Need advice for building a cast website

[Grace "Rum" O'Malley]

Hi everyone,

I am  building a new cast website for the Fishers Renaissance Faire.  I'm looking for advice from other faire cast and renfolk who may have experience as to what to look for in a good website.  I am thinking a private forum, file cabinet to post text files, midi's and pics and anything that can help cast research and develop historic characters for our faire.   Currently we are using myfamily.com, which does a pretty good job, but I think we can do it even better.  Any ideas on a good web hosting site? What do other faires use?

[Master James]

Well for Virginia we just simply use Yahoo groups for the general cast.  It is simply a way to get information out and post a few things that are needed however so we don't really need the full website.  Now for the court at Virginia, we were lucky enough to have a former court GM build us a site and host it.  It has a forum area, cast information with who is playing what parts with biographies of their characters and their precedence, important date are listed on a calendar and we have a bunch of files that can be accessed that are specific to court.  In addition to that we also have a email server that contains just the court members so that its easy for the GM to contact everyone.

If you are looking for a web hosting site I'd strongly recommend http://www.cheapwebhost.us/ as they are VERY good and VERY inexpensive.  Only downside is that you cannot speak to a real person via phone.  You have to email them.  However they are VERY responsive and for most of my inquiries, they got back to me in 2-3 hours and the information they gave me was VERY helpful.  Hope this helps.