Pokemon Website Thoughts

So WOW i created a plug-in outline for the pokedex page and jesus h christ it is taking forever! To set up each pokedex. So what im thinking is creating something i call a VPP, or a Visual Plug and Play.

The VPP will work like a fill in the blank. This is what the page looks like:

Piplup                                 Prinplup                                Empoleon

Empleon

Ability - Blaze | Ability - Torrent

Hidden Ability - Transform

Overview                                 Moves                                    Location

Leveling Up Moves                  TM/HM Moves                           Movesets

---Then it shows a list of moves in an organized table here---

but to actually fill in all of this for every pokemon is going to take a while (there is something like 693 pokemon total). As you can tell, the text is bigger depending on which link you are looking at, if you are viewing the TM/HM moves then TM/HM Moves will be bold and bigger and Leveling Up Moves will be normal size. i can keep the header for the most part, but still will have to change some stuff around every time. So here is my VPP suggestion.

Overview                           Moves                              Location

Leveling Up Moves                         TM/HM                          Movesets

The VPP of the movesets will go here but i dont want to release my whole layout

This will make submitting entries so much better and faster easier in my opinion, havent built it yet and havent tried it. Hope it works. This will just be another tool added my my fast growing collection. As you can tell, the checkboxes are for deciding on which link the page is going to be under. Which will make it bold and bigger. This will make sumbitting entries so easy that i can pay my 12 and 13 year old sister to do it, which i might. it will make it go by faster and you dont have to be a programmer to use this tool.

Creating a Web Development Team

What goes into created a web development team? Creating one is very wary but it differs on what you want to accomplish. First, there are a few different types of people that you want to hire.
The basics:
   -Web Designer
   -Web Programmer
   -SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Web Designer- Web Designers are the people that draw up how the site will look. These people are the creative backbone in the construction of your website. These are people born with the desire to create ideas; artists if you like. These artist either draw on paper, a whiteboard, or even create a Photoshop image but remember, if your programmers are intellectually creative enough, dont feel pressured in HAVING to have a web designer but if you come across a good one or someone with good ideas then feel free to have him on your team.

Web Programmer- Web Programmers are the structure of your team. Without them, well, there wouldnt be a team to begin with. Some people wont hire a "web master" because in their mind, it would be better to hire someone who masters front-end (a word to describe the use of html and css) and then hire another master of Javascript and another master of PHP and mysql and so on and so on but as you can tell already, this can get extremely crowded (if your working out of the comfort of your own house) and extremely costly. The more web programmers you have, the more ideas you have floating back and forth, and the more work you can distribute between programmers.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)- SEO's are very useful when you want better traffic to come through your search engines, I am not familiar too much with SEO but the whole idea behind it is to add things like meta tags to your code so the "web crawlers" or the algorithms that the web engines use to see what pops up on which key words work. I heard a guy talking about how he made a beautiful web-site that was user friendly but it want search engine friendly, and you can have the best website in the world but if there is no traffic then it was worthless. Your SEO should know a little bit about everything. If you have a web master on board then make sure he learns about SEO also and how it works, once he masters SEO then your team is golden.

Another job that you should appoint someone once the traffic starts rolling in and ad's start generating money, is appointing a CFO or a Chief Financial Officer. Now the CFO will obviously handle the money side of the website, like what money goes to which account and the ideas of expansion and where to and especially getting VC's or Venture Capitalists. VC's are people with lots of money that invest in small business's that they think will turn a profit. These people will give you money for an office, computers, monitors, servers, whatever you need in return for either an interest rate, shares (an ownership of the company) or a stake (a ownership AND say in the company)

Web Development Tools

Anyone who is anyone has tools. The carpenter has the hammer, the jeweler has the magnifying glass and the lawyer has the suitcase; but what does a web developer have? Code. When a client calls you and says, "hey buddy! i need a website done quick, my business is opening in 2 weeks and i need a full website done", your immediate response would be to say "HA! a full scale website in 2 weeks? Get the hell out of here". With the right set of tools, you can tell your client "sure thing, i can have it done in 5 days. Lets meet up and talk about what your looking for." 5 days to complete a full scale website, while it would normally take well over a month but there is one word: Tools. Tools make or break a web developer and without them then their number of clientele suffer drastically. So lets talk about how to make a tool:

Most tools are written in PHP because the code is very constant and with a few customization's that takes 5 minutes, you can cut 2 hours off your programming time. Also, it will be 100x easier to find a job in programming if you mention on your resume that you have over 100+ programming tool files (and name your best ones and give examples of how they function). So the way i do it is i create a folder called Tools and create files with the name of their functionality. For example:

Folder Name: Tools
File Name(s):
-Surveillance
-Language changes
-Page engines
etc etc.

Now when i create a website and want to create a surveillance system( would probably take about 2 hours to set up coding, i can now copy and paste these files into the website, change some things around and done. Two hours of work in 15 minutes.) Web developer make money per hour, if you do this method, you can make more websites with a less chunk out of your clienteles pocket. Which means your client is more likely to tell his co-workers and friends about you. You get quality AND quantity.

Another tool is to make your own templates. Draw and create designs that you can use whenever you feel is the right decision. If you want, you can create a whole book of designs to show your soon to be boss or your clients.

A good idea i just thought of is to create an 'application' type deal where your client can check off what they want, the first page will be to pick a template, the second page will be to pick their navigation, the third page will be to pick an engine, the fourth page etc etc etc. Now each check will cost money. Your client can either choose a money saving route and a highly premium website. The ability to pick your own fully customizable  website with the ability to choose his own budget will bring you crazy amounts of people. More money with little work, whats better then that? That's what web developing is all about. You'll never make it as a developer if you never create tools. With programming, your limitation are your own mind. Remember to email me with any questions or even if you want to become friends and chat. onxmyxblock925@yahoo.com

Web-Engine Versions

My thoughts on different versions that I will be coding:

Version 1: This version is going to be strictly code, no visuals. Nobody other then me should really know how to use it because it will be all crazy with code everywhere. Only one language: English. (currently in production, about 2 weeks in)

Version 2: This version is going to be the same as version one with the exception that different languages will be implemented: spanish, german, french, italian and russian.

Version 3: Start to add visuals. Adding anymore things to pure code would be crazy and would get way too hectic and confusing. adding visuals will let me create more code with greater organization. Why would i give up that trade off.

***Version 3.5: Create visuals to manage languages. After this, all i need is time in order to make my website user-friendly for all countries. This is important and will generate a lot more traffic that i wouldnt otherwise get to have with just english text.

Version 4: Start focusing primarily on construction and organization. Having links to add more pages.

Version 5: This is the big step. In version 5 i will be making it user friendly so people can use it on their sites. This addition will make the engine so vast that i wouldnt be surprised if people wanted to buy it. Which is why  I will be taking advantage of that and starting up a website so people can log-in and control one website of their own from the safety and convenience  of 1 place. But people wont use the engine for just one website which is why i will be making it possible to control multiple websites; im talking about 10+ websites all from one place. Remember when i said the engine will be so vast by then? Well i wasn't kidding. Being able to run 10+ websites from one engine seems ridiculous but its possible and i'm going to do it.

Version 5+: These will mainly be used to fix bugs

International

Ok so lets look at this from a business perspective. Your an English speaking person. Your going to make a website obviously in English thinking you will reach out to tons of people, which you will, but think of it another way. There is around 300 million people living in the United States and around 60 million living in England. Your website is only available to a statistical 360 million people. Sure, people in other countries speak english pretty well as a second language but there is no convenience there and thats what websites need: Convenience.  Now what if you could make a feature on your website where your user could change the language of the website to a selected language.

Think of the first language you would translate to; the best way to do this is to think of the next biggest language other then English. Yes, Spanish.

330 million people speak Spanish in the world as a first language. Translating your webpage into spanish might seem like a challenge but remember, you have a Web-Engine. Creating a page in Spanish could be as easy as pasting the words in a Google translator and pasting the outcome in some HTML tags. But creating the entire website into a spanish translation? Easy.

The home page will have a variable, lets set the variable equal to $english_top_news. now $top_news has a value of the latest news in english which is echo'd onto the home page. Now right in the Web-Engine, you can take that same $english_top_news variable and create another $top_news variable called $spanish_top_news and translate your english top news over into spanish and echo it out onto the now spanish home page. But wait, how will you know if the user needs the home page to be in Spanish? Easy. Create a cookie and set it equal to $language. Now on the very top part of the webpage will be a menu bar looking like this:

English | Espanol | Deutsch | Franciase

Now when that Espanol button is clicked, BAM, the $language cookie is set to spanish. But the cookie isnt enough. Now we have to create an if statement that will check the value of the $language cookie. Easy.

if($language==spanish){
     echo $spanish_top_news;
}else {echo $english_top_news;}

What this is saying is, if the $language cookie is equal to Spanish, write the top news in Spanish. If the $language cookie is equal to english or nothing, write the top news in English. Web-Engine makes this easier and no, i have not fully implemented this in my Web-Engine, it will come out in later versions. Just by taking a few more moments out of your time, you have statistically doubled your audience to nearly 700 million, and i say statistically because  700 million people probably arent going to be interested in your site, to find out more exact numbers you would need to break it down into age groups and social structures and media and more technical stuff that really wouldnt take that long to figure out.

Advertisements, Selling-Out?

So one of my favorite movies is The Social Network. Not because its well directed or the fact that i think Jessie Eisenhower makes a good Mark Zuckerberg, its the whole concept of the movie. The concept of how Mark never sold his application to Microsoft for an undisclosed amount of money (which was probably a lot) or how he turned down the $1 billion dollar sale of Facebook because because he didnt want it to be about money. It kind of just makes you think "hmph" what would i do in a situation like that because at first glance, your first choice is to take the billion dollars hands down but building an empire from a blank white canvas is not easy task and you can build up a lot of friends and enemies and just to sell it all away to have someone else mess it all up? Mark Zuckerberg's top priority was to have 0 ads on facebook. He was losing more money then he was getting from facebook ( even though at the time he had half-a-million users ) because he didnt want to be a sell-out.

I think there is nothing wrong with placing ads on your website ... to a certain extent. Here are my thoughts on advertisements:

   -No more then 2 advertisements. One across the top and one down the side of the page.
   -NO pop-ups. there is nothing more annoying then a pop-up and will deter users from your site
   -Keep it constant! dont change where ads are placed, this might not seem bad but will deter users from your site and when it is just in the early days of development, word of mouth is the best advertisement and you need all the viewers you can get.

You can basically run your entire website off of ads. Advertisements generate a lot of money in comparison to  the work it takes for you to put them live on your website. The best way to support a website you like is to simply click on the ads. Your website generates money from the amount of clicks you receive. Therefore putting ads on your website, in my eyes, is not selling-out, its being smart.

Websites: Coming Up With Ideas

Well first off, you have to be a creative person in order to come up with ideas that would ever have a chance in making it to the big show. The first thing you have to think of is:

   -Does this topic really interest me?

You cant just start making a website about dogs because thats where you see the most amount of people flocking onto their computer. I mean, you can but if it doesn't interest you then you wont have the motivation to actually dig deep into your mind and come up the ideas that other, bigger dog sites have.

Once you have your idea, write it down. I have a thought book, which is just a composition notebook  filled with about 110 pages front and back of thoughts. I carry it around school and every time a thought comes into my head about any topic, i write it down. but then again i claim i suffer from excessive thinking, and i do. There are times i cannot sleep at night because i keep on playing in my head an idea over and over because it is such a good idea that i am afraid i might lose it and never remember it again; which is sometimes true. The next question you have to ask yourself is:

   -Where is my audience?

Your not going to have an audience if you dont do something called advertisement. Now advertisement is the practice of getting something known, obviously, but it is easier said then done. Anybody can think of an idea but it takes an intelligent person to put it into action. Lets say my interest is Pokemon. Now where is my audience? Well i know for a fact that there are about 10+ people on YouTube that are in what they call a "Pokemon community", each of these people have about an average of 25,000 subscribers. Statistically, if i posted on their videos about my website, that is an estimated 250,000 people being broad-casted to. Statistically, now some ... most people will be subscribed to more then one person if not all of them, so lets say 50,000 different people. So 50,000 people have the chance to see my website. thats not bad. Next question:

   -Where is my competition?

If your going to start a website, you better bet your ass that it better be better then all the competitors websites. Getting your site well known is one task but getting visitors to come back is another. Let your website be user friendly and ALWAYS offer more then your competitors. It is a WASTE of time to create something in equal or lesser value to your competitors because even if your website is EXACTLY the same, the have something better on you: Popularity. And in the world of websites, popularity always wins. So what do you do? First off, buy a whiteboard, this whiteboard is going to be your best friend. OH and buy skinny markers, not those fat ones; and write down the names of all the competitors in the top row and draw lines to keep them in their own box. now write down each of the benefits that a website has and dont be afraid to really browse a competitors website and see what they offer. The best way to do this is find an "about us" link. Now once your done i want you to draw a box with your website, and take EVERYTHING and put it into your box. this is how you make your website better.

Now erase everything but your box and for everything you wrote down, write down a reason on how you want it to look, say, accomplish and keep in mind that you have to make it better. If its not better, write down another way to make it better, dont stop until its the best and draw it. I have never drawn myself up a web page that i wasn't able to make in code. Making a website isnt something you do over the weekend. A website is something that takes months. everyday constant coding, you can create a pretty complex website in about a month but dont let it be everything you do. Make sure you get out and about because you will bore yourself and your website will become sloppy because you will be under one constant idea which is getting the website done and you wont have the time to let better ideas pop into your head. Oh, and DONT let anyone know your ideas, especially if they are potentially amazing. Keep your ideas to yourself, your notebook and your whiteboard; my thought book (the one with 110+ double sided pages) in the hands of the right person, can completely demolish my life which is why i only give away certain information on this blog.

Web-Engine [WE 1.0.0] Surveillance

Implementing an entire surveillance system on the Web-Engine is a lot easier then it sounds. Every time a user signs on, a file will be written to that will contain information. This information will include:
     -the username
     -the ip address
     -the time-stamp [a large combination of all the seconds from some date in the 90's]
     -the time
     -the date
Then when the user views pages of the website:
     -the name of webpage he viewed
     -the URL of the website he viewed
So the data should look like this:

user123 viewed the articles page [http://www.pokemon.com/articles/pokemon.php] @ 3:15pm [3487172817] 183.0.0.1 on Thursday 8-25-2011.

Every page he views is recorded just like this, not necessarily monitored but the information is good to have. It will be recorded into a text file and be kept in a flash drive. I estimate that there will be about 1mb of data imputed per day, so 1gb every 1,000 days. so a 4gb flash drive will last a long time before i need to buy a new one.

Web-Engine [WE 1.0.0] Updating

The Web-Engine is also implemented with an updating system. With a website of 100+ pages, its pretty hard to update all of it. For example, Lets say the web looked like this:

My Website

Homepage | Articles | Contacts | About Me

now lets say i have 100 pages with a header that looks exactly like this one and i want to add a Top News link. In order to update this header on all these pages, i would have to go to every single page, and update the header manually, BUT with the new engine, all i have to do is edit it on the engine and BAM, all 100+ pages are updated in less then 10 seconds. Beautiful. If i wanted to change the logo, the side bar, the main nav bar, ANYTHING i can just create a variable for it in the engine and change it anytime i want to reflect upon all of my web pages. With this power, i can maintain more websites that i ever could before, even creating a MASTER Web_Engine that can control all of my websites. Now THAT is innovation. 

Web-Engine [WE 1.0.0] Maintenance

The Web Engine is being created for the Pokemon website and has been in the makings for two days now. The engine is to make maintaining a website extremely easy but is being very very closed source, meaning the code that goes into making the engine is very secretive, for now. Soon after the engine is completed i will make a "plug-in engine" which will consist of just plugging into your website so everyone can have an engine and making having a website so much easier.

Included in the current Web-Engine:
     -A complete maintenance variable. I've created a variable on every page with PHP that i can go into the engine, change my $complete_maintenance equal to true and bam, the entire website is under maintenance.  The variable sends every page to a maintenance page that says:

This website is under construction

Please come back in: 45 minutes

now don't make the same mistake i almost did, i created a maintenance variable for just the homepage, thinking that when people go to my website, they will be directed to the maintenance page above. BUT they can simply go to another page and access everything but the homepage. So make sure you create the variable on EVERY page. When the website is not under construction, the variable is equal to false. In just 10 seconds you can down the whole website, and the beauty of it is that no one can see your code if they right click on your web pages and do "view source code" because PHP doesn't show up so they wont know your secrets and how you run your websites. Now the "website is under construction" and the time that is displayed is completely customizable to say whatever you want and set whatever time you want to show. Every website should have an engine and one that is created JUST for your website is the perfect kind.

Pokemon Website part 1

back in 2009 i woke up one morning and had an epiphany. I wanted to catch all the pokemon in the world. Now im not a nerdy kid. i wear baggy clothes, listen to tupac and all that stuff, but something made me want to accomplish something like this. So sure enough i scrummage up money and bought a pokemon game. i finished it and caught as many as i could in one game, then moved on to the next one. i joined a youtube community of players to watch them and learn the tricks of the trade. i found a website called Smogon.com. this website inspired me to create a website of my own since hell, i already knew how to make a decent one and im teaching myself to make a better one. So i began drawing up a website, a name and all that good stuff and made a few 'blogs' in notepad that i will post on here just so you can see what i was thinking of at the time. Kind of interesting looking back on it which is why i made this blog. Here are a few things i written down about the website.

3-15-11


On Tuesday March 15th, The Pokemon ---- website was just a thought; but with some hard work and devoted people, The Pokemon ---- has grown into a full fledged online pokemon encyclopedia. If you would like to help, please click read more for a full list of what are the top things this website would love help with.

3-23-11


On Wednesday March 23rd, The Pokemon ----- has opened its doors to all pokemon trainers from around the world. The wesbite is currently still in construction but we have been trying our best to expand as quickly as possible. The main site attractions are open to the public but most of the features are closed for maintnence but will open soon.

8-23-11

Today will be the first implementation of the new website engine [WE 1.0.0]. This new engine will be fully implemented into all of our pages as soon as possible. An update will be shown that will notify when this task has been completed. This engine will allow us to change our website's layout and update our pages faster and with greater ease. This is estimated that this implementation will put us far ahead of our competitors and supply all of you with better details, descriptions, speed and overall quality with less revenue needed to keep the site open, requiring less man-power to keep the site running at maximum efficiency.

---- means that i had to delete some words to safe the identity of the websites URL since it is not bought yet.

You might be able to notice that it looks like i was writing to an audience when the website isnt even on the internet but i just had fun doing that. Now recently i have been teaching myself PHP so i can actually make full fledged websites with members and everything. 

Web designer background

I am 18 years old. Training myself to be a web designer through books and tutorials on YouTube. Believe it or not but YouTube is a huge help. Me being a quick leaner makes it easy for me to learn scripting and markup languages. I never knew what i wanted to be when i grew up but after stumbling upon a video i knew from that point that i wanted to learn how to program. I started with html, then moved on to css and was able to make a basic website. I then went on to learn Javascript but when i got half way through knowing the language i went on to learn PHP and fell in love with it. I was able to do twice as much as Javascript can do and able to learn it twice as fast because the syntax was so similar so i picked it up easy. Now i program websites in my free time. if you would like to chat with me or ask me any questions, you can message me and i will  answer any question or chat with anyone.

A quick lesson for anyone who does not know too much about Web programming:

HTML stands for hyper text mark-up language -- This makes the words of the website. You can make them big, small, italics, bold.

CSS- stands for Cascading Style Sheets -- This is what makes the colors and the layouts of the website, this can move around words and create tables etc.

Javascript - this language creates a more dynamic website, allows you to interact with the user more, when you click on something and a window pops up, thats Javascript.

PHP - this is the backbone behind most websites. This is what is behind forms that you fill out and mailing lists you sign up for and updates websites.

Now that you know a little bit more about websites, you might be able to follow my blogs a little more easily.