Any Ideas for a New Pirate Website?

[Stowaway]

Hello everyone, time has come for the stowaway to make himself known to the crew... haha... the captain was dipping for apples and he found me... so nows as good a time as any... hope i can be some usefull powder monkey or something . Im Not great food for the sharks too little grizzle on the bone.

Anyway Im a history major and ive recently been injured so i have allot of time on my hands and wanted to make a website about something that always fastinated me: Pirates- both in fact and in our imagination.

I want the website to be great and unique and truly piraty - something people who are interested in the topic will visit and revisit. Not trying to compete with the forums here at all mind you. But appealing Visually and in terms of information/ creativity

Any ideas of what you wish a pirate website had? Any at all. - Im scouring the discussions for inspiration and im finding many great things. :)

Thank you all , and happy plundering whoring and in general misconduct (ing)

- Stowaway

[RIPP Tar]

Personally i was considering building one on research of all types of subjects concerning piracy. people, places, things, events and so forth, that we are always looking into and asking about. a lot like the captain twill forum all categorized and so forth for easy research

[Mission]

There are actually a lot of pirate, pirate-oriented, pirate-re-enactor-group and pirate-re-enactor-commerce websites out there. There may even be one of those pirate website webrings things for all I know. (Anyone? Bueller?) So, like all of life, you're actually competing in a crowded field. The question is, what do you bring to the pirate gig that's fresh?

This is the value of a niche topic. Your niche should grow out of your personal interests in Piracy - it's a huge topic. Otherwise you're going to be shackled to a site on a topic that bores you and you'll end up giving the whole thing up as a lost cause.

Ed Foxe, a poster on this here forum has created an informative and well-respected site on Pirate Myths. You can check it out here: http://www.bonaventure.org.uk/ed/piratemythtory.htm

My angle is pirate surgeons: http://www.piratesurgeon.com

You can also check out the links on my page to see other pirate-oriented and re-enactor pages as well. (I don't currently link to any of the mainstream sites like BlindKat or Kipar because...well, they're not included in my Surgeon's Journals. They're so all-encompassing that they're sort of dull IMO. There are several good books on those topics that I'd rather read than a regurgitation of what's in said books.)

Be sure to do some research by looking at other pirate-re-enactor and pirate-oriented websites. They're scattered all over in the Pub Forums. But, for a start, check out the links' threads that are stickied at the top of some of the forums here at Pyracy.com. They're not all pirate specific, but they are all related. Here are quick links to two of them:

In Twill: Amazing Reference Sites

In Thieves Market: Vendors Index Threads

Another good one is the No Quarter Given Index.

[Capt. Bo of the WTF co.]

When i get done with school and if I ever get time away from being a teacher, I'd like to look at the smuggler/fence aspect of pyracy. Hey,they had to move their stuff somehow, and this is a very much overlooked part of world history.

Bo

[Ransom]

I agree with Bo. I have always liked the smuggler's aspect of pyracy, and actually base my Ransom character more on a smuggler than an actual pyrate. I haven't done any real research on it, but I suspect there are fewer sites devoted to smuggling than pyracy, so you might look into that as a niche topic, as per Mission's suggestion.

[CharityRackham]

I would love to see a page that breaks piracy into time periods and spend more than a sentence on a time period. Why? well....

The Jade Dragon crew was made for a 1500s storyline at the BC Renaissance Festival and I was amazed at how many people said to me 'there were pirates in the 1500s?' or 'where's your gun or coat?'. We now give our customers a choice of 1500s or 1700s (it really is a simple matter of coat instead of cloak and a pistol on the outfit) but it would be nice to see a page that is divided down into decades and include things like Vikings and early Asian piracy.

AND since we are the Jade Dragon crew and you are talking about imaginary... I have to start being kinder to my hands BUT if you have Skype I'd be happy to talk about what we do. The difference between LARPING, stage fighting and real fighting is one possibility of discussion. Our scripts to final product, can be another. Costumes - what do we push for real and what's pretend and why.

You can cheek out the growing collection of videos at: http://www.YouTube.com/bcrenfest There is a Jade Dragon folder.

Also get a copy of 'piratitude' and you can do a comparison between the modern image and the actual...

It's be kind of neat to see popular pirates through the ages, get compared to each other (how the 1940s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s saw pirates) and maybe see what made them who and what they were/are. Why did the 80s encourage pirates like Genna Davis to exist whereas the image of a pirate in the 40s/50s was Errol Flynn?

Plenty of possibilities. Gotta dash. Hands hurt and shouldbe out the door by now.

Have fun and good luck.

[Red_Dawn]

I want the website to be great and unique and truly piraty - something people who are interested in the topic will visit and revisit. Not trying to compete with the forums here at all mind you. But appealing Visually and in terms of information/ creativity

Can't help you much on the content front, but as far as the look goes, your site should definitely be easy on the eyes. No neon-colored backgrounds, no seizure-inducing animations, etc. The main text of the site should be 10 points or larger and readable. Also, the navigation should be easy to find, figure out, and use.

A good site for learning what not to do is Web Pages That Suck. You might want to go to the bathroom before you read it, though, just in case.

[Stowaway]

these are all very good suggestions. to Mission, Captian Bo Ransom and Charity, Im really probably not trying to make a niche website although i appreciate how interesting those things can be. Im rather trying to make a kind of interactive pirate website which really imersses you in both the fact and fiction of the whole pirate Carribean 16-17th century world. with some humour inside to.

The goal is to make a place where pirate lovers would love to hang out for the images, interactivity and atmosphere of the site and casual users could learn about who the pirates were and their surrouding world as they explore the websites "world". I would love to be able to ask people here in future for their expertise and any other suggestions they have about kind of fun humourous things to do with pirates that i might include in such a website. When i have something done and online il posit it. But for now any more suggestions?

graces,

Max

[blunderingbuccaneer]

Well I am sure you are familiar with review sites for pirate culture like:

The Bilge Monkey or The Pirate King especially has a nice nautical layout.

Miss Scarlett Harlott has a fun romanticized feel certainly worth a gander.

I've created a pirate blog on piratitude to chronicle my crew's backyard ship building:

the Blundering Buccaneer's Big Black BlogSpot.

A Piratapeadia (wikipedia) Caribbean experience that you are suggesting sounds intriquing. Keep us abreast.