Difference between revisions of "YTMND:Guide to making sites that don't suck"

The original version of this guide was from Max at the forums when YTMND.com was first opened. It is his guide to making an enjoyable YTMND site. Several additional volumes were made but were lost to the Nuclear Forum Holocaust.

Sound

Once you have a sound file you would like to use, there are two key things to remember:

1. Don't make it too large, something between 800k and 1.5megabytes would work.
2. Make sure you end the file so it loops with the beginning.

If the sound file is too large, people will just close the page before it loads, making the site pretty much useless. Also, it wastes Max's bandwidth and makes him hate you. The exception to the rule is if you plan to release a full remix of a fad song, and even so, you should use a low quality file and offer a HQ download at another site. So before you think it's a great idea to upload the entire song of "Livin La Vida Loca", please remember that it's stupid on many levels.

Looping is very important and not that hard to do. You will usually want to use WAV format, as MP3 has a spacer at the end and usually doesn't sound right. For an example of a properly looping site go to pussycat or fyad. When using WAV, you probably want to encode somewhere around 11khz Mono at 15kb/s. Depending on your sound file you may need to encode it at a different rate. Please note also, when encoding WAV files use PCM format, it's the standard and most of the others don't work.

Images

Animated gifs are fine, but don't use 300k animated gifs that have 200 frames and lock up your computer. It makes the site much nicer when the gifs maintain a fluid motion. Also, remember that transparency shows through. See also Creating an animated gif.

General

Take a look around. I know you are all tempted to get right to creating your awesome idea of a "Is Wayne Brady gonna have to choke a bitch?" site, but it's been done. Many times. Check to see if you are duping someone's idea first. It's happening a lot.

Your (inside joke|anime reference|personal pictures|video game) isn't funny to most people and would cause your site to be downvoted or possibly deleted.