How to create paranormal website, from free templates to wordpress management

The above is a lyrics from a funny song titled “Here comes another bubble”, regarding “the american dream” in the web. The point is clear, your webmaster likes pizza and coffee, and this should be enough for him to survive :P. All right, just kidding. Still, it’s important for you to remember, if you don’t know anything about building websites, then you have to find someone who does. Or you can learn everything on your own. I suggest looking around first. Also, it’s better to pay someone for job well done, than to create crappy website on your own.

So look around, among your friends first, then among friends of your friends, maybe you will find someone with skills and interest in paranormal on some discussion board related to supernatural topics. If not, just use Job Boards to hire a freelancer and voila!

Layout

Take a look at these websites: Digg.com, Flickr.com, Delicious.com, CNN.com, Facebook.com – what can you see? White! There is a lot of bright and clean colors on these websites, and a lot of so called “white-space” or emptiness. It’s because these websites are designed to be very user-friendly. Websites cannot be too dark, but more than that there can not be white font on black background. Dark websites are hard to read because each and every display is glowing (except advanced NASA technology and e-paper), and emitting light, which makes your eyes tired very quickly. Black on white is good, but white on black isn’t.

Let’s not get into technical details, we’re not creating a designer’s or artist’s portfolio here, we want to create a website which is going to be read by people. Picking up the wrong colors and people will get easily tired, and it is possible they will look for something better than your website.

Another issue of the dark

Another important thing regarding this technical issue is the fact that when you’re creating a dark website, you automatically want to say “Ooo, this is spooky and scary” (can you hear this Irish accent, like Conan O’Brian’s?). This is OK, as long as you’re making a website for 14-years old kids who can’t fit into school’s society… If you want to reach normal people interested in paranormal or those looking for more reliable informations on the subject, you can not create dark website “cause it’s cool”, because it will throw most people away. Black is bad, dark is nice but if you won’t pay your professional designer minimum $1500 USD, then your dark layout will look awful too. This is caused because creating dark template/layout requires a lot of skills (I mean it, a lot), and those who can do this know they can’t charge too little for such hard work.

Grunge and Vintage styles

A lot of dirt, some vintage photos, nulled hand-drawen buttons etc., and yes, a grunge style in web design is very nice.It fits the paranormal subject, but you have to remember a few things about it. First, creating a good looking grunge layout isn’t an easy task, so it will probably cost you a few dollars. Secondly, not every website should use grunge style, wordpress plugins simply because it won’t fit. Simple example : a website for your investigators team can use nice grunge layout, but your huge vortal about paranormal phenomenon should stick with something much cleaner. It’s not set-in-stone rule, more like a guideline and it depends on your designer’ skills, but basically you should stick to it :).

If you don’t know any designer and you don’t like free themes, you can look on to find some cool cheap premium themes.

Ghost comic images and animated GIF’s

Put an animated ghost GIF image on your super-scientific website and I will surely define you as a 16-year old girl who loves pink and has an emotional problems. No, seriously, what do you want to achieve by placing such animations on your website? No, it’s not cool, it’s not spooky, it’s stupid, childish and completely insane. You want people to consider you as serious paranormal investigator and you’re placing animated ghosts on your websites? No one will take you seriously, wordpress plugins and what worries me the most are the called “investigators” with such elements on their websites. No! No animated gifs or any “cool” or “spooky” images on your paranormal website!

Look around the web – useful things you can find

Even without technical skills, you can still make your own paranormal website, all you have to do is to look around the web and find useful stuff. Like templates and layouts for your website. There’s a plenty of these and all you have to do is to spent some time on googling themes.

And you can find a CMS. CMS stands for Content Management System. It’s a special script, or maybe it’s better to say, an engine you will use to easily manage the content on your website. 90% of sites you want to create can be created using the best CMS ever :

Informative Website, or „Vortal”

Let’s say you want to create a general website with some news, articles, case studies, and some galleries. Let’s start with the proper layout. In this case we will choose a simple and clean “magazine-look”.

Let’s use a clean and user-friendly layout, perfect for classic informative website. Also recognized as a “minimalistic” style, it will be easy to read and easy to navigate soyou can be sure as long as you will have good content, your users won’t leave too quickly. In this specific case you can allow yourself room for some “craziness” and some grunge elements but we’ll get to that later. For now let’s keep it clean and simple.

Using WordPress will make creating new content easily. It will support both galleries and comments system, as well as a team of editors with a simple and useful privileges system. Never forget about comments, it’s what makes your community. Your community is an invaluable element.

Investigators Team Website

You have an investigators team, you need a website, huh? No animations, no grunge/dark template, bright and clean, corporate layout is the best choice for this site. You want to look very serious so your website has to do the same.

Again, wordpress plugins is the best choice. Create an “About” page and write something about your team, present each and every member with a photo. Put some contact informations in a visible area, header is good. General idea is – the less navigation elements the better. When a person will visit your website, they will first look for information about yout and what you do. Remember that when people contact you, your community will grow too.

After the above is done, you can think about some sub-navigation to put your investigations reports on. Do not insert typical articles on this website. Rather create another, informative vortal for this. On an investigators team/group site, you should put only information related directly to your group and its activity, while “how-to” articles and other stuff should be placed on other, more general website.

Finally, remember you’re still humans, don’t look too seriously, show some emotions, show you’re not machines :P.

Forums & Discussion Boards

Personally I really see no point of creating another cookie cutter forum about paranormal phenomenon mainly because it will attract kids and trolls who see ghosts on every photo they take. There’s no simple way of persuading them that it’s just a mist. But if you’re going to create a forum anyway, remember the basic layout rules : clean and simple. Know that you need a serious team of moderators who are seriously interested in paranormal, and they’re not fluffy kids :).

The best choice is to use SimpleMachines or phpBB3 as forum engines. If you’re thinking about adding abforum for your bigger website, then use bbPress or FluxBB. Vanilla is a good choice if you want a private forum for your group management.

Using your own server?

You can ask “should I create my own shared server, or should I use free hosting?” It’s a little complicated. Free hosting almost always puts ads on your page and this won’t look very professional. So try to avoid free FTP hosting at all costs. WordPress.com and Blogger.com, on the other hand, are completely different, you can attach your own domain to both services, and you will be able to change site template when needed. WordPress.com is good for small Investigations Teams, but still I would suggest Blogger.com. You can use AdSense there, with a little bit of luck you will be able to monetize your website to finance your activity. And Blogger.com doesn’t have restrictions regarding templates. You can upload a template from the web, and there are plenty of Blogger.com layouts. It’s simple to use, easy to configure and maintain. It’s a perfect choice for those who want something simple and easy to customize. After few hours of work your, Blogger website will look professional enough.

Thumblr.com and WordPress.com can be used for single investigator website. wordpress themes.com is a little more complicated, so if you don’t need too many fireworks, use Thumblr. It has some nice templates, you can create your own template, put ads, and customize your website, attach your own domain and finally, stop worrying about “how the heck works” :).

No Google Pages or other “create-your-own-website-in-a-matter-of-minutes” kind of stuff (like Freewebs). They’re good but not for what we’re creating here. I like Google’ apps, but in this case not this one :P. Finally, if you want to create a huge, original and useful website for paranormal maniacs, a professional portal or some web application, or even more professional blog, you have to decide to your own server, starting with a shared one, like budget hosting here.

You now know how to create a website, you know where to look for useful resources, and you have discover useful web services to help you manage your projects. Also, you probably know already that creating paranormal website today is just a matter of learning how to use the resources crawling all over the web.