How to Start a Clan Website in 2020 for WC3: Step by Step Guide

Ever wanted to have a professional Clan website for your team or community?

The time has come: In this guide, I show you how to totally blast away your mates with a professional site in only 30 minutes.
You can even create a streaming or tournament platform with match results – it’s all about your imagination.

I will guide you through each of the steps in detail, let’s start!

Content:

Chapter 1: Choose your Clan Website Name
and Upload Your Website

In this chapter I will guide you through the simple process, of setting the website up.

Some think it’s difficult but in modern times it’s just about a few clicks, it’s an absolute no-brainer. Everyone can do it if you follow my step by step process.

Make sure that you have some undisturbed time so that you can concentrate on the next steps, let’s start! 🙂

Choose the perfect
Website Name for your Clan:

First of all it’s important to find a website domain name. Do you already have a clan or community name? Often the Teamspeak or Discord server is already setup with a proper name, maybe you can take that name? My clan is called siQ, so the domain I ordered was siQ-Gaming.com.

Tips to find the perfect Domain Name:
Here are some name ideas, as an example I use the word “Banana” you can replace it with your name. 🙂

• Banana-Gaming.com
• Team-Banana.com
• Banana-Masters.com
• Battle-Banana.com
• Esport-Banana.com
• Dota-Banana.com
• Warcraft-Banana.com
• ProBanana.com

Tip: I recommend using “.com” domain endings, because people know them and it feels secure, but you can use any other ending that you like.

If you have a rough idea about your website name, we can go on.

Now we will complete the following 3 Steps:

• We setup the hosting with your clan name.
• We install Worpdress on it.
  What is WordPress?
  Wordpress is a super flexible website toolkit, which is super easy to setup. With WordPress you can drag and drop any design you like as well as any plugins for functionality. It’s great for beginners as well as experienced creators.
• Afterwards we choose the perfect gaming website design for your Warcraft 3 community (or any other community).

Setting up WordPress
for the Clanpage:

• With Bluehost this is a complete no-brainer, on the next screen you are asked to choose a wordpress theme, but you don’t need these, scroll down and click on “skip this step”.
  
• Now Bluehost will install WordPress automatically.
  When it’s done simply click start.
  
• That’s it you are done. Now you are in the wordpress backend!
  In general it always looks like this:
  
  In the backend you can manage all the things your users should see on the website later on. On the left side is the menu.

  The most important menus are:

  • Posts: Here you can create blog posts and news.
  • Pages: Create your startpage, team page, etc.
  • Media: Upload images.
  • Appereance: We will need this menu to edit our gaming theme now.

Chapter 2: Install a Professional Gaming Theme for Warcraft 3 or Dota

Now your website is almost ready, it’s time to get seriously awesome! 😀

In this chapter, I will show you how to install a professional gaming theme that fits perfectly for your community or team.

Choose a professional Gaming Theme:

Now you are in the great situation, to choose any gaming theme that you like.
I will show you the best themes on the market!
Before choosing a theme, make sure you know what the goal of your page is.
What’s the Main Goal of the Website?

• A typical clan (with a team area, forums, news and maybe clanwars).
• A pro team showcase (with player demonstration and highlights).
• A streamer/streaming related website (to support a twitch channel with showing streaming schedules).
• Just a forum.
• A tournament website.

Which of these topics fits best for you? The options are endless!
Let’s choose the perfect gaming theme now.

Do you want a Free or Premium Theme?
You have two options, you can choose a free theme or a premium theme.
I recommend premium themes, it’s a one-time investment and worth the money.
The price for premium themes goes from 15$-75$.
You will save hundreds of hours with a premium theme. 🙂
Free Gaming Themes:
If you want to choose a free theme, skip this step, and hit the “appearance” menu button inside WordPress and browse all free WordPress themes, you can also enter the word “gaming” to find related themes. But be careful, the free themes often require tons of work to adjust them and to make them look professional.

Premium Gaming Themes:
The premium clan page themes have everything ready for you:

Match results, clan war functionality, well-designed menus a team area, and many more.

How to simply install the Gaming Theme:

If you haven chosen a gaming theme that you like, go to the next step:

• If you bought a theme, you will get a download file.
• Now go to your WordPress dashboard and in the left menu choose Appereance. You will now see the themes menu, click on “add new theme” and then you will see the upload button.
  
• Just upload it and when it’s done, activate it immidiatelly. You’re done! 🙂 Now we can create great content pages.

Chapter 3: Creating the Startpage and the Subpages of your Clan Website

Your hosting and the site with the gaming theme is now ready to use! 🙂

Now there’s nothing that can stop you. We need to create the most important content pages that visitors will visually see when they come to the website.

Let’s adjust the game theme to your needs.

How to Customise
your Gaming Theme?

First of all, it’s important to know that each gaming theme in WordPress has different settings and possibilities. “Good and easy” theme settings show the quality of a theme.
The good message is that premium themes are highly professional: In most cases, you find everything with only a few clicks!

To adjust those theme settings, find the “appereance” menu on the left side. Now click “customise” and the editor opens, where you can see your website for direct changes.

How to Customize your Theme:
On the left side is a menu, on the right side, you can see how your website looks. Now take the time and adjust every single option so that it is like you want it to be. Important changes are the site title and the images that represent your website. Tip: To download great background images for your website, find my WC3 and Dota wallpaper archive.

Here you can see my Warcraft 3 website, it’s not a clan, but a wiki/news portal:

Now adjust all options on the left side. 🙂

Step by Step Guide how to adjust Content in WordPress:

How to adjust pages and posts in WordPress?
It’s super easy to adjust pages and posts in WordPress:
Just click on the area on the left side called “pages” and go create a new page. Add a title, add text, and then simply hit publish to put it onto your website. Then you can visit the page by clicking on the link on top.

It’s simple like that!
Tip: The professional gaming themes always have “demo content”, that means the most pages are already ready to use. You can just activate them and use them. Like that you have much less work and you just have to edit a few things. This is why these gaming themes are worth a thousand dollars. 🙂

Top Pages, that every Clan should have:

• A superstrong startpage.
• A team or about site, that represents the community.
• A news area with updates.
• A forum link, so that users can interact and talk about different topics.
• A match result page, achievements or future plans of the clan.

Chapter 4: Tips & Tricks for your Gaming Clan Website

You made it! 🙂

Once the site is mainly done, you have tons of options to grow it to something really big, what will you do?

Here are some ideas and last words.

How to make your
Clan Website successful:

In my gaming career I have created about 2-3 clan websites and I can honestly say, that it takes time to grow it, it won’t come overnight. You need to actively work on it to make it better and better – and it’s a lot of fun, trust me. 🙂

• To have success, it’s important to have enough content that users can find on your website, add 4-5 pages and interesting stuff that visitors can engage with.
• Create a reason, why your members should come again. The reason could be updated content or a streaming integration of all of your members that are live on twitch.
• A great option for high engagement is to produce recurring events. These events will constantly drive users to the site. Recurring events could be videos that you upload, match results, clan wars, news and many more!
• Try to split the work through user-generated content and roles.
  You can ask friends and teammates if they want to help. Like that you can distribute “positions” like admins, team leaders, news-writers, and so on. If a user has a position, write it behind his name on the team list.

  From my experience, I can say, that in every community there are always guys who love to help you. Also integrate donation buttons, to get income on your site, or even introduce a paid clan membership to show how professional you are.

• Integrate all of the tools your community is using, for example, it’s great to implement a discord addon, that displays all active users of discord on your website.
• Get professional with WordPress: For me, the clan page was just a start into my career as a website creator. If you love what you do, do it better and improve every day.

  With all of the plugins, WordPress has to offer you can create a big world out of your imagination. 🙂

• Also put an eye on “SEO”. SEO means search engine optimization, you can google it to learn more about it. It means that you structure your website is a good way so that readers can find everything.

  When you do it right, many users will find you through google. This is how more than 200.000 users come to my Warcraft 3 site every month, just from google.

That’s it! Do you have any questions?
I know it’s a big topic and I could write thousands of words about it, but I was trying to keep it short! 🙂Do you want more content like that?

If you are interested comment below! 🙂
Cheers, Kevin