YTMND:Guide to making sites that don't suck
The original version of this guide was from Max at the forums, when YTMND was very new. It is his guide to making an enjoyable YTMND site.
Sound
Once you have a sound file you would like to use, there are two key things to remember:
- Don't make it too large.
- Make sure it loops!
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 my bandwidth and makes me hate you. So before you think it's a great idea to upload the entire song of "Livin La Vida Loco", 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 you the gifs maintain a fluid motion. Your gif should not have a frame rate less than a frame a second, that is very important. Also remember that transparency shows through.
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.
