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How did it all began?

More than ten years ago, I wanted to share the great games of Final Fantasy with my friends, so I made a little book on the computer containing info about the game history of FFVIII, the characters and more other basic info, I had combined it all into a nice little book with pictures. I had printed it and shared it with a few friends. It was then when I realised that I wanted to share this with more people, not only the ones who I could give a copy of that book, but also people in other countries. And thus the idea to put it all into a site was born, I made a free site at MSN Groups and placed the info of FFVIII on it. Since I already had that on the computer, I added more info for the other games of Final Fantasy.

In the years that passed, I added more and more information and I got a site that was running pretting well with around 500 members and at my top I had like 250 messages a day, from many active visiters. I had created an RPG on the forums, where I came up with another FF game story: FFX-3. Where characters from any game or Anime serie would be worked into the story. All words were combined by one great evil. The RPG was running great and we had around 10.000 posts on the story!

It waS all nice, but I actually wanted my own domain and not a free site, where I was limited in every way. I couldn't add any decent layouts, only very very basic html coding was able to be used and that was it. All pictures had to come from another site, since everything had to be linked. When I had more than 300 pages, I noticed another downside; a limitation of pages! So I created another free site and linked all secundairy pages to that site and I was able to create more pages. After having more than 1000 pages (and thus 4 linked sites), I realised it couldn't go on like that. It wasn't my domain, I didn't have enough space and I was still limited in my ways of webdesign and layout creating.

My own domain

I started looking for a real host and bought myself a domain: Bar2aYunie. That was in januari 2008. When I was working on setting the information over to the new site, I made everything better: better info, better set-ups for the info, I made my own graphics for the game info and expanded the info. I shortly noticed that I had a lot of info that I couldn't use anymore. That was info that I already had on another page or just info that didn't had anything to do with the games. I also had a lot of pages containing only linked pictures from other sites. Also, not only the total amount of pages were limited, but also the content on a single page. So when I wanted to put down into on all of the weapons for a game, I had to split that up into 5-10 different pages, all linked to one another. That wasn't working. Now, I could add all of that info into one page, which is the main reason wny I now have less pages, but with much better content, trust me!

After having a portion of the content ready, I created a forum. A few things went wrong and I spent more time on the forum than I had planned, but it turned out nicely! The forum is all ready now and more and more members join every week! I continued on the content until I had the basic info on most of the series completed. I corrected mistakes and broken links and uploaded it all what wasn't there already. In februari 2009, I had it all ready for visitors so I started advertising and affiliating. At the end of fevruari 2009, the free MSN Groups sites were closed, so my step to a real domain was timed really well!

Right after I had started to advertise and become affiliates with other great sites, I realised the basic and plain layout wasn't good anymore, I wanted a new and refreshing layout, Something that looked more professional and that would attract people, instead of the layout that I had made in like 10 minutes so I could start on the content. The purple layout was born. Right after that, I got a few comments from guys who disliked the purple layout, so I thought 'why not let them choose what color they want?' And I created the same layout, but this time...in blue! It was quite some work to get all the links and pages fixed, since I waS still working with plain html at that time. I knew the html pretty good, but it was a hell to change any of the menu links!

So, I used php! Since I had to edit all of the pages to the new layout, I changed a few things to use the PHP Inckude function and I had my menu links in a seperate file! Whosh that saved time! I already knew stuff about PHP, so I wonder why I had never used it before. I probably was too busy creating the content and I didn't work at all on the layout, as I said before, it was created in about 5-10 minutes! I transferred all of the pages to the new layouts and added the PHP codes. I even added some other nice effects to the layout!

Graphics Design

I began working with photoshop years ago, and I even created a free site using MSN Groups containing only Graphics Design, So I thought it might be a nice idea to add a Graphics Design section to the site. I already had created a few tutorials, because I was planning on adding a design section from the beginning, but now I was hoping to split the site into FF and Design! I created more and more graphics, using different programs. I have so many idea's for this site and it'll probably take up a lot of time to execute them all, but I am having so much fun in creating this site, that I will not stop!

It was also during the creation of the new design sections when I realised it was something I wanted to do for work! I am working on that now, so more and more will follow!

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed reading the history of this site. It took years to come this far, and it will take years to get where I want to be, but every hour that I have put in this site (and trust me...it's a lot!!), I have gladly spent it!!

Feel free to sent me a message or post something on the forums if you have a comment!

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