E.P.O.C.H Through To The Top 25 Guildsites

Just recieved the following from Yospeck:

Yospeck wrote:

Congratulations!

After a painstaking trawl through the 40 nominated websites for the 'Best Guild Website Award 2010!' you have made it down to the final 25. Kudos.

The next step will put all 25 finalists into a public poll for their website to be voted on by the rest of the Guild Hall community. The votes will then be screened to ensure no poll fixing has occurred and I will announce the final winner myself.

So what do you need to do from here?

We would like to give each guild a chance to promote their websites features and tell us a little more about why your Website deserves to be number one. This isn't a recruitment spiel where you tell us about the guild, the 'Award' is solely for the technical and aesthetics of your website, so a paragraph or two or a list of bullet points will suffice (don't feel the need to go too over the top though). Nominees will have until the end of next week to forward me their guild details, after that they will simply be added to the list without any information other than a link to their site.

So once again, congratulations on getting through as a finalist of this most esteemed and prestigious award!

I have to say I'm kinda miffed as to why it's solely based on technical and aesthetics only as I think many websites hold a lot more interesting things such as content, but ah well.

So lets put our thinking caps on here and give us your favourite reasons why this is our home.

nice, it may be at over website is simple and easy to use

Yospeck wrote:

We would like to give each guild a chance to promote their websites features and tell us a little more about why your Website deserves to be number one.

Cause we're EPOCH and we r0xx? Is that not enough of a reason and more important can we blackmail votants?

Asthetics?

Well I'd got with LW and his mad DAZ3D skills, and obviously Harewood designed the site (I think) so he deserves credit, I think just the joint contributions from the guildies has made the site great

More seriously, here are points I would underline.

1. Simple and efficient forum
2. With a strongly united guild that is as active as it could be without the actual game in our dirty hands.
3. The forum shows the guild as it is: a bunch of friends from all over the world gathered here to wait together for the game release. (not sure if that argument will make the forum stand aside from all the others.
4. PJK's awesome homepage.

So far I'm thinking of going with this (feel free to add):

1. Simple and easy-to-use forum with high amounts of activity.

2. Hand designed flash player for the front page.

3. Fully customized buttons created from scratch.

4. Useful widgets including various timezone clocks, recruitment updates, links and a flash player containing a wide variety of Star Wars themes.

5. Users own personal picture galleries should they wish to make one.

Obviously I'm not good with the technicalities so any help would be great.

Its only on technical details? hmmm..... that sells the best part of our site short - the Community and the user-created media.

The RP, Stories and Art are all pretty awesome in this place; and we can't big that up? That's harsh.

I'll put me thinking cap on.

Yeah! I suspect they don't want to favour the RP forums with a big lore. PvP guilds probably don't have as much to fill their forum as we do. That's a shame since it would highlight our forum.

I don't think there's any reason why we can't include L-Dubz's RP floor plans that help visualize the area we're in though is there? Is it an 'aesthetic' after all.

EDIT: Just thought on another one.

6. An intergrated chatbox with easy to use commands.

LOL my floor-plans are a wee bit basic, but if you want to....

Oooh! Top 25! Good job gang! How about:

7. A Currently Recruiting Widget that tells newcomers the classes and spots open to them.

8. Links on the homepage to all important areas of the guild.

Righty-o guys the poll is now up for best guild websites and we've already got 8 votes!

Before I post the link to the poll I would like to remind everyone in the guild.....

DO NOT VOTE FOR OUR GUILD IN THE POLL!

If you vote for our guild in the poll we will be automatically disquailified.

To head to the poll and leave your vote please click here.


Personally I voted for our good allies Hands of Darkness as I've noticed that a few of them have given us a nod.

Double post incoming..........

Thanks for the HoD vote Tando! It seems the majority of the votes we've recieved are coming from their camp.

Voted for HoD Have no idea where Jensaari and Exodus are getting their votes from. I couldn't even see the Jensaari and the Exodus website is basically a cookie-cutter forum provider site. I see a lot of people with 9 like us though.

LOL! Both us and HoD have been naughty apparently!!!

YoSpeck wrote:

Guys, I'm sending this message privately as opposed to making a public deal about it as I respect both of you and your guilds. However, having gone through the results of the Best Website poll today it has become glaringly obvious that both Agents of the Epoch and Hands of Darkness have had some sort of mutual agreement to vote for each others websites.

I dont believe there were any sinister intentions behind it, and yes I suppose that in the literal sense neither of your guilds have broken the rules as you have not voted for your own guilds. However, the rules were made to stop popularity votes skewing the the final result. The sheer number of your guildmembers that have voted for the others guild site (the bulk of your 'valid' votes are made up of each others members), combined with the fact that you have your private cross-faction RP and OOC/IC relationship, suggests that many of the votes (regardless of any possible true intentions) have had a seemingly different agenda, which looks more like a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" and not independent voting.

To me it just seems like unfair play.

Due to this I'm going to be discounting any Hands of Darkness members vote that have voted for Agents of Epoch, and vice versa. Out of respect for your guilds I'm not going to flag this up in my results, but this is me explaining now why your final results will not reflect your poll votes.

If you think that my reasoning is unfair then you are free to bring it up in the results thread and see what other people think, but honestly I don't think folk will look at it particularly favourably.

Regards,
YoSpeck

Well what did he expect from a bunch of Sith and a group of Mercs?



I'm actually surprised that some people take this seriously!

He is taking it very seriously actually and he's gained a level of respect in my books for doing that. Although I'm annoyed that my result had been discounted (the HoD's website is pretty stunning and I'd probably have given it to them anyway), it is fair play to do what he's just done. What I'm surprised about is that he's not making a meal out of it publically.

Because he's an outsider to our inter-guild relations and Alliance I can see why it would look that way but honestly, does he really think he set we set up a 'mutual agreement' to vote for each other?

Is it not more likely (and in this case actually true) that we voted for a site we've seen grow from nothing to the interwebz giant it is now, being fully aware that the design, re-design and in fact re-design again of the website was a big part of that?

In my eyes at least thats why I voted for HoD as the best guild. That and the fact we were'nt allowed to vote for ourselves.

I hope you replied with something akin to the fact that we do not influence our memberss votes and that if we all voted for HoD it was because we had a damn good reason? If not, I'll do it!

I feel so dirty lol

Ah well at least he didn't disqualify us !

Quite honestly I voted HoD because that was the only name I knew and I was too lazy to browse through all the website. So in the theory I'd plead guilty of voting for politics not for the best website.

On second though, I've registered on the HoD website last week and I found it awesome... So even if I voted for 'the wrong reason' I'm pleased with my vote anyway ^^' .