How to Contribute a Theme

So you'd like to contribute you're creativity to a web site, but can't handle drawing fan art? Or have you ever wanted to make a Love Hina page, but can't seem to get enough content? Well, here's your chance to help out by contributing a layout for Hinastar.com! Because of the underlying database engine that runs the site, I can take your layout and place my content into it (fully linked and everything) in under 10 minutes!

There are some basic specifications to designing a layout:

1. Please refrain from FLASH or JAVA in the layout, but if you use it, keep it to the layout as decoration and not a container for content. As far as I know, Flash and Java don't work well with databases, so I can't take things from the database and put them into a Java applet nor Flash file.
2. Please no frames. I know frames are popular in anime layouts, but it's a nightmare to index correctly (have you ever bookmarked a page that lives in a frame?). If you really like the frames effect, try using scrollable CSS layers.
3. The place in the layout that holds the content of the page MUST be at least 400 pixels wide, no ifs, ands, or buts. It must also be able to accommidate content of indefinite length. In other words, make the layout vertically stretchy and not a fixed box.
4. USE STYLE SHEETS! It saves SOOOOO much hassle if I don't have to go and hunt down <FONT> tags and such.
5. Content must all be in text, which means that I can't have images as links for my sections nor can I have images as titles/headings in pages. I'm thinking of implementing something that can handle this in the future, but for now, all content is in text.
6. Make a few pages on my web site and submit them to me with the template, specifically the "Hinata Girls Song Best Vol. 1" page and the "Main" page (see #8). Copy and paste my content and images into your layout so that when you email it to me, I have an idea of how you want the images to be placed.
7. There has to be a "Hinastar.com" somewhere on the page. Preferably on top, but it's up to you.
8. Finally, give me a few of your comments about your theme. On the main page of every theme, there's a section where the theme creator comments on the theme he/she made. If you also like to have some image there or a winamp skin and such, send it to me too!

Some Tips

• Look around at the other themes I have on my page to get an idea of what is possible. For example, CD track listings don't necessary need to be 1 track per row. They can also be in a two column format where the half the tracks are in the first column and the second half in the second.
• Try to design for cross-browser compatibility and stick with HTML and CSS standards. I personally use Mozilla as my browser, so if you use some special Internet Explorer only effect, I won't be able to see it. Don't worry about Netscape 4.x though. In my opinion, that's a buggy beast that needs to go away.

When you're done, just drop me an email (click guestbook link for email info) and send the HTML template, along with the sample pages, zipped up as an attachment. I might need to modify it or clean up some of the code to my nit-picky format, but I'll try as hard as I can to keep it the way it is.

Thank you for contributing!