Fansites, Web novels, Oh My!
12/31/2024
I've been spending the last 4 months brainstorming new ideas for stories and with those new ideas, I've made some templates for sites to house those new ideas. This kind of makes me what to redo the webcomic template I made AGES ago for my webcomics, but I think that template is still good.
Anyways, I wanted to showcase some of the templates I made, and lightly explain their use and what kind of media they'll be used for. I plan to go more in depth about this projects in a Comic Sans like presentation (which is supposed to be unserious and funny, but knowing me I'm probably gonna take it too seriously and actually make a decent PowerPoint that could get like an solid B+)
Anyways, here's the things, I've made...
Beautiful Brainrot
Beautiful Brainrot is a compilation of fansites to house my fanworks (i.e fanfics, AUs/Alternate Universes, and fanart/comics).
(I don't own any of the these proporties showcased in Beautiful Brainrot, this is just a fan project meant to grow my coding, art, and writing skills. other than fan art, Original Characters, and the scenarios I write I own NOTHING!)
I created BB because I wanted to place where I could showcase my fanworks and have it look neat and pretty, like the fansites of the old web, with landing pages, an archive of fanfiction, a gallery of fanwork, some blog post about fannish stuff, and all that jazz.
At the moment only 4 of the 7 sites that planned, have a finished template ready to be filled with fannish works. Those sites being Budding Seed (a Trigun fansite), Tav's Grove (a BG3 fansite), and Speedpaint ( An AU centered on the TF2 game/comic), Talesland Rewritten (a rewrite of the story of Talesland from the racing MMORPG, Talerunners).
The base template I made for each site...
I wanted the template to be a mix of the old web fansites but also have a modern, responsive look that allows for a good amount of customization. I did some web surfing around Neocities and the small web to look at some sites where people were showcasing their fan works and sites centered around people showcasing their writings and art, and managed to cook this template up.
A site that really inspired the overall look of this template was aroceu's fic site, I like the theme and the organization of the site, this one of the site I found during my web surfing looking for inspo for this template. I found Aroceu's site through the fan fiction webring, a collection of sites from the small web that are centered around wirting and fanfictions.
Aroceu's Fic site
The Fanfiction Webring
For this template I used the Smolcss card snippet ALOT in this site template, I was recommended to use it by a homie from the Neocities discord server I lurked in. Funny enough, thanks to the smolcss card, this page works similar to this one tumblr theme used for displaying fanfic archive and fanfic recs, which was a page I wanted to emulate without fully just ripping off the code, and I'm glad was able to do that.
Fic Rec One: Tangerine by ebrothemes
To go with the writing section, I made a template for the fanfiction work itself, so I can basically just copy and paste the fic into the template, and fill out the description box.
The filler text is just lucky star quotes
For the gallery and the comics page, I used a lightbox function where, the images go full size when clicked and each full image card has their own description.
The placeholder images come from Placeholder Pics, which is a SUPER helpful site for....well...placeholders.
This site is a GODSEND!
A character page for displaying...characters, basically like a mini on-site wiki. This page is also helpful for holding Alternate Universe versions of canon characters. Oh I forgor to mention that with the characters, comics, fanfic pages I've organized the content by arcs, which is how I tend to organized my fannish stuff. Since when I do my fanworks I tend to think in either arcs that the piece of media has within its own canon timeline or my own fan made arcs featuring the characters. I don't know, it just makes it easier for stuff not to blend together or for the page not to be one long scroll of pictures and fics.
The Extra page is used for multi-media content or interactive web content (like web-based games, Interactive Fiction/Visual Novels, Kentic Webcomics). I got the idea to make this page after browsing Nomnomnami's site and seeing how she displays her games and comics)
(Check out Nami's games/comics if you like cute girls and slice of life stories with a fantasy twist)
Blog Page
This blog page is also inspired by Nomnomnami's diary page, which she treats like her own personal social media page, giving small updates on her projects and general musing. I thought that was a pretty neat feature of her site so I decided to add to this template, since I could see myself making use of adding small updates and notes (even if I'm the only one whose going to be visiting these sites, lol).
While I don't really plan on Beautiful Brainrot to be readily available publicly (at least at the moment), I could see Beautiful Brainrot being attached to my Fandom Nomad site. I mean I DO have the Nomad Archive, where I hold (or at least planned to hold) my fanfics, but I guess I could still use the Nomad Archives as a more straightforward archive since it can only hold fics and not much else.
Also I would like to mention that I updated the theme of my Fandom Nomad blog, it used to have a purple space color scheme, and now it has red and blue web/typerwriter theme.
Moving on to another template that I made, this one is for web novels...
Main page
Web novels are basically the equivalent of web comics, written stories with chapters posted on a weekly or monthly basis, and some web novel eventually turn into physical novels, similar to how many webcomics have physical volume releases.
I would like to start posting chapters of my stories, and eventually turn them into a e-book to be sold on itchio, a digital marketplace where user sells and host their digital projects; everything from web games to indie games to zine to comics to TTRPGs/board games to e-books. (But that's basically a pipe dream at this point, lol)
I got inspo for this site's layout from Marina, blogger of Squelfland, sites for her web novels; Meganee and The Tale Of Horus.
( Really dig Marina's artstyle, very nostagic, very cozy)
The main page of the web novel template also displays a small section for character introductions, I plan to have these pages link to Toyhouse and Character Hub for a more detailed bio. Toyhouse and Character Hub are original character storage sites, meant to hold information about original characters and a marketplace to find commissions, art trades, and character adopts.
The read page of the site has the most recent chapter/page of the story. There's a simple navigation bar made of links, linking all the pages together for an easy read.
For the start of each web novel, I made my own placeholder image in Canva, which maybe the only image I'll have for the actual novel itself, but I guess nothing is stopping me from adding illustrations in between.
Warnings Page
A warnings page to list any content or trigger warnings for the story, I plan to go chapter by chapter for content warnings, hopefully without spoiling with the actual story.
Archive Page
The archive page displays all the available chapters and pages of the web novel....that's it that's the page.
The Goodies and Gallery page are code snippets taken from the fansite template page. I was thinking "Hey, if it aint broke, not need to fix it.." and used the Smolcss card code again here.
With the Goodies page, I listed some other pages I plan to add pages that go over extra world building lore (if there is world building lore), a page that showcases short stories, a meme page displaying story and character related memes, and a personal tv tropes page showcasing any tropes that show up in the story.
I got the idea for the goodies page from goodies section of the Heralds Of Rhimn' s webpage of the Gail Novelry website.
I would also like to mention that Gaily Noverly has a banger tutorial (that's a bit of WIP) about how to make your own e-book using programs like Sigil and Scriubs, which are both free e-book editing and publishing software.
Gaily Novelry's Ebook Tutorial
Gail also makes some gorgeous book covers for their books, like bruh...
Anyways, I think that's all I wanted to share, I was going to go through the individual projects that I made the site template for, but I think I'll save that for the Comic-Sans powerpoint post. This is just something I've been working on for the past few weeks. I hope you enjoyed me rambling on about fansites and web novels, maybe I gave you some ideas to make your own archive for your own fan projects or personal projects. As for me, I can't wait to see how the sites I made grow over time!
Until next time, later days..