Links
On this page, I hope to compile a list of interesting websites that are connected to Watership Down and the Animals of Farthing Wood. I also welcome suggestions of fan sites, forums, etc to similiar books, films and TV series. Fan sites for books similiar to Redwall and The Wind in the Willows are also welcome.
Wikis
Fandom wikis are great because they hold a lot of information about a film, book, tv show, etc. They have many people contributing to them and it would be impossible for one person alone to compile a site which is as extensive as these. If there is something which you want to know, but can't find it on Bright Eyes, then it is very likely that it is on one of these.
The Animals of Farthing Wood Wiki
Watership Down WikiFan Sites
Thank U Stars - Thank U Stars is a Watership Down fan site that focuses primarily on the ITV/YTV animated series of the late 90's/early 2000's, with a small section on the 1978 film by Martin Rosen.Forums
Fiver's Honeycomb - Fiver's Honeycomb is primarily a Watership Down forum where you can discuss the book and various adaptations, post fan fiction, share fan art and fan animations. There is also a board where you can discuss other films, books and tv series and a section of the site where you can have your own blog! (The blog is a feature that is important to me because I was once a member of a Star Wars forum (now long inactive) for female fans of Star Wars where you could have your own section to share your creations and thoughts. It's much nicer than using Facebook and other social media sites for the same purpose.) I am the user Kili, on there, btw.Fanlistings
Fanlistings are small sites with the goal of making a list of fans. They are probably dying out now because people hardly ever join them as they go to sites like Facebook and Twitter. Some sites can be really impressive with lots of extra pages about the subject and are really a fan site with a listing attached. Others are more simple. Creating them can become quite addictive, but the ones I like most are those which are more than just a list. I used to make fanlistigs but no longer do so because I always wanted the site to be more than just a listing - they always looked kind of sad without proper content on them.
The Animals of Farthing Wood Fanlisting
Official
Site Creation Resources
Amassment - Amassment is a website dedicated to helping people create fan sites and shrines for their favourite fandoms. It can be anything and they also have a small directory where you can have your fan site listed.
Lissa Explains it All - Really a site to help children create their first web pages, this is a good site for anyone beginning to start coding to learn from, though it doesn't replace text books, etc, for those who wish to carry it further than just a hobby. I like it because it is no nonsense and doesn't try to baffle people with technical jargon.
Google Fonts - Until google fonts came into being, there were very few fonts that you could use to place on web pages other than the generic ones like Arial, Times New Roman, Courier and Verdana font. If you wanted a fancy font, you would have to make an image button for it instead and that would cause problems for the site. This is because not every computer would have had non-standard fonts on their drive and so would display incorrectly when people visited it if images weren't used. With google fonts, you can really make your site look pretty without having to go through the trouble of making images. (And let's face it, some of the generic fonts don't really look nice on a computer screen, nor easy to read.)
Color Scheme Designer 3 is a tool designed to help web designers come up with a complementary colour scheme for their website. With out it, it can be very difficult to come up with colours that don't clash, or which are hard to see against each other. It's one of the tools I couldn't really do without!
CSS Portal.com If you aren't good at coming up with css layouts for your site, do not rely on ready made templates unless they are just a blank template telling you where to put things, etc. Many times I come across premade templates which I really just cannot use because the fonts, images, theme, etc, of the template have already been determined and they are extremely difficult to customize. Instead, you want a blank slate where /you/ can choose the fonts, images and colour scheme of the site. It's espeacially frustrating when you want to find a layout for a forum or a wordpress site because every thing either looks the same or you can't make it fit your forum's/wordpress's theme/subject. It's easier with a static site and if you can't find a good template you can play around with, there is always CSS Portal.com. I use this tool quite a lot!
Optimizilla It's a bit time consuming, but it is important to make your image sizes small for the web. (And I am talking about the file sizes, not the height and width size.) It was a long time ago now, but before I made my first fan sites, I was interested in web design and took an Open University course regarding it. They stressed the importance of small file sizes for the web. This is something which the modern web seems to have forgotten. Ever wondered why despite the fact that we have broadband and other more advanced internet connections than the old dial-up back in the late 90's and early 2000's that web pages seem to take ages to open up on your computer? One of the reasons are big files. You could get around it by having plain webpages with only text on them, but I like images because it makes pages more appealing visually and in some cases, they also make it easier to read. One of the ways you can prevent slow speeds is compressing your images so that the file sizes are smaller, and I use this tool to do it. It's no good having a really fancy site only to have no one be able to get on to it because it takes too long to access.
Paint.net is a free image editing software. There are quite a number of them around, but some are very complicated to use. I like Paint.net because it is one of the more simple ones, and is very much like the image editing software that you used to be able to get with scanners. There are some limits to it (like cropping images, for instance...) and it is not as powerful as software like photoshop, but if you don't need photoshop or a similiar product, then it's useful. As it's a download on your computer, you don't need to upload images to use it - I find that there are a lot of websites which offer an image editing program where you have to upload the image to their server, but if your images are very large then it is problematic to use them as they don't upload properly.
Search Neocities
VHSearch do like to search for sites to follow, which isn't always easy on here because of the tag system. You don't get enough tags to be able to list everything that your site is about and using them to search only works if other people are using the same tag. Vague tags like 'animals' won't let you find a site about wolves if that site isn't using it as a tag, videogames won't bring up a Sonic fan site if the site in question doesn't use it. Searching activity doesn't always bring up an interesting site, so most of the sites I follow are either ones that have found me and followed, or ones that have followed, or been followed, or communicate with sites I follow. So, I was happy to come aross VHSearch because I now can look for sites more effectively. (And I would like to follow more fandom based sites on here in fandoms I am interested in - most of the ones I find tend to be personal diaries or sites which act like a static blog and these don't always interest me.