Sites
get listed at *escaboys in the following
ways. *
Independent selection by yours truly. If I happen
to find an Escaflowne guy page I really
like, I'll add it and email the owner. *
Email nomination, either by the site's owner (I
like to foster shameless self-promotion) or by
someone else who thinks it's cool. I'm
keen to list more Escaflowne guy shrines. If
you want to nominate a site for listing, please
check whether it meets the following requirements.
They're just a minimum quality-control check,
because I want to keep standards high and encourage
excellence. Content
Requirements *
No hate pages or anti-shrines. The goal of this
collective is to celebrate the guys, not to run
them down. You have a perfect right to dislike them
- I just think you're nuts if you do *^.^* There's
some room to move here - you may certainly make
reasonable criticisms of the guys, but these should
not be the raison d'être of the site.
My own Merchant
Prince
is a case in point - the 'Sales Pitch' section
explains why I find Dryden superior to Allen, but
it's not like I'm just tearing strips off poor old
Allen for the fun of it, and I'd be the first to
admit he has his uses. *
No hentai (pornographic) sites. It's not
that I dismiss all art and literature that deals
with sexual themes as Dirty And Bad, merely that
hentai tends to be degrading and, well,
skanky. I don't know how necessary this is to say,
but people are weird and you never know. If your
site is sort of borderline, with some innuendoes
but nothing really blushworthy, it might be okay. I
don't classify yaoi (homoerotic content) as
automatically hentai; there's tasteful
yaoi. I might drool over these guys a bit (I
can hear everyone on the Dilandau Mailing List
laughing at me and repeating 'a BIT!') but I
respect them, y'know? *
There needs to be something original, something
special about your site. This doesn't mean you have
to have incredibly sophisticated design or a whole
lot of ultra-rare scans or an exclusive interview
with Shoji Kawamori; it can just be your unique
approach to your subject. Be creative, and have fun
with it! If you have one feature that really rocks,
like an excellent image gallery or really in-depth
character profiles, that may be enough. Hey,
speaking of ultra-rare scans, if anyone can give me
decent scans of the covers of the Escaflowne
novelisations (not the filmbooks) I'll be their
best friend. *
Ask yourself, 'Is my site as complete and as good
as I want it to be?' I've been getting submissions
from people with disclaimers like 'I've only just
started but it's going to be really good one day,'
and when I go there I find they have one page
active and the rest is 'Coming Soon.' A page like
this is not ready for *escaboys. (I don't
think it's ready for anything.) I do accept pages
that are under construction (all good pages are
under construction in the sense of being updated
and maintained), but they need to have a decent
amount of content up and running. Due to the choice
of subject matter and availability of related
material, obviously some sites are never going to
be huge and encyclopaedic, and may not often be
updatable. If you want to make a shrine to Balgus,
say, there's only so much you can do. But it will
not be listed at *escaboys if when you
submit all it's got is a picture of Balgus and his
Compendium stats. It's not that you'll never get
into the listing, just wait to submit until you've
got the place spiffed up a bit. Design
Requirements *
Navigation should be clear and easy, with all the
links set up correctly so you don't get 404 error
messages when you click. *
No direct-linked images. I have a real thing about
this - the images you display on your webpage
should be in a directory on your own server. Things
like buttons and banners, where you have the
owner's permission, are okay. Broken images - nope.
These are all basic courtesies to your visitors
that every website should observe. *
If you have a gallery and use thumbnails, they
should be real thumbnails, small image
files, not full-sized pictures with the height and
width tags adjusted to make them appear small. If
you don't have the software to make thumbnails, use
descriptive text links instead, please. It
is so much more considerate to your guests. (This
is my Pet Peeve du jour.) Well,
if you've read all the way through that I guess you
really want to nominate a site. If it meets those
requirements, please email me at sarah-neko@dove.gen.nz
and include in the message: *
the site's title and URL (I can do nothing without
these!) *
your email address, so I can get back to you about
it (if I decide not to include the page, I will
explain why without getting nasty, and offer
constructive criticism - which, of course, you are
free to ignore if you think I'm full of
it) *
any comments you care to make about why you're
nominating this site, why it's special. I
look forward to hearing from you!
join
* Obviously, it needs to be a site devoted to
one or more of the male characters of
Escaflowne. General series information
pages, nope. Female character shrines, nope. (I
love the female characters too, especially Hitomi,
Meruru, Nariya and Eriya, but they're not the focus
here.) If you had a Van page that included some
information about Hitomi and Meruru, because
they're important people to him, that would be
fine. If you had a primarily Hitomi page that
mentioned Van, nope!
* Very simply, the site should not take a
tiresomely long time to load. Its graphical
elements should be harmonious (no clashing colours
or over-busy backgrounds) and the text should be
easy to read (think very carefully about how
well it shows up against any coloured or patterned
background you may be using - people make a lot of
mistakes here. Dark text on a light bg is always
easiest on the eye). Remember, we can't all be
fancy, but everyone can be tidy.home