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.
 
Fan Site End User Licence  
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. 
 
  
Create Your Own Fansite
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
 
 
 
Homestead.com - A good start for WYSIWYG hosting
 
Blogger.com - A popular blogging service.
 
Blogspot.com - Another blogging service worth a look.
 
Myspace.com - Yet another blog style service network.

WordPress 
 
Dreamweaver - A popular WYSIWYG editor that offers a 30-day trial.