Community:Zelda Dungeon

Zelda Dungeon is a Legend of Zelda fan website created by Mases Hagopian on August 19th, 2001. The site's main purpose is to provide the most in-depth game guides possible, utilizing screenshots, maps, and artwork. The site is part of the Telefragged / Atomic Gamer network. As a part of this network, Zelda Dungeon has a media section on the 3ddownloads file server. Zelda Dungeon has recently launched a new message board, The Dark World. Zelda Dungeon was the recipient of the Golden Mirror Shield Award in 2008.

=History= Zelda Dungeon has been around for over 7 years, and during this long period of time, there have been plenty of ups and downs. Below is a detailed account of the creation and history of Zelda Dungeon.

Conception
Mases Hagopian originally gained interest in the Zelda series after playing A Link to the Past for the Super Nintendo. Years later, Mases obtained a copy of Ocarina of Time and his interest in the series had grown. Leading up to the release of Majora's Mask in the year 2000, Mases first became involved in the online Zelda community, frequently visiting the Zelda fan website known as Zelda Power. During the summer of 2001, Mases thought of the idea of creating his own Legend of Zelda website where he could provide written strategy guides for all of the Zelda games. This idea came to fruition near the end of the summer of 2001.

Layout 1.0 - The Early Days
The site launched on August 19th, 2001 and was originally hosted at Yahoo Geocities free hosting service. The site initially launched as part of a network of sites about several other gaming and TV show series', including Mega Man, Final Fantasy, Dark Cloud, and Dragonball Z. The Zelda portion of the site was solely run by Mases during its first few months.

This early era didn't last long, and by October of 2001, all of the network sites had gone inactive and only Zelda Dungeon remained. This primitive version of Zelda Dungeon had very minor amounts of game content, and it was in October of 2001 that Mases began work on the Ocarina of Time Walkthrough. After about a month of work, Mases was beginning to lose interest in working on the site, based on the fact that there were no incoming in visitors. Activity came to a complete halt until January 2nd, 2003, when Zelda Dungeon was first listed on the Google search engine. For the first time, consistent visitors began to flow into Zelda Dungeon. While such a tiny number in retrospect, the site was receiving 5-10 visitors per day, and this caused work to presume on Zelda Dungeon. The site got its first affiliate in City of Clocktown, an aspiring website at the time, and Mases became very close friends with the Webmaster of City of Clocktown. Zelda Dungeon continued to rack up more affiliates, and the growing amount of content at the website was beginning to set in. With the help of the Webmaster of City of Clocktown, Mases setup an account at shorturl, and the sites much easier to remember url was now zeldadungeon.vze.com.

Controversy hit Zelda Dungeon during this early period, when Mases was directly linking to media files that were hosted by the website, Zelda Power. Mases, being the ignorant Webmaster at the time, could not comprehend that this was illegal. However, in response to these new audio files that were hosted at the website, more visitors began to come to the forum. After a few weeks, Mases was contacted by Aaron Holt, Webmaster of Zelda Power, and was asked to remove the direct links to Zelda Power's media.

Layout 2.0 - HTML Conversion
On March 27th, 2002, Zelda Dungeon launched Layout version 2.0, and it was the first layout that was built with html code. The layout was built by the Webmaster of City of Clocktown. Prior to this layout, Zelda Dungeon was built with a yahoo geocities site builder. With the introduction of HTML coding, plenty of new pros and cons came with transition. One of the pros was that the website was now consistent throughout all the pages of the website. However, going along with this change, each games index page was no longer visually unique as it was in the websites first layout.

Two versions of this layout were actually released. Upon release, version 2.0 had a listing of all the Zelda games along the navigation, and every specific page of content for each of the games was also listed. This worked well at the layouts launch, as there were so few content pages, and it skipped extra steps of having to go to a games index page to get to the game content. However, as the website began to grow and new pages were constantly added, the left navigation was getting quite lengthy. Additionally, because of the primitive coding that the site was using, after every new page or affiliate was added, every single page of the website had to be altered, and this was one of the cons of the initial switchover to html.

Several months into the layouts existence, version 2.5 was launched. The noticeable difference was the game menu on the left navigation. It was now compacted so that it only listed the actual games and did not list the individual content pages. The website went through another coding change, and was now using shtml. What shtml did, was allowed the navigation bars to be adjusted without having to go through and edit every single page when a single link was changed. This made editing the website a lot more efficient and more time was now focused on the content of the website, rather than the coding.

It was also during this layout where Zelda Dungeon was beginning to put its stamp on the online Zelda community. The site was growing rapidly, and yahoo geocities was no longer large enough for Zelda Dungeon. At the end of each month, Zelda Dungeon was being taken offline due to overuse of the sites bandwidth. After searching online for other free hosts that were more reliable, Mases stumbled upon a website known as Zelda Odyssey, which was part of the Chatville network. After contacting them, Zelda Dungeon was accepted for hosting, and moved to this new network. Hosting was no longer an issue at this point in time, which allowed the website to further grow.

During this time frame, Zelda Dungeon hired its first ever staff member, Steph. Steph originated at a Zelda website known as Link's Domain, a website which closed when its host, E-Zelda had closed down. After seeing her work and seeing the closure of the Link's Domain, Mases contacted Steph and offered her a job at the website, where she officially became a staff member on October 27th, 2002. Steph ended up creating much of the Adventure of Link content at the time, and had set a new standard of content for Zelda Dungeon. Steph was at the website for several months before leaving her position behind. Almost all of her content has since been replaced, but Steph still leaves behind a legacy of being the first staff member at Zelda Dungeon.

Zelda Dungeon had picked up numerous affiliates during the lifespan of Layout #2, including large Zelda websites at the time such as Zelda Guide, Link's Legacies, and Zelda Central. Victor of Zelda Central became one of the members of the community to which Mases looked up to and admired. Victor helped Mases with coding whenever it was needed, and is a big reason for the sites growth during this time frame.

Layout 3.0 - Hosting Issues
Victor of Zelda Central had grown to be close friends with Mases, and seeing the sites potential, he offered to create Zelda Dungeon a brand new layout. On November 23rd, 2002, layout 3.0 was launched and it was a huge upgrade over layout 2.0, and gave the website a much better first appeal.