So you'd like to start a guide?

[ladykayra]

Here are some of my personal tips for making a guide. Take them with a grain of salt as I personally have only made color related guides.

1. To figure out what to make a guide for (it is best to pick something you like)

Picking something you like isn't a requirement but I feel it makes keeping the guide up to date easier. If you like it you'll be invested in seeing the list continue to grow.

2. Make sure you know how often what you want to make a guide for updates

This is important because if it updates daily but you get on monthly you'll have a lot of catching up to do each update. Incremental updates usually feel less overwhelming and are definitely what I recommend for new guide makers.

3. Pick a layout and display type

This is important for the consistency of the thread and can help making updates easier. The layout is how you want the thread organized, this doesn't have be complicated but it should have -some- sort of organization scheme. The display type is how you are going to display the individual points of the thread. If your guide has to do with items this will likely be a mix of names, icons and previews. As an example (colored test are comments):

Bright Rust + Yellow [Scheme Title] (Bright Rust, Yellow, Gold, OffBlack) [Colors in scheme]
[Item icon which links to MP listing]

Having an code snippet saved somewhere is probably a good idea. If you display it in the thread you can even ask people to submit suggestions using it.

4. Save your first page

Yes, the -whole- first page. I know some guides start out with only one or two items and the whole page seems like overkill but do it anyways. You never know how big your guide will get and having to redo the thread because you only saved three posts isn't that fun. You can either do this using a test forum thread and have to moved or do it directly in the guides forum. If you want to put it in the guides forum directly I will also suggest having all the coding done so you can just plop it in. I see more guides die while still in the "WIP DNP" state than any other.

5. Open your thread!

You've got your desired guide idea, picked a nice format that suits you, and build the thread from the ground up. Congrats! Now open that sucker and bask in your completed work. Let others bask in your completed work. So much basking!

Something to keep in mind is that people may not always post in your thread. This doesn't mean no-one is stopping by or that no-one like your guide! Please don't think that after all your hard work. The guides forum is bound for a lot more looking than interacting and people not posting is reasonably normal.

Optional things: Pick a way to display you have updated the guide
Get some affiliates for your guide.
Get people to post mocks or suggestions related to the guide


Other guidemakers or non-guidemakers feel free to post your own suggestions and tips too. Feel free to contradict anything stated here, I am by no means an authority on all the guide making  

[ladykayra]

Second post in case I think of more things because the above is already kinda long for what I wanted

6. Post in your thread at least once every 2 months!

Even if you are quietly updating you need to post every few months or your thread will be locked from new posts. This is a Gaia feature to prevent the necroing of threads but has a fairly negative affect on the Guides forum. You will need to proactively combat this.  

[angie_sash]

For me, my tips are based on personal experience maintaining several item guides in GG&R, an alchemy crafting guide, and two RIG guides in GCD.

gaia_crown First, it's not to rely too much on image banners or images hosted outside of Gaia. Reasons include:
1.) Not all Gaians have all images enabled in their site preferences. If the image headers are then blocked from being viewed, those Gaians might be confused with parts of your guide. This also applies to mobile users, as the layout of your guide might look weird if the screen is resized.
2.) Having lots of images may make the page to load slower. Using spoiler tags may help load it faster though.
3.) If your guide is an item guide where you have an image preview per item, it will get tiresome to do that all the time once it reaches more than 50 items. Examples are my velvetine, robin blue and ghastly item lists... sweatdrop
4.) Last is third-party image hosting sites may have sudden changes, like what happened to Photobucket removing its image hosting features unless you upgrade to a paid account or something. I say this from personal experience as several of my guides got discontinued because of that.

gaia_crown I second the saving the entire first page. If you believe that your guide will become larger in the future, you should also reserve several more pages after. You'll understand how helpful this is if you've reached the character limit for a post.

gaia_crown For item guides, if you're still not aware of GaiaUpgrade, I suggest using it as it helps you with copy-paste BBCodes of items much easier and faster. You can find GaiaUpgrade's thread in the Gaia Guides and Resources forum.

gaia_crown You can also choose to disable voting for your guide if you have the feeling that it will become a high salt thread. The advantages though of enabling it is that having a popular tag(having 100 "<3" votes) will make it stand out more, and people will trust your guide more because it's "popular". If you're willing to spend Gaia Cash, you can also promote your thread to attract more attention.

gaia_crown Having a backup of your guide is also useful, in the event that your account may be banned, hacked, or something. This backup can either be in a guild, another thread you own, your mule accounts' thread, etc.

gaia_crown Make sure that the text in your guides are actually readable. Please please PLEASE I BEG YOU, DON'T USE light-colored text. Examples are using yellow text when Gaia's default background color is white, like this: You have good eyesight if you can read this. It makes it hard to read. You also have to consider that some Gaia users have color blindness, so it'll be harder to read your posts. Then there's also the font size. The default size is 12, but don't use anything smaller than 10 if you want people to easily read your posts. Unless your guide has something to do with Snellen charts, eyesight examinations or something. For text headers, font sizes 13 to 24 are recommended.

gaia_crown Also if you're enumerating something, beware of using the number 8 together with the symbol ')'. Otherwise it will end up like this emoji: cool

gaia_crown If users come flaming, offending, or posting insulting things in your thread, do not reply to them. Report them instead. This is much better than getting your thread deleted, or getting banned because you picked a fight with them too.

gaia_crown Another one for item guides or RIG guides, if you're using thumbnail images for items for lists, space out the images. As much as possible, use only 5-10 images per row. If you want to show 20 thumbnail images in a row, using symbols like "|||" can help separate the thumbnails. Example:

This is much easier to read/view...
||| ||| |||

...than this:


That's all I could think of for now. I'll add more later if I come up with more. (This post only started with one. How did I come up with eight more, hahaha...)