The Webmasters Guide to the GALAXY!

Now this guide is dedicated to all those generic sites out there.
Change them, it will help heaps. Nobody cares that you have
The latest pokemon news because thats not true. Nearly
Every Pokemon fan has heard of Serebii, and stealing from it
Is even more no life-ish. So stop.

I know that there are heaps of "Website tips" out there,
but this one is different. It isn't one that tells you to
"Never swear be polite blah blah" Because those have already been made
I try to keep my generic stuff to a mininum, but sometimes it's unavoidable.
Well, enough with the random babble. Let's get on with the guide :D

The Key Factors

The Key factors are not ranked in importance.
Factors help each other and without each other are nothing. . Advertisement
. Grammar, Politeness
. Design and looks
. Originality

Advertising

The generic new webmaster will advertise on a million forums/sites/plugboards,
In some cases cboxs which don't even allow it. Now, advertising is the key to
success, but if you really want regular visitors, that isn't the way to go,
no-one likes to see advertisements on forums for art, and trust me,
you'll ruin your internet career like that. Spammers are hated in this
Internet world, and unless you have bots and warez to send to the haters,
Then you're gonna face a bad life, sometimes you might even quit.
So, advertise a bit on maybe 1 or 2 forums,
Then keep track of the comments that other people post. This is
Essential. You please as many as you can, and unless
it's life threatening, you listen to them. The guests know best.

Generic pages/content

Okay, this is one of my main points on this page.
If I could see every single Pokemon site,
I could guarentee half would have similar pages/content.
Pokemon of the Week? Seriously, that is soooo lame.
Even lamer if all it is is a pic, I mean I understand some competitive
Sites would want to list a moveset or something, but I don't get
A simple sprite/pic of a Pokemon on the right/left nav simply with
"PotW". The way all this generic thing starts is very similar to fashion
"Omg, Eevees HQ has a "insert thing here", Let's copy them so
The visitors come to our site!" Or, "Wow, That thing on
Eonlight valley looks pretty awesome, I'll view the source and copypasta
the code onto my site!" That, my friend is called bandwagoning.
So don't do it, we don't want clones of Eonlight Valley or "Insert cool site".

Styleswitchers and splashes

These are again, common, and for most, they are useless.
The point of a splash is like a gateway, the visitor chooses where to go,
Or maybe a warning about the guest needing a certain resolution/browser.
You don't need a splash if you have a simple layout
That works on all browsers and you don't have a forum/oekaki or anything or the sort.
A styleswitcher is another common thing. I have one yes, because maybe the visitor
Has a different resolution and needs to switch to one that's compatible, I also
Have a special style thats suitable for people with a slow internet connection.
You don't want a style switcher if the other styles are all the same color,
And the only difference is a pattern as the background and maybe a different banner.

Originality

As stated previously, Originality is one of the key factors to creating a successful
website. Originality needs the other factors but probably least
out of all of them. Having originality in a Advert is good, and will help the cycle
of visitors go, but without good grammar you'll just get flamed til you burn.
I am in no way expecting the average webmaster/mistress to code some hard-core
RPG made in flash with all that C++ and stuff integrated to make a MMORPG and make
more hits then EHQ, but having a few interesting pages that make your page stand out
more then others will definitely have it's effect. If you took the average "RAISE PIKACHU"
game and added all these things like save Pikachu, compare, battle, etc then I know
I'd go back to the edited then go to the original. So just make sure to compare.

What not to do

Having a forum when no-one goes on. You shouldn't have a forum just for the sake of it.
The same goes for an Oekaki/chatbox.
Broken links or sites that have under construction signs everywhere.
This is incredibly annoying, you might as well go on Hiatus.
Stealing. Stealing from Wikipedia or google is not cool.