Site Suggestions

Today’s update concerns the forums and where this site needs to go in the future.

Forum Stuff – I know I have had to have said this about ten times, but I and others have been so surprised at how much activity the forums have been getting compared to the old ones that were basically dead. I am so glad that I chose to start them over and to not abandon them. Anyways, just a few notes on the forums. First off, if you are ever on the internet and have no one to play with on Apprentice, go into our forums and post a new thread in the “Online Card Battling” forum and ask if anyone wants to play against you. I don’t know any forum that would allow you to do this, but I guess we are trying to be a little different here and want to meet players’ demands better. When you finish your battle or when someone responds, please post in the thread and let us know so that we can close it. Also, I hate so much how I don’t know what to do with improving the forums or getting more people to come to them. If you have any sort of suggestion on what I can do, please post in [this thread].

Website Stuff – My sleeping habits were weird today. I woke up at 1 AM, stayed up for a few hours, went back to bed around 5 AM, woke up around 8:30 AM, fell asleep after Pokemon ended, woke up at 1 PM, and now it’s almost 10 PM. In my excessive need for REM sleep today, and in my boredom of having nothing planned at all for this three-day weekend, I got to thinking on what I need to improve with this site. First I though of the coding on the site, which if I fixed would give us better search results on search engines like Google. Then I thought of working on card scans, since people like card scans. Then I thought of the forums and some other random ideas. In all of this thinking, I never actually accomplished anything today, since I wanted to get something done with the site. So, in my frustration, here is a rant:

Okay, so card scans. We don’t have any of the Unlimited set scans up. While browsing through my folders of scans today, I discovered many set scans I had worked on in the past, but gave up on since I didn’t think I had edited them perfectly. I literally had worked on Sandstorm almost 15 times through, yet was never satisfied with the quality of my edits due to me being a perfectionist. However, I think that my constant urge to make the scans as perfect as possible is what is causing me to delay them so much. So, what if I were to just throw up all the raw scans on the site, and then edit them at a later time? That way, we would have scans of all the sets up, which would be better than nothing, and then I could edit them later and post the edited, tilted, color-adjusted scans up when I finished them. What do you guys think of that?

Then there is the layout. No one ever comments on it, and I feel that the layout is hard to display everything we have on here to someone who is new. If someone were to come to this site for their first time, would they even see that we have scans, since it is so far down on the page? Would they see that there will be a future Japanese set called Miracle Crystal, which has its own little link about 3/4ths of the page down? I really need suggestions on this, because I don’t feel people are getting all the information they want. This frustration is what mainly caused me to put up the EX Legend Maker / Holon Phantom image links at the top of this page, so that people would know they exist.

Thirdly, there is the popularity of PokeBeach. How popular is the site? Is it getting to anyone’s computer screens? I always wonder this. We always have good and unique information, yet sometimes I wonder who it is actually getting to. How do I advertise the site better? Do I copy bulbasnore’s idea and pass out little business cards of my site to people at tournaments? (I like the idea) Do I affiliate with sites more? Do I hold a gun to people’s heads and make them go advertise my site in real life to people? What on earth can I do?

Overall, I just feel lost. No one ever tells me anything or is nit-picky about my site, so I am always left to questions. I want people to tell me that when they use Internet Explorer, my site shows up funny! I want them to tell me one of my card scans are crooked! I want them to tell me an idea! Yet, no one ever does, and I am just left to wonder.

So, if you have anything to say about anything, please, PLEASE, PLEASE post in [this thread] and tell me anything that is on your mind. ANYTHING. I want this discussion to be open to the public, so do not e-mail me. If one person says something in public, maybe it will spark something in someone else or an idea or anything. Thank you.