[IatricSB]

Originally Posted by The Professor

1. There is nothing better than a little experience. Mad0die offers the best advice one can give a prospective new commissioner. Join a good league, watch, ask questions, learn. This is the best way to get a feel for the way a league operates and to see how things go. You may want to jump right in and get your feet wet, but your chances of survival are slim to none. Learn the game, learn the way leagues operate. You'll have to exercise a lot of patience, but IT IS ESSENTIAL. Your final product will be better for it.

2. Once you've gotten the hang of things, then you can begin to realize dreams of having your own league.

-- The Website:

*If you can get on the OOTP Server, fine. Otherwise, purchasing space from a web host is almost a necessity. It would be nice if you could run a league off a free web host, but the required bandwidth is usually simply too much. You'll sink before you even get to doggy paddle, much less sink -- and your league will probably be bare bones, including annoying banner ads and pop-ups -- if you can even manage it.

*Simpler is almost always better when it comes to the site. Many new online leaguers feel the need to jazz things up with lots of java or flashy things. Avoid, avoid, avoid unless you are proficient at coding and HTML. A clean, simple, HTML site is a good way to begin. If nothing else you'll want all the necessary links to the OOTP HTML pages up, some kind of place where you can post news tidbits etc. You'll probably want some kind of forum, which again necessitates having space on some web host. Take a look around at other leagues, see what you think works. If you don't know anything about web design, ask for help (there are people here who occasionally offer to help build simple sites, etc.), surf the web, read up on it. As you learn more, you'll be able to improve your site by adding neat new features.

Really, once you have a feel for a how a league works, you'll be much better prepared to run a league yourself. You'll be more confident, you'll be prepared to handle the sticky situations that sometimes come up in leagues, and your owners will be thankful for it. Get experience.

Good post and I agree that the best way to learn is to be in an online league at first. But if you'd still like to give it a go, you'll need to have someone with some HTML experience to create your main pages. OOTP will perform some stuff for you such as posting your league HTML files (FTP them for you) and technically you could get by with just that. But typically you'll want to have an owners page, a message board for league postings, and some of the 3rd party goodies that are out there (Catobase for example once you get comfortable with what's going on).

Also, a non-website thing, but backup your league files regularly and often (I keep zipped archives of my league). That way if anything happens corrupting the file or an error of some kind, you have backups to go to. But I also keep an end of year file just in case I want to use those previously mentioned 3rd party programs (with Catobase you'll want the history your league creates yearly).