This site has come a very long way since I first began creating it in my mind: from a simple personal site, to an information site about an order of Force-users. When I first got the idea to create it, I wanted its main purpose to be a sort of art gallery to post all of the art I've drawn, as well as an archive for a few of the things that I've written. Most of the art was fan art, so I thought I might make it so that others could submit theirs as well. I wanted to make the site large, informative, and interesting to visit...but I didn't really have much that I could put on it. I had a few other ideas to put on as extra features, but that's all they were -- extra features. I wanted the site to have an actual reason for being here; wanted it to be about something, and not just be a few of my drawings and writings thrown together. Only problem was, I wasn't sure what it could be about.

But then came the Warriors of the Force. I had been "balanced" for a long time, but it was when I officially created the order and gave it a name that I really wanted people to know about it. Only about a month after the order's official beginning, I had the idea to make the site about the order. The entire "balance" principle is very misunderstood by most and looked down upon by some, so I wanted to do everything I could to try and make people understand what we're trying to do and what we believe in regards to the Force. But I still felt there wasn't enough information about it to make an interesting site. This was when I decided that there would also be some extra features that didn't have to do with the order, mainly the art and writings ideas from the very beginning.

Another one of my earliest ideas was something similar to what ended up as our information archives, or the Databank, but when I first started writing up biographies, etc., the only ones I had were my own and a couple of things I had written about.

All of this was long before I actually created the site.

I'd known for a long time that I wanted the site to be hosted by Hyperjump.net (the original host), because they had hosted one of my favorite sites, the Zabrak Historical Society's. (Unfortunately, their site no longer exists that I know of.) On July 25, 2004, I finally got around to joining the host site and began work. The first page I started was the news page because I had just heard an exciting piece of news (non-site related) that I wanted to share. The news was that they had just announced immediately before that the title for Episode III was going to be "Revenge of the Sith." This became the first news post ever and I started building from there.

When I first started the site, I decided to use an EZ-web builder because I thought it would be faster. It wasn't. Every single thing had to be added separately, and it took me much longer than it should have to finish a page. I didn't think that you could use HTML in the text boxes. Eventually, I discovered that I could and things became much easier. I already knew a little HTML, but after this, I started learning more and more. Now I know all of the simpler HTML and some more intricate things as well.

The site's layout was very simple at first. There was one banner across the top, and the links lined up horizontally just beneath it. Everything from there down was text, with a picture here and there. Before long, I made vertical side-banners that went to the bottom of each page, but I soon realized that it was far too much work to make them, so I decided on 200 x 200-pixel signs for each page instead. This was when I also decided to move the links into a vertical alignment and create an entire navigation menu down the left side of each main page. That menu still remains, although it has undergone many changes since then in terms of the pages' signs and the navigation labels, and the addition of many links.

There have also been many additions in the images displayed on the site, including a matching set of banners for minor pages, or sub-pages.

At first, the "About the Order" page was the only page including information about the Warriors of the Force as an order, and then there were the Databank and a few extra features pages on the side.

However, after the additions of trivia, wallpaper, badges, the tributes to my three favorite Force-users, and of course our biggest feature, the Databank, I began to feel that the other features were outshining the order itself. So I began to add more pages about the order, and more information about them, their history, uniforms, rules and guidelines, and anything else I could, including rearranging the links in the navigation menu to better reflect their relevance or importance to the order.

When I first started it, it was just a "HoloNet information site" to let people read about the order; and creating a site was just something I thought I would like to try because it sounded interesting and because I like designing things. But after I worked on it for a while, I realized just how much I loved webdesign. I love HTML, making images for the site, and everything else involved. I plan to make many more sites in the future about a number of things, but one thing that's nice about this one is that it was my first one, and the one that got me so interested in webdesign.

It was when Hyperjump decided to remove ads from all of the websites that the site had to switch hosts. In order to make up for the removal of ads, they had to stop offering the built-in guestbooks, and decrease the amount of file space available to each site -- to a third of what it had been at first (15,000 KB to 5,000). I was already over that limit, so I had to delete some fan art images to stay under 5,000. I wanted to make the site bigger, not smaller; so I knew I would have to find a new host.

To tell you how I found the new host, I must go back in time a bit: Approximately three months before the switch, I had decided that I wanted to make the Comlink (message board) more interesting by switching to a new forum-hosting service. As mentioned below in the Comlink's section, I had to join five others before I finally found the right one. One of the ones I joined was at Bravenet.com, but after I'd joined, there was a missing feature that I needed on my board. Although their forums weren't right, Bravenet had a lot of other interesting services, so I decided not to delete my account, even though I wasn't sure I'd ever use it.

Then, a few months later, I had to find the new host, so I did a search, and Bravenet was one that came up in the search. Because I'd already had a host at the time, I hadn't paid much attention to their hosting services, but now that I needed some, I checked them out, and they seemed pretty good. So I ended finding a good new host in a site that I already belonged to!

And the best part is they offer plently of file space: 50 MB (which is 50,000 KB -- 10 times as much as I had on the other site!)