I think it’s pretty much de rigeur now for MMO guilds to have their own websites, even if it is just a free bboard so that members can communicate when they aren’t in the game. Semi-professional guilds like Ensidia go the whole nine yards with forums, player blogs, articles and guides, advertising, and I’m quite surprised they don’t sell branded T-shirts and mugs too.
There are also specialist services like wowstead.com and guildportal.com which present guilds with the ability to easily set up complex and game-specific functionality (like rosters, contents of the guild bank, raid calendars, armoury access, etc). And I think EQ2 offers a similar service to guilds directly, although not for free, which I always thought was a fantastic idea.
For me personally, I’m happy with a basic bulletin board. Although calendars where you can sign up for guild events have also worked well for us.
What do you look for in a good guild website?
June 26, 2009 at 8:50 am |
Forum, maybe a gallery. Search-squigs are important too.
(see http://www.roguishness.com/war/gallery.php)
Tbh, most people in my guild only ever use the forum (if they go near the website at all). WAR’s in game events stuff makes an out of game event calendar somewhat redundant (though if you’ve got a multi game guild it’s probably quite handy to have that – gifv XML export of calendar imo)
June 26, 2009 at 8:51 am |
http://www.roguishness.com/war/gallery.php even…
Punctuation killed the link.
June 26, 2009 at 9:10 am |
That’s an awesome looking site, Flim (shame you’re destruction
).
I have noticed that some guilds just seem to have a guild culture where people post a lot on bboards, and others not so much. I always suspected it came down to what proportion of the players had full time jobs and would be more likely to read/post from work.
June 26, 2009 at 2:29 pm |
in my opinion a good guild site also needs a “news” section. There you can promote your guild. tell little stories about your doings or simply brag about you accomplishments.
June 26, 2009 at 3:39 pm |
I find the hardest part of running a guild site is simply getting people there that would rather be playing the game. Design is important to me as I’m a visual person and most people will take one look before making a judgement instead of looking at content. My guild requires registration to see most of the good stuff, but it’s still nicely laid out and has plenty of information. Our Ventrilo server is broken at the moment though.
http://www.guildportal.com/Guild.aspx?GuildID=292970&TabID=2456523
June 26, 2009 at 4:41 pm |
I only really need a forum. The rest is nice, but fluff. When I was looking for a WAR guild, I visited some sites that were so filled with random colors and fonts and flashy bits that I didn’t even bother looking at the recruitment info, but navigated right off.
Both my WoW guild and my WAR guild have active forums that get used for chatty stuff as well as game stuff.
June 26, 2009 at 6:45 pm |
I coded my own for my guild since I got tired of having several accounts for forum, raid signup, dkp, etc.
It got forum, raid signup, DKP, news (great for promoting raid progress), character creation, chat, message system, etc.
Unlike most other guilds (from what I have seen) we actually enjoy being on the site, and the forum and chat is used daily. Having a nice customized site I think is a big part of that.
http://tribe.sunstrider.eu/
June 26, 2009 at 8:50 pm |
I now feel that I couldn’t possibly settle for any guild that doesn’t at least have its own web browser:
http://www.brokentoys.org/2009/06/26/taking-theorycrafting-to-an-entirely-new-level-of-nerdosity/
I’m also considering patenting the English language for our guild’s chat. The rest of you will have to find something else to speak if the Liechtenstein International Patent Office accepts my 10 000 euros.
Lastly I’m pondering a guild operating system. Wonder how much Windows would cost….
June 26, 2009 at 10:08 pm |
Some cool looking guild sites there. My guild site for New Dawn in EQ2 is pretty basic but it does the job. A forum is definitely the most important thing IMO just so people can communicate and stay in touch.