For those of you who have been asking me for HTML advice, here you go! (This is all the advice I'm going to give - I don't have the time to talk with a bunch of people on an individual basis... If you have a question about something, you can try e-mailing me, but if I'm too busy to help you, I'll let you know straight out.)

I'm sure you're as tired as I am of seeing crappy pages on the web that take three weeks to load on slow modems, or that are so cluttered that you can't find anything. If you want to make sure your page isn't like that, here are some tips and tricks I've picked up along the way from the eight or so years I've been doing HTML... Enjoy!

Does your site have a splash page? No? You should probably have one. Why? I'll tell you.

A splash page is a place to welcome your visitors. It's a place to have your site name, counter (see the section called Counter Etiquette!), sister/affiliate sites' button banners (usually no more than three or four to decrease loading time, and only button-sized - say around 88x31 pixels apiece), and any text cliques you belong to. It should be the first page anyone sees of your site, and they should only see it one time per visit.

The default name for your splash page should be "index.html" (or on some free servers, "default.html") because that's the default page a browser will go to if you don't specify it in your URL. (For example, http://www.geocities.com/yourusername/ would go to index.html in your account. If you don't have an index.html page, it will usually go to a site index that the server provides you with that's set up with your file structure. Then people have to hunt for your main page. Not nice. Most, including me, will give up and leave.)

A splash page lets people know what kind of site they've stumbled upon. A great idea to aid people with this is to put somewhere (on your main entrance image, in a sentence or two underneath it, etc.) what your site is about - "A Sailormoon Multimedia Site", "An Beginner's Guide To Sailormoon", "A Sailormoon Manga Reference", "A Web Page Ranking Site", etc. That way, if they think your site looks like something they might be interested in, they'll go in. If they realized they made a boo-boo and didn't want to be there, it gives them a chance to find out before they have to wait for your whole main page to load and try to find out what kind of site you are somewhere inside.

So you know what a splash page should be; now I'll tell you what it shouldn't be. It should not lead to a second splash page under any circumstances. (I've seen sites with as many as three splash pages!) There should be only one splash page per site!!

It also shouldn't be a dumping ground for twelve animated gifs, animated banners, a slew of text, or any embedded multimedia (unless your entire site is in Flash or something, in which case you should have a link to skip the Flash or Shockwave intro for people with slow modems) such as midis, wavs, avis, or movies. You also should avoid putting a huge image as your main splash image - either cut it up, compress its file size (if you have Photoshop 5.5+, you can use the "Save For Web" feature - it's a lifesaver!), or use a smaller image.

Another tip is don't image map your image so that only part of it says "Enter", and then not provide a text link to enter the site: some people (though not too many) have images turned off on their browsers (or use a browser that doesn't support images), or will hit stop before the main image finishes loading, and then can't enter the site.

My final comment about a splash page is that it should match your layout. FMOCT, for example, occasionally changes the character on the layout. When I change the layout, the splash gets a new look with the same character and same basic color scheme. You should keep the same background color throughout the rest of your site, as well. The mood of your site should be set on the splash page and carried through to the very last page a person visits.

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Almost everyone has one: a counter that boasts how many visitors a site has had. (I readily admit that I have them on quite a few of my sites too.) However, many times counters can be deceiving. People fail to realize that if you put your counter on the main content page of your site - the page that people have to keep refreshing every time they want to do something new - it goes up every time someone revisits the page. The purpose of a counter is not to see how many times the same person can hit the same page - it's to find out how many visits overall you get to your site. (Oh, I know some people will be really depressed to hear that, in actuality, they are not receiving 45 hits a day, but really only something like 5 or 6... But it's true.) Some counters come with a feature that "won't count" the same IP address twice in the span of 12 or 24 hours, but most free counters...well, don't, or they're so unreliable that it never really matters whether or not it supposedly comes with that feature anyway.

The only way to get a true reading of how many visitors you get to your site is to have it on a page that visitors will only hit once per visit. Thus, a logical place to put a counter is a site splash page, or in a frame that doesn't get refreshed every time the visitor goes back to the main page. (The down side to putting it on your splash is that if someone bookmarks your main page instead of your splash, you don't count any hits from them when they use their bookmarks to go to your site. Same thing if someone links a page other than your splash. It's not a huge deal, but if you want a really accurate count, the best bet is putting it in a non-reloading frame in your main frameset.) It's not really fair to say that you've had over 1,000 hits if you've really only had 200 or so. Most people will probably prefer to ignore this tidbit because the escalating counter makes their site look that much more popular. Whatever the case, I'd much rather know how many people really visit my site, than how many times the main page is refreshed in the course of a day.

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OK, now I know a lot of folks like to put midis on their pages for their guests to listen to - usually whether the guests like it or not. I can't really talk much here because I did the same thing when I first started out, but now I've learned - it usually just serves to piss people off. I understand that you found this awesome new midi and you're just dying to put it as your main page theme, and that you have different ones for every page to go with the theme of each page, but we begin running into problems at about this point.

Many people surf with their Winamp players or CD players on. I'm one of them. If your computer is like mine, it doesn't like getting two different sound files trying to play through the same device at the same time. Mine tends to have a coronary. Most people who use midis make a few mistakes and/or assumptions:

Let's address these issues, shall we?

One: There are very few people who enjoy listening to the fabulous strains of their favorite anime song in midi format while they surf. Especially if: a) there is a different midi on each page, or b) the midi starts and stops every time you change pages.

Two: While listening to the soft refrains of the Rurouni Kenshin OST 3 or the smooth sounds of Sakura's Shishira album, your speakers suddenly crackle, your hard drive convulses, and your Winamp player's sound gets flushed down the toilet as a blaring rendition of "Moonlight Densetsu" blasts through your poor, strained output devices. (This is a bad thing, by the way.)

Three: "Oh hell!" you growl in frustration. "Another midi!" You frantically search the page in vain for a controller to shut it off or turn it down - something. No dice. The controller has been hidden for "aesthetic" purposes or through malicious intent - no one can quite be sure which.

Four: You resign yourself to sitting through the whole discourse, reluctantly hitting pause on your Winamp to ease your poor computer. "I'll just wait till it's over and then I can listen to my music again..." Finally, the end comes, when...It's the beginning again! What the hell!

I'm sure most of you out there can relate to this. I'm all for putting a nice midi on your page if it goes with the content. (No midis of the theme for Final Fantasy IX on a Sailormoon shrine, please. Stick with your subject matter.) And if you absolutely must put a midi on your page, and if you absolutely must have it autostart, at least have the courtesy to provide your (quite literally) captive audience with a controller. Believe it or not, nine times out of ten when I'm surfing and I come across a page that has a hidden midi that autostarts, I immediately leave the site without looking around. Flat out. I'm sure most other people do exactly the same thing. The only time I'd stay on pages that have non-controlled midis is when people had applied for awards, and I usually gritted my teeth through my entire visit because I was so damn sick of the first five seconds of "My Only Love" every time I had go back to the main page to get to another section.

Please. Be kind.

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Thou shalt be organized on your main page and all pages contained therein. You have a boatload of information on your page. You have bios, attacks, gifs, pictures, mp3s, even fanart. But you have things scattered all over the place. No one can find what they're looking for. One of the first things when designing (or redesigning) your page should be deciding where everything should go.

Split your page up into well-labeled categories. (I'm all for naming things creatively, but if you're going to call your individual sections things like, "Dusk & Daydreams", "Peony Blossom Patio", and "Full Moonlight Serenade", tell people what's in the sections on your main page. I can't guess what all those sections are. Sometimes I'll click a section and end up having to wait for a huge bitmap image map to load that's not even part of the category I want to be in!

If you don't want to have section descriptions on your main page, then put a fast-loading link (preferably text) to a sitemap that tells people exactly what's in each of the sections. (Yeah, and by the way, this means that you have to make it very clear that the link is to a sitemap. It does no good to have a link called "Midnight Dreaming" that could very well be to yet another section I don't want to wait for. Call it "Sitemap", "Site Directory", or even "Help?".) How am I supposed to know that you keep your music files in "Dusk & Daydreams"? I would have thought I could probably find them in "Full Moonlight Serenade". Naming your categories with some reference to what's inside is a good idea. "The Library" for a fanfic section is fairly recognizable, if not the most creative thing in the world.

Thou shalt be consistent with your main layout and all pages contained therein. Be consistent with your layouts!! Sure, you might have gotten twelve really cool layouts from different places, and you want to have a theme for each section of your page, but for God's sake people, don't fully change your layout every page!!! You should keep at least a few elements of your page consistent. If you want to have a different background of each of the Senshi's symbols on their bios pages, it could be passable, as long as you keep the rest of your layout and colors the same.

Don't confuse people by changing the navigation style every time they click a link - on top one time, in a drop-down menu the next page, then on the left-hand side of the page. Don't randomly switch colors of fonts (or fonts themselves).

Don't randomly switch ways of punctuating your sentences from page to page. If you write with no capital letters on your bios pages, but you WrItE LiKe ThIs on your image galleries page, you'll hurt people's eyes (though writing like the second example on any page will hurt their eyes anyway).

If you feel that you absolutely MUST change the background color for all your bios pages so that they match the Senshi's aura colors, please don't write in a conflicting font color!! You should not use red text on Jupiter's neon green background! As a general rule, don't use the color tag <bgcolor="green"> or <bgcolor="red"> - most of the default colors are simply atrocious, and are not meant to be used for full page designs!! Instead, learn how to use "hexadecimal" - go to HTMLgoodies.com if you must look it up. (Say you want the purple color I used for my links in my Saturn layout... Your color tag would be <bgcolor="#9966cc">.

Want a good example of some of the points of this topic? Look at this new FMOCT layout as your example - yes, there is a different character and color scheme for every section, but everything is still in the same position in each section: the character image is the same size and in the same place, the affiliates are all listed underneath the character, and the navigation bar hasn't undergone any other change than color scheme. The links are different colors, but everything matches.

The main point here is that it's startling, to say the least, to enter a page with a black main layout, then click to see character bios, and suddenly be slapped in the face with a neon turquoise background and magenta text, only to go to their image galleries and see yet another free graphics layout (which is on every other Sailormoon page in existence) with a white background, followed immediately by an incomprehensible page written over a busy background image. Don't confuse your patrons. They'll think they've left your site by accident if your changes are too drastic. Keep it simple, and keep it consistent. Great, now you've got 11 more layouts that you can use - after you're done with this one.

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Why is it bad? Because there's this whole issue about "bandwidth" on the web nowadays. When you get people visiting your pages and looking at your files, or downloading things, that increases your bandwidth. If a site gets too much bandwidth, it will go slow, or people won't be able to access it until other visitors leave. (Many free servers now have issues where if you use up your bandwidth, your site will be completely inaccessible for twelve hours or so. Many also try to thwart direct-linking by showing "Hosted by Angelfire" default images when you link to an image not in that person's account.) When you direct link to others' files on their servers, you not only slow your site, but their site, as well. Basically, twice the amount of people will be trying to access the same file on two separate servers at the same time. SLOW. BAD.

So how do you use what you want to from their site without direct linking? Simple.

JavaScript and Java applets have become insanely popular on the web over the last few years - and now DHTML and layers have been added into the fray. I myself use several scripts, especially the rollovers for my navigation bars, a randomizing JavaScript for my affiliates' buttons on some sites, and my JavaGames section. Otherwise, I don't really like them that much. I have been known to make the occasional site with DHTML scrolling, but I'm pretty moderate besides that, and I replaced most of the DHTML-layout sites when I found out that DHTML and Macs don't like each other.

Java and JavaScript, while usually a wonderful thing, are usually rather heavily overused. If you use, say, more than four scripts or applets on your entire site, you have a problem. Don't forget that Java and JavaScripts (especially applets like the ever-popular, and ever-annoying "lake applet" and "raindrop applet") require extra time to load. I've been to sites that have five or six applets per page, that take absolutely forever to load.

Usually it's pointless and stupid applets such as the one that scrolls your text like the Star Wars opening, or something that thoroughly annoys the hell out of me like a pointer trailer!! As a side note, pointer trailers Piss Me Off. Especially the text ones and Comet Cursor ones that ask if you want to install their stupid software to view the pointer trailer. The text trailers always land over text I'm trying to read, and it slows mouse movement across the screen. Don't go here. The other thing that makes me nuts is those stupid falling-flowers or -snow applets. Unless you can make it so that they don't fall over the text I'm trying to read, don't do it. I saw one site where once they hit the main frame where everything text-related was located, they disappeared. That was fine. Also, if you must use this script, make sure your damn image works. Nothing turns me off more from that kind of script than little falling broken-image x's all over the place.

Also, do not use an applet on your splash page!! You want a rollover button on your splash for your enter button, it's fine. But no full-blown applets like lakes on huge images!!! They usually take so long to load that people will either leave the site, or they'll enter without looking at it anyway. I usually will assume that the person continues extraneous use of random Java applet-ing and JavaScripting throughout the rest of their site and will leave upon encountering such annoyances on splash pages... Don't forget, not everyone has cable modems!! Some of people are still stuck on phone modems, some behind firewalls at 33.6, no less!

Of course, then we get into the annoyances of DHTML and layers... I don't know why layers are so damn popular. They're more annoying than anything unless you know how to use them properly. A good rule of thumb for any of the things here is: if you don't know how to script them yourself, don't use them. Since you can't script them, chances are you don't understand how they work, and if you don't understand how they work, there's no way you can tell how they'll look on other systems. Half the time they might look fine on your computer, but on everyone else's the text goes over the images (or vice-versa), or links don't work because they're not lined up right. Plus, making linking banners with layers is a bad idea. Putting a blank banner and using a layer to put text on it is not a linking banner. If someone tries to save that image to link you, you know what they'll save? Not a banner with meticulously aligned text, but a blank banner. Linking banners must have their text saved on them in an imaging program.

So before you go adding all those free Java applets and scripts that you find at sites or that are offered by your server, please consider whether or not you'll really need it, if it goes with your page, or if it's worth making your guests wait. Don't put Java games on your main page - link them to another page so if your visitors want to play, they can - FMOCT's JavaGames are in a separate section, and each individual game has its own page, so that people only load and play the ones they want. Don't put chat applets all over the place - again, put them on a separate page. Don't have image enhancing applets like lakes and raindrops on more than perhaps one page in your site - and have a warning before it appears so people can choose if they want to see the applet image.

Don't use rollovers on all your images - don't forget, for each image, the browser has to connect to your server for two things - the original image, and the image when it's rolled over. Unless you use frames like FMOCT did until recently, you shouldn't put rollovers on your menu bars, unless they're very small gif images. (With the menu in frames, you only have to have the browser connect to the server for the images once per visit. If you have them on every page, the browser must reconnect for each hit to the page - so if they're bigger than say, 10 or 15k, you're in for a terribly long wait.) These tips will help your guests keep their sanity, and will keep your webpage loading time down considerably.

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This deals with a few HTML tags that are widely overused, used incorrectly, or that just should be taken out back and shot.

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This is actually going to cover a little more than just sites that are perpetually under construction. But we'll start there. Now there is nothing wrong with continuously working on your site to make it better. Far from it! In fact, I'm constantly (well, not so much as of late - I'm running out of ideas for updates) adding new things to my site to keep it interesting. However, there's a big difference between "in development" and "under construction".

Sites that are always labeled as "Under Construction - Check Back Soon" and their last update was sometime four or five months ago... Sites with that annoying little digging man construction gif whose only updates are explanations of why there are no updates... These are "under construction" sites. They're over 90% down, or at least 99.9% of the site has been untouched since sometime last May and the webmaster/mistress seems to have vacated the premises... These annoy me more than I can say.

A site that is "in development", on the other hand, is one that is being actively worked on. You can come back every week or so (hell, even as long as every few months) and expect to see something has changed, even if it's only a post from the webmaster/mistress saying that they've been really busy and haven't gotten the new images uploaded yet... My site, as well as many others, are perpetually in development. Often times I'll think of something totally random that I think would be cool or unique, and I'll add it to my site. (The LD covers, SeraMyu info, JavaGames, FMOCT FAQ, and even this are all examples of StarFire's random mind at work.) I'll occasionally go for a few months without updating, but then I'll be back, and I'll apologize for my tardiness, and I'll add something or update something. Sometimes the changes are minute and minor, but there are changes. Additions. Something.

Another thing that annoys everyone is a site that is actively advertising (ie - search engines, "sister sites" or affiliates, signing your URL in guestbooks) and it's not even up yet. Now I'm not saying that it has to be 100% done, but it should be "in development". (Remember that from a little while ago?) There should be more than one working button, there should be more than five pages. Even if you only have your links section and bios up, just have something before you go advertising your site to the world. Chances are, if people visit it when you have nothing there, they won't "Bookmark this sitey and come back later! Diz is gonna be tha biggest and bestest Sallor Moon site on tha net!", because so many webmasters/mistresses abandon their sites and they fall into the tired old "Under Construction" category.

One more thing that is thoroughly annoying, perhaps more so than the two above, is broken links and images. Do you people visit your own pages?! Look! The main picture on my page is broken. Oh well. Oh, if I click "Image Galleries", it can't find it. Maybe I should fix that... Perhaps the most horrible part of this is when you're looking for something specific... Say a movie clip of the first Sailormoon season text-less opening in Japanese... Oh my God! This site has a link for it!! My search is over!! ::Angel choir joyously sings "Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-le-lu-jah!":: Click. "Yahoo Geocities - We Can't Find The Page You Requested..." (Or worse, one of those retarded-but-I-think-they're-supposed-to-be-funny Angelfire error messages...) How many times has this happened to you? What's worse is when it happens repeatedly on a site.

Granted, keeping on top of broken links is pretty hard sometimes - especially when your site reaches the size of FMOCT or AR. Often when you're on "free servers" like Xoom, Geocities, Angelfire, or Tripod, things get deleted... (Especially those pesky little zipped mp3s...) But as a webmaster/mistress, it's your page. If you care about it, fix it. Put a notice that asks for people to report broken links. Make sure you give them an e-mail address to report it to, by the way. Does no good just saying "Please let me know if you find any broken links!" and then not having your contact information available anywhere.

If you have nice friends that have a lot of time on their hands, ask if they'd be willing to take a quick spin through your site and check for misdirected URLs, broken pics, and broken links. (Younger siblings are also excellent for this sort of thing, especially when offered incentive like "I'll take you to the movies later.") Trust me - your visitors will thank you, and it will keep a lot of people from just leaving your site immediately, never to return.

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You want to know what gives me a headache? Trying to decipher what someone is trying to say on their page. If you |_|§e §¥|\/|ß0|_§ |_i|<E T|-|i§ to write on your pages, most people won't have any idea what you were saying!!! I (and probably 98% of the world's population) have no desire to see your "mad l33t skillz". Another thing is when people AltERnATe CapITaLS aNd LoWeRCaSE lEtTErS ON TheIR PAgES. Am I the only one who finds that annoying? I think not.

OK, so you know not to mix capitalization styles and use weird symbols... How about speaking in excessive vernacular or slang? Spelling things weird on purpose? Using letters and numbers to represent entire words? "Dis sitey iz da bomb." "Yo, I wanna shout out 2 my crew - you gurlz r DA best! Dis page iz 4 u! Sailor Moon & sk8tas 4eva!" Yeah, this makes me think "intelligent person" immediately.

Now that we know to use proper (or at least passably proper) English, how about addressing the issues of spelling and grammar? Now, granted, I know most people aren't fabulous spellers. And I know that we're all bound to make some mistakes grammar-wise, but proofread, or put the text you want on your page into a word-processing program with a spellchecker before you upload your HTML!!! (If you're fortunate enough to have Macromedia Dreamweaver, hit Shift+F7 - it has a spellchecker built in!!) I know I make a few spelling errors here and there because my fingers can't always keep up with my mind when I'm trying to type something (going 98 words a minute typing doesn't even help all that much - trust me. So even if you're slow, just remember: the quick typists have the same problems too - it just takes us less time to complete our errors.)

I also know that people usually like to be informal on their pages. It is, after all, "for fun" in most cases. But please speak in complete sentences. Don't fragment. It's annoying. "We were walking, and then like all of a sudden. It got mad dark out." Uh-huuuuh... Before you upload your pages, or before you link to them from your other pages, you should open them in a new browser window and proofread. Or, since you've probably been looking at the page for the last hour or so and are more inclined to skip over things (your mind can do strange things and fill in the missing words for you), have someone else proofread. If they've never read the information before, they're more likely to spot mistakes.

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I don't know how many times I've been to a site that has an enormous image right smack on the main page. (Or their layout consists entirely of a bunch of really big bitmaps or something.) I sit patiently (or not so patiently), waiting for it to load... If a page takes more than 35 seconds to maybe a minute to load, I'm gone. I don't like having to wait - one of the great things about the Internet is that you get what you want when you want it - right now. Waiting ten minutes for a page that very likely has the exact same information and things to offer that the next, more slow-connection-friendly page has is not likely going to make people very happy. Here is where the wonderful world of compression enters...

There are certain file formats made specifically for use on the web - and there are specific types that are not at all web-friendly. I see so many pages that use .bmp files or .art files as graphics that it isn't even funny. The only files that you should use to save graphic files that you're going to use on the web are GIF and JPG. Bitmaps take forever to load, because there is so much information being saved with the file (plus, most of them look like crap, anyway). ART files are exclusive to certain browsers (most notable AOHell) and many programs can't open them. GIF and JPG images are specifically designed to be web-friendly, decreasing load time.

JPG files are what are known as a "lossy" file type. They lose a little bit of information every time you save them - therefore, they lose a little quality every time you save over them. Large JPGs can still be very big file sizes, and JPG format is not the best choice for some graphical elements. Photos and pictures for galleries are usually best saved as JPG extensions. GIF files, on the other hand, use a system of "indexed" color, meaning when you create a GIF file, the program will usually create a palette of colors that are mainly used in the file. Images that have large areas of the same color, and images that have text but no or very little picture to them (ie - buttons) are best saved as GIF files.

Another great thing about the GIF format is the ability to save you even more time and make your elements integrate really nicely with your layouts: the "transparent gif" option. Some programs will let you cut out the parts of your image you don't want to keep - they then show up as clear spaces around your image that you can see your page background through. My last layout used a lot of these - by cutting out the background, you don't have to worry about perfectly aligning header images so that your patterned page background doesn't look warped. Also, since there are fewer areas to save, the palette needs fewer colors, and your file size is much smaller.

If you have a layout that uses a large image as your sidebar, you may want to consider another way of decreasing file size - cutting up your image. For this to be accurate you'll need a decent graphics program and you'll have to be at least a little competent with using it. Cutting an image into pieces and putting it back together with HTML will save your viewers from having to wait for a huge image to load - instead they just wait for a few small ones and aren't stuck with nothing to do or look at while it loads.

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I know you've all seen it. Some of you may even have it - an image gallery with nothing but text links. "This is a pretty picture of Sailorvenus." "This is Usagi with pink hearts around her." Crappy crappy text links.

"But StarFire," you cry in dismay, "I don't know how to make thumbnails! I don't have a good graphics program!" Fine. If you don't know how to make thumbnails, it's very simple. I'll cover that in a bit, so read on. If you say you don't have a good program, it's very, very easy to acquire one - even if you settle for a shareware or a demo. Go to http://www.download.com and search for paint programs. One that's absolutely free that will do the trick is ImageForge Basic. (It's a bit crappy, but it's better than nothing. Personally, I use Photoshop 7.0, but I realize that most people don't have access to Photoshop...)

"I already have thumbnails. I have my images all on the pages, and I told them to be smaller, so I'm saving a lot of time and space, right?" NO. A true thumbnail is a separate file than the big picture. Say "Usagi01.jpg" is 500 x 800 pixels full sized. Go look at your "thumbnail" tag. If it looks like what's below, then you need to learn about real thumbnails.

That is what I like to call a "fake" thumbnail. Just by "telling" it to be 50 x 80 doesn't mean it really is. If you've ever watched a page load that has these "fake" thumbnails, you'll notice that it takes a long time for them to load, and it usually loads kind of funny looking and pixelated, one line at a time. That's because the HTML code is still loading that whole 500 x 800 pixel image into a little 50 x 80 pixel box. So you're still loading the big file, it just looks smaller. Now consider that many people put as many as 50 thumbnailed images per page, and you're starting to get a headache, especially if you're on a slower modem.

So what's a "real" thumbnail? There are a few ways of doing it, but the easiest is simply saving two versions of each picture. Sound boring? Sure. A lot of work? You bet. But would you rather sit through a page loading 50 5k files, or 50 150k files? You can make these smaller versions of a picture by taking them into a paint program (not Microsoft Paint - you can't resize them properly in there), and resizing the image. You give it the height and width that you want, and then it throws away some pixel information, thus reducing file size and making the image much faster to load. You'd probably save the thumbnail for Usagi01.jpg with a name like _Usagi01.jpg, or tUsagi01.jpg or something. So, your code would look something like this:

Come up with a system or naming your thumbnailed and original files and stick to it. Trust me, your visitors will appreciate it!!

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One thing that always drives me absolutely bananas is when people post information on their sites about the Japanese version of a show when they've obviously only seen the dubbed version. If your shrine is to Serena and Darien, then call them Serena and Darien. If you have an Amara and Michelle shrine, it sure as hell better be a lot different than if you had a Haruka and Michiru shrine.

I've seen so many pages that talk about "Usagi and the Sailor Scouts" or "Usagi and Darien". Don't mix sub and dub information. Stick with the series you're familiar with. You won't impress anyone by talking about "Raye-chan, Amy-chan and Usagi" or "Mirichu and Harkura". (Well, you might impress - or confuse - a few newbie dubbies, but any watcher of the original series will scoff and leave immediately - or send you a scathing e-mail about how you don't have it right, and that you better fix it or stick with the damn dubbed information.)

There's nothing wrong with posting both their Japanese and American names - provided two things. One, you spell their names right. BOTH their names. "Sarina" and "Usagy" are not correct spellings! The only dubbed name that should be up in the air is Rini or Reenie (or even Reeny), or however you prefer it (though they spell it "Rini" on the boxes of the DVDs that have been released for the R season - the dub-only ones). And the Japanese names are not negotiable at all, with the exception of the Outers' last names. If you can't do the little research required to correctly report their names, you have no business even touching on the Japanese version.

Two, if you're starting out your site saying anything about Serena or Darien or any of the other dubbed characters, stick with it throughout your entire site. Some pages I've been to switch back and forth between the English and badly-spelled Japanese names (oh, and according to most of them, it's Japonease or Japenesse or some other ludicrous spelling) randomly. You're off in one direction with Rei-chan and Minako-chan, and suddenly Trista and Lita jump into the picture. Ehh?? It's enough to confuse even the most seasoned "subbie".

The other thing included in staying consistent is talking about "Scouts" with the dubbed version only, and "Senshi" with the subbed version only. (And there is no such word as "Senshis" in Japanese (or "animes" for that matter). If they're talking about more than one Senshi, it's "Senshi-tachi", or you can just say, "the Senshi" - unless you're talking possessives in English, like "The Senshi's Winter Vacation" or something... Note the apostrophe... Thus, it would be "The Inner Senshi" and not "The Inner Senshis".) Also, though it's more of a minor point, there is no space between "Sailor" and the planet name in the original version - it was the DiC dub that separated the names - therefore dubbed would be Sailor Moon, and original would be Sailormoon or SailorMoon. This isn't as critical as the whole Senshi / Scouts thing, but it's usually good to stick with the correct way of punctuating their names for the version you're working with.

(Also, just as a side note, you might read some places that some hard-core-original-Japanese-version-Sailormoon fans hate the terms "Inner Senshi" and "Outer Senshi" - or "Inner Scouts" and "Outer Scouts" to the dubbies - because they're not ever really referred to as that in the original manga or anime. A lot of people say that the terms are incorrect, because they are originally referred to as "The Senshi of the Inner Solar System / Universe" and "The Senshi of the Outer Solar System / Universe". I personally think it's fine to use the terms "Inner Senshi" and "Outer Senshi" to differentiate between the two "teams" because it's a lot shorter than using their full titles, and most people are most familiar with this terminology.)

So basically what I'm saying is, stick with the version you know. Don't talk about what you don't. If you haven't seen any of the Japanese version (or even if you've seen less than, say... an entire season, don't talk about it other than mentioning the name changes. Don't try to make your shrine to Haruka and Michiru with Amara and Michelle's relationship (or God forbid vice-versa - newbies will be having nightmares of incest whenever they watch Cartoon Network), or a shrine to Usagi and the Inner "Scouts" where Molly is Usagi's best friend. It usually only makes you look stupid instead of knowledgeable, and often will drive people away from your site.

Just to be helpful, here's a chart with the names you should be associating on your site if you primarily offer subbed or dubbed information:

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So you're doing research for your new Neptune and Uranus shrine, and you want to discuss their roles in the anime as well as the manga... So you start checking other sites, gleaning information. However, you stumble across sites that adamantly declare that there was no relationship between them in the original series and (I've actually seen a page that said this) "don't listen to what anyone else says, because I'm right and I know I am and everyone else is stupid and doesn't know what they're talking about." You're a little confused. You've only been exposed to the dubbed version, so you know them as Amara and Michelle, the cousins who are Sailor Scouts. There are multitudinous pages dedicated to the romance between them, ones that deny all ties between them, and others that have information about the "Prince of Uranus". (SOS frequenters, you'll probably know what I'm talking about...)

You combine all the information you've gotten and you end up with a story of how the Prince of Uranus met his cousin in the Moon Kingdom, and when the Scouts got sent to Earth, "Hakura" and "Mirichiu" fall in love not knowing that they're really cousins and that "Hakura" was really a boy in a former life.

Have you any idea how absurd that sounds? Yet I've seen people with pages that are almost that garbled. If you see something strange in your travels on the web, confirm anything you might have a question about before you put it on your page!!! It's not all that hard to find good, legitimate sites (actually, it is a bit of a challenge, but if you do your homework, it's possible) that have correct information. A good rule of thumb: if a lot of the sites you visit have basically the same thing, it's probably true. If you run into that one fluke page that says that Michelle is Hotaru's long-lost identical twin sister from another galaxy, it's more than likely not legitimate. Don't post any information you don't know the truth about!

I try to follow my own advice (imagine that!), and don't have manga information because I haven't had the chance to read most of the manga. (And reading two volumes of the MiXX translated version does not constitute "reading" the manga.) Always check your sources, and if you're not sure of something, it's usually better to just not post it than to confuse someone else, or at the very least say something like, "I'm not completely sure, but I've read that blah blah blah. If anyone knows whether this is correct or not, I'd appreciate an e-mail letting me know! Thanks!"

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How many times have you gone to a site and seen a layout from what is obviously a free-graphics place (face it - you've seen the exact same layout on about thirty Sailormoon pages just today alone), and not found a link to where they got their layout from? Or have you been to a site that uses the same divider graphics, buttons, and bullets as half the other Sailormoon pages on the Internet, but don't say where they got them from?

There's this little thing called "crediting" people you get things from. If people let you host large portions of their image galleries - especially if they're rare or especially wonderful-quality images - it's common courtesy to link them. If you get custom graphics from someone, put a link back to where you got them from! If someone else wants something like what you have, it would be nice to let them know where they can get it! If someone makes you a banner, button, or animated gif, link them. Even if someone helps you considerably with HTML or something, link them (or at the very least thank them somewhere on your page). One good turn deserves another, as they say.

Basically, by not crediting people who make the things you use on your site, you are insinuating that you yourself are responsible for the creation of all the graphics on your site. Some people will take entire layouts from sites and outright claim that they made them.

If you want to use information from someone's page, that does not entail copying them word for word unless it's something standard like a stats profile. If you want to list information about Sailorsaturn on your Saturn shrine, don't go to someone else's site and copy their information word for word. (I'm sure the majority of you have at least talked about plagiarism in your English classes at school... Remember that? Applies to the web as much as it does to your final essay on Hamlet, my friends.)

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That's it for the time being - now go out and make the web a happier place!