Avatars are icons that allow people to represent themselves on websites. An avatar website is a website that allows people to create avatars and displays them beside the name of the user. Popular avatar websites include answers.yahoo.com, youtube.com and many forum sites, such as puroeuro.com.

Setting Up a Website

In order to have an avatar website, you must first have a domain name and reliable web hosting. You can easily buy a domain name from yahoo.com or godaddy.com for a few dollars a month. Web hosting is a different story. If you plan on setting up a very small website, web hosting can be covered by the domain name provider for a very small cost. However, if you plan on creating a large forum in which hundreds, if not thousands, of people will be commenting and clicking through everyday, you will need better and faster hosting.

Setting Up Avatars For Forums

If you want to create a forum website, I highly recommend that you use an already existing forum website template such as vbulletin. The license to use the template is $200 a year and it does all the work for you when it comes to setting up avatars. Basically, people will be able to upload their own images as avatars and the file storage automatically links to your server. However, if you want to have your own template that you control, it will be a lot of work and you will have to either code the entire website template yourself, or have someone else code a website for you. Now, if you have a website that does not do all the work for you, you can still host images on your site; you will have to setup an account at a web host, such as mediafire.com or dataracks.net. Once you setup an account at a web host, you give them the DNS number of your server and they start hosting your site, including the avatars, on their servers. But keep in mind that web hosts can be expensive: one terabyte of bandwidth (small) will usually go for about $100 a month.

Hosting Avatars

You have two choices. You can either let all your users choose their own avatars, which is simpler, but can be bad in terms of virus protection, copyright infringements, or pornography. If you want to create your own avatars for your site, buy a program, such as photoshop, and use the program to create avatars for you. Yahoo allows you to use an avatar generator from their page at avatars.yahoo.com, which will allow you to create avatars in the forms of animated persons. Nevertheless, whichever avatars you choose to create, you must host them on your site. To do this, you must simply contact your server provider and give them all the files to host as avatars. You can also incorporate an avatar generator, such as the one on yahoo, onto your site to create avatars on demand for your users and not violate any of the rules.

Source:

Vbulletin

Dataracks.net