Would you like to create your own online shrine to Total War?
Already have your own website but want to give it a makeover? With our
Fan Site Kit and Beginners Guide, you will have everything you need to
create a professional looking Total War Fan Site in no time!
Please read through and accept the following Fan Site End User Licence if you would like to download our Total War Fan Site Kit.
The Creative
Assembly Limited and its group companies (together, “CA”) grants you a non-transferable license on the following
terms to download one copy of the graphics, sound files, and other materials
accompanying this licence (the “Materials”),
onto a single computer solely for your personal, noncommercial use of the
Materials on your Fan Site. A “Fan Site” is a personal,
noncommercial web site, created by you, that is freely accessible to the public
and dedicated to promoting one or more games published by CA.
By clicking on
the ‘I ACCEPT’ button below you are agreeing to be bound by the terms and
conditions of this licence.
CA and any third-party licensors own all of the
rights in the Materials. You may not
alter any of CA’s trademarks or logos, or alter or remove any of the trademark
or copyright notices included in the Materials. Your right to use Materials is
limited to the licence granted above, and you may not otherwise copy, display,
perform, publish, broadcast, transmit or use any of the Materials. You may not modify, reverse engineer,
disassemble, create derivative works from, licence, transfer, distribute, or
sell any Materials, or use the Materials in connection with any commercial or
unlawful activity. Without limiting the
foregoing, you may not use the Materials to sell anything, to advertise
anything, or to promote another product or business. You may not use the Materials on any site that operates or
promotes a server emulator or game machine emulator. You may not make the Materials available by download from your
Fan Site.
If you post the Materials on your Fan Site, you must
also post the following notice on your Fan Site on the same web page(s) as any
of the Materials: “© The Creative Assembly Limited. All trade marks and game
content are the property of The Creative Assembly Limited and its group
companies. All rights reserved.” You will not represent that your Fan Site is
endorsed or approved by CA or that any other content on your Fan Site is endorsed
or approved by CA.
CA does not represent or warrant that any of the
Materials will work on your Fan Site, or that the Materials are of any
particular quality or usefulness. You expressly agree that your use of the
Materials is at your sole risk. The Materials are provided on an “as is” basis.
CA disclaims all implied warranties and conditions, including without
limitation any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular
purpose, or non-infringement of third party rights. CA assumes no
responsibility for any damages suffered by you. At CA’s request, you agree to
defend, indemnify and hold harmless CA from all liabilities, claims and
expenses, including legal fees, arising from any breach of this license by you.
You are solely responsible for knowing and complying
with all national, federal, state, and local laws that may apply to your use of
Materials in your own jurisdiction. By downloading the Materials, you warrant
that you are not located in any country, or exporting the Materials to any
person or place, that would be a violation of any applicable export control
laws.
CA may terminate this licence at any time. Upon your receipt of a termination notice
from CA, you must remove from your Fan Site and destroy all Materials. This licence is governed by English law and
is the entire agreement between CA and you regarding the Materials.
To celebrate the release of our awesome new faniste kit, we
thought we’d put together a blog entry offering a few tips on how to get
started on making your own Total War fansite.
If you’ve yet to grab the fansite kit itself, here’s a list
of its contents:
Medieval II Banners: x6
Medieval II Box Art: x2 (UK and US)
Medieval II Logos: x4
Medieval II Screenshots: x42 (Various sizes)
Medieval II Videos: x1
Medieval II Wallpapers: x12 (6
designs in 2 sizes)
Medieval II Forum Avatars: x49
So you've grabbed that little lot - where do you go from there?
Finding A Host Or Some Personal Space
First things first, you’ll need to decide if you are going to build
your own site and get it hosted or use one of the popular blogging
sites. Building your own site may require some technical know-how and
will mean you’ll need to purchase some webspace (see hosting tips
below). On the plus side you’ll have almost total freedom in your
design and content.
An alternative is to use one of the free blogging platforms such as
Blogspot or MySpace. Blog sites like this very site have become an
enormously popular method of getting seen and heard on the web. They
are easy to customise, even if you’re not technically minded, and there
are loads of great free templates to download. Other personal page
services include wordpress, which have space to blog, share photos,
pictures, your movie files and links. This option is great if you’re
looking to get your site off the ground and your content seen as soon
as possible. In the long term though, you may want to look at a more
ambitious design and to get your own webspace, which involves some more
hands on design work and coughing up for some hosting.
Hosting Tips
There are many companies
offering hosting services out there. These companies will host your html files,
images and movies and provide tools to help you update your site regularly.
Many will also offer domain name registration – the registration of your chosen
URL address. Simply do a websearch for “
cheap domain hosting” and
you will find 100,000’s of services from as little as $1 month and url
registration from around $5 a year.
The URL of your site (the www. bit)
will need to be registered first; this is the address people use to find your
site. One thing to keep in mind here is copyright, don’t use someone else’s IP
(intellectual property) in the URL otherwise you may be forced to close or
rename your site once it’s launched and built a community. As mentioned, most
of the sites that offer hosting include registration services, but if you do
register a domain name with your hosting service you’d be wise to check who
owns the url should you want to change hosting providers and take you url
elsewhere.
Designing your site
So you’ve decided on a host or set up your blog site, now
it’s time to consider design and this means making a few more decisions.
Websites are constructed using HTML (hyper text mark up language) and more
recently XHTML, both of which, with the right book(s) and resources, are easy
to learn. Just visit your Internet retailer of choice and have a look at the
basic html tuition books there are loads of great ones out there. The web
itself is also a massive resource in this area – there are so many good
tutorials it’s hard to recommend just one but
http://webmonkey.com/ has plenty of cool
guides, but again a simple websearch “
web tutorials” will do the
trick.
Pure HTML programming requires little software other than a
simple text editor such as Notepad. However, if you don’t want to get your head
in the books and start from scratch, you can opt to use a wysiwig editor (what
you see is what you get) to build your site. These editors make website
building far easier since you can place elements on your pages using visual
tools and wizards. However they won’t necessarily improve your knowledge of the
code behind your site. Again, it’s a question of how quickly you want your site
up and running and how much time you have to invest in learning all that’s
involved.
When it comes to choosing an editor - Dreameweaver is an
obvious choice here, and you can get a 30-day trail at
http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/. There are alternatives of course -
as mentioned earlier, some sites offer tools and templates free with hosting
services
- www.homestead.com/ is
just one example of the many great sites out there that do so.
The rest is up to you now but there’s an awful lot of help
around. If you have friends who have made their own site to talk to them about
what options they went for. Also if you
are a member of any forums, a quick post asking for advice will normally do the
trick. The web itself is certainly your best tutorial and guide. You can get a
lot of ideas for website design by just browsing other peoples sites. You can
even get plugins for your browser such as the web developer plugin for Firefox
(
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60/)
that allow you to examine the code, images and scripts behind websites in
detail.
Hopefully our fansite kit and this blog has inspired you and
helped you take the first few steps. After the holiday we’ll post a second blog
to give you some help with regards to promoting your site and setting up your
own forums.
Useful Links
The Medieval II Fansite Kit - Our awesome fansite kit full of
goodies such as images, logos, banners and much much, more.
Some great resources
Webmonkey.com - More great html and web tutorials and tools
Dreamweaver - A popular WYSIWYG editor that offers a 30-day trial.