the resources our site uses, it would have been incredibly hard to find a cheap hosting company that could handle the site. However, since we’re hosted by a community member’s server for now, it’s been easier on the pocket book.”

Despite this, the site still experiences problems. An example of this occurred when the owner of the Sonic franchise, Sega, announced their upcoming title, Sonic The Hedgehog 4: Episode 1. The site was hit with so much traffic and constant posting that it managed to knock the entire site offline from the load. This is similar to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, where a site is flooded with requests until it goes down, only this one was not considered malicious in intent.

While the content of a website is important to attract visitors–and likely keep some as regular members–the atmosphere a website projects is also a key aspect of designing a web page, both in a design aspect and the general attitude of the member base.

“We try our best to keep discussions interesting by having rules on our message boards enforced to prevent topics from derailing toward an unrelated topic or pointless attacking of other members,” said Grimes.

A site with interesting topics of discussion and a receptive member base will likely help attract more people too, whereas a hostile one will likely cause a homogenization–a lack of new members and ideas in favor of established users, according to Grimes.

“When it comes to rude members, we deal with them right away accordingly. Why let a small handful of people ruin the fun for everyone?” said Rebbecca, who prefers to be addressed by her online handle Vixy, head administrator of fan site Rockman Perfect Memories, dedicated to Capcom’s “Blue Bomber”, Mega Man.

Vixy’s idea for her site is to give people with similar interests a forum for which to interact with each other across in a very casual atmosphere, including letting members coordinate with each other in writing stories or organizing times to play games with each other online on various major consoles, such as Nintendo’s Wii and Sony’s PlayStation 3.

Compared to Sonic Retro, Vixy’s website isn’t filled with as much content, though it offers some basic information on the series as well as news updates and live demonstrations of the games played by Vixy herself.

The lower content though doesn’t mean that there isn’t much of an established user base on her site. According to her, word of the site is largely spread through word-of-mouth from established members and the casual atmosphere the site gives off allows people to get comfortable and enjoy their time with other users.

“At the end of the day, people just want to relax,” said Vixy. “I like to think that my site helps out with that. We may not be a big site, but our member base is just wants to have fun and unwind from their long days. What could be better than that?”