There are a lot of people out there who don't understand all the things that go into creating a website. Among those, there are even fewer who actually care, I'm sure. But for lack of a better topic, I'm going to give you a little taste of all the pieces and how they fit together. It's more relevant than you think, since the site is today celebrating a barely-precedented tenth birthday, and I think it's important for all of you to know just how we roll here. Plus it's good for my ego.
I've been a part of a lot of sites over the years, both epic and minute in scale. But the principles in play to make a good one are the same regardless of the size. You have to have someone in place to design the thing in a way that looks good and draws the user in. A good design is just designed enough to be fancy without making the site hard to use. Even more important than that is the content, of course, regardless of what some people might try to tell you. Trust me, those that say that presentation is better than content are those who have lousy content. To have meaningful content, you need to bring something to the table that's both relevant to your audience and is somehow different than what everyone else has. Kids, note that, it's why nobody reads your blogs.
Now, if you want to have a moderately successful site, you can stop there. Nobody would blame you - bringing those two things together alone is quite a feat. But you can keep going. You can market the site, to really give those users who show up something to tell their friends about and to keep them all coming back. You can make the site interactive, so it's not just people showing up to read; give them something to really wrap their hands around. You can begin to focus on refinement, not just creation. You'll learn terms like information architechture, the art of designing your content so it's neatly organized and webbed together in a way that makes it easy for your users to access everything. You'll figure out how to analyze metrics to make sure people are seeing what you want them to, and also that you're giving them the new things that they come to your site to find. And, you learn that from time to time you might have to just burn the whole thing down and build it back up from scratch.
This is relevant because, for the last ten years, we here at the Caves of Narshe have been trying like mad to do all these things in an effort to bring the best Final Fantasy content possible straight to you. Ten years ago, it was just me, sitting at a Pentium-60 with a thousand-page HTML book, and CoN was nothing more than something for me to learn a new hobby. Five years ago, it was a handful of us, most of whom are still here, rushing like crazy folk to get Caves of Narshe version 5.0, the look and feel that you'll now know as "Persona," online. And now, it's a thriving group of people dedicated not only to gaming and Final Fantasy, but also to bringing the love of the most classic Final Fantasy games to the masses. We haven't all been doing it for a decade (though, some days it feels like it, right, guys?), but we are still here because we do it better. All of it.
I think I thank you all pretty... much... every... year, but can you ever get enough of it? I have a lot to thank you for, really. You guys are the ones that come to the site and post at the forums, and come to chat, and generally appreciate the work that we all do for you here. That alone is a lot of the reason that we keep doing this. You guys are the ones that shop at AmaCoN, and every little thing that you guys buy helps pay the bills a little bit. Those of you who talk to me often know I'm cheap, so all those little purchases keep me motivated too! And some of you guys, well, you're the ones that tick me off and incur my wrath. And, in your own little irritating way, by God you all keep me around and active too.
So this year I want to thank absolutely everyone. Not just our oldest members, not just our newest members, not just my staff, but everyone who reads this. That includes you, GoogleBot. It's really a lot more personal than I think it's easy to say, but I'm going to try. Ten years ago, I had no idea that a collection of webpages was going to become a career. I was just killing time one summer, the kind of time you have to kill when you live in the middle of nowhere. Since that day ten years ago, caves and mines and holes in the ground have followed me everywhere. The site went with me to University. The site was there when I got engaged, and later married. The site followed behind when I moved halfway across the country. The Caves got me my first web job, and that was a bare three years ago. I daresay the site will be with me forever—even if one day it does not exist on the web, the education it provided and the people it brought to me will.
The lessons I learned in creating and refining this site also got me my current job, and I don't think anyone who knows me or my line of work would doubt that I've come to benefit significantly from that little turn of events. Take that full circle: I have a fulfilling and happy life, old-man grousing notwithstanding, and a major reason why is because I've been here at CoN for ten years.
I don't expect that you folks out there have had this sort of life-changing experience due to any website, let alone our humble little nook of the internets here. But hey, maybe you should stick around. Post at the forums. Chat with us about random things. Maybe you even want to help out at the site a little, who can say? Maybe in a few years you'll have the same depth of love for this site and what it means that I do. Or maybe you will go out on your own, and start checking out all that gibberish I wrote about a few paragraphs back. If you do, drop me a line ten years down the road. Let me know how it works out for you, and I'll be proud to know I played a small part, just as I hope you all are proud of the parts you have all played here over the years.
So, that's it. Ten years, complete and in the books. And the ledger says that on balance, a fine profit was had by all. But we're clearly not done yet. You'll notice today that our wizard Tiddles has just finished refreshing all the skins for the site and the forums, giving everything a fresh and time-consuming coat of paint. Of course, we've got the CoNtests running, and we plan to have more coming soon as well. The future, in fact the quite-near future, holds even more! We promise that even though it's now been ten years, we will keep you posted on the new stuff if you keep coming to check it out. At Caves of Narshe, we may no longer be just starting, but we're a long way from finishing.
Posted in: CoN Site News
