Hear Ye, Hear Ye! How to Make Your Notice Be Noticed by muas |  |
The Noticeboard is one of the best places for a Neopian to advertise anything
related to Neopia. You can post shop ads, guild ads, pet pages, requests, anything!
Of course, it can get a little pricey--up to three million Neopoints. It does
get lower as the pages go on, and any ad within five pages is likely to get
some notice, so don't feel like you have to spend a fortune on it.
But how can you make your board be noticed, no matter where it's situated?
That is what I, your friendly guide, will be instructing you on in the following
article.
1. Decide your topic
Will you be advertising your shop, guild, pet's page, or anything else? If you
decide you want to advertise everything, you're going to have to decide how
you want to split it up. You may decide to pick one main subject and add links
to the other things, or you may want to give them all equal space. Just make
sure you have the basic idea down.
2. Don't pick a really silly topic.
I've seen people who paid 30,000 NP for a board which says "Hehe, I like Neopets.
I have lots of NP." There is no point to that. Don't waste your money on that!
3. Pick a layout
Many noticeboards have one large image which takes the place of any text, but
of course you can still have text. Decide what size it will be, what it will
look like, and what will link to what.
4. Design an image, if you picked that.
There are many Neopian graphic artists out there who will design your images
for a small fee. If you don't have a graphics program besides Paint, you would
probably be better off hiring one of these people. Remember, also, that you
have to upload your image to a web server for it to show up correctly.
5. Learn the basic HTML you'll need.
You could just have a basic ad with no links or anything, but this will most
likely not attract a lot of visitors. Learn the basics: bolding, linking, and
putting images in. Or, hire someone to do that for you.
6. Set your noticeboard code up in Wordpad or Notepad beforehand.
This is so you have a backup of it in case you lose the HTML, and so you can
modify it if it does not show up correctly.
7. Don't add MIDIs, huge files, WAVs, or Javascript.
Most of these are against Neopian rules anyway, but there is a reason for this.
People with dialup modems (28.8 or 56k) cannot load a page very quickly that
has these "extras". They'll just give up, and never see your site.
8. Test the code before you post it.
Too many times, I've seen people who paid a million Neopoints for an ad, only
to have a broken image or a link that never ended. Save your code in Notepad
as an .html file, and open it up in your browser. Make sure it looks OK and
there are no mishaps.
9. Find out where your board will be located for the amount you're paying.
If you are paying 20,000 NP, will it be on the fourth or fifth page? At the
top or the bottom? You may want to adjust your spending a bit. For example,
if a board that costs 21,000 NP is at the top of page 3, you might want to pay
21,100 NP so yours is ahead of that one. Make these adjustments ahead of time.
10. Post it!
Plug the HTML into your board, post it, and check out what it looks like. Then
wait. Hopefully, it will look okay and will get people coming. If it didn't,
reevaluate the steps you took, and, when you get enough NP again, try again!
I hope that the steps I outlined here helped you to make a great board, and
that you get lots of visitors because of it. Good luck! |
