Tips for Creating Quality Community Topics

All of the content that is created for Shadowness, currently, is created solely by the Shadowness Staff. Each staff member is tasked with writing at least one article a week, though some do more, and some help with interviews, daily features and daily inspiration. It’s a big community effort and each day, we spend quite a bit of time thinking about new features, member suggestions and ways that we can improve both the content, and the site.

As a result of these discussions, we are offering group owners the chance to produce some content of their own. Meng has created a page called 'Community Topics' for such articles as Interviews, features (artwork, tutorials, comments) and also informative news articles about copyright, techniques, and just ‘art news’ in general. The Community Topics are all of the topics that are created within /groups each day. The highest quality articles will be featured by Shadowness on our Facebook page. Please get out there and share you knowledge with us!

Let's Take a Look at Some of the Great Community Topics!

Tips on Shooting Birds by Dynnnad

Vertoramas by Damien-C

Recipe Swap by Rinn

How to Develop Concepts by Famz

Welcome to Love4Photography by Mindwarp2

Here's how you can get started!

First off, you’ll start with a topic. Make sure that it says all that you’d like it to. "Interview with Christopher Ross" is good, but does it tell people who we’re going to be reading about? "Interview with Digital Painter Christopher Ross" is much better.

Next, we’ll need some content!

Content is generally divided into 3 sections. Text, Images and Links. It is important to keep the spacing and html very clean and readable for the members who want to access your content.
The better your topic reads, and the better it is formatted, the more likely people will wish to see your work, and discuss your subject matter. Remember, most people on the internet like text that is highly scannable, so that they can search for the content that they enjoy reading, while skipping detail that they may not be concerned with.

PLEASE spell-check your content! You can do this on most email and word-processing software. It only takes a moment, and it adds considerably to the quality of your content!
Proper spacing is a must to allow for good scanning. A good spacing rule of thumb is, double space before and after images, and triple-space before each header or h2 tag.

Last, we'll need some HTML!

Using html helps your article to look its best! Using the 'Center' and 'h2' tags, you can create great headers and centered bodies of text or use the center tags to center your images like /DeathRockLuv (Dr.Luv) does in his weeklyShort Stories article! Staff Picks article! Make certain that your text follows your header immediately with no spacing, so that your formatted article will look professional!

You can also use HTML to add images! Just click on the "Copy Link" area in each SN artwork's description. Then right-click and select copy. This will collect the < a href > and < img src > data conveniently to copy/paste into your article




Last but not least, Be Original. Content ripped from other sites, or loosely paraphrased will not be accepted. Create your own work, feature your favorite artists and do your own research.
Thanks for reading, Shadows! Keep your content in your sites as high quality as your artworks!
/HellOnAStick

May 12th, 2011