About Sora
I was inspired to create my own website after many years of admiring Pokémon fan sites. I loved the idea of writing up my own articles and creating my own artwork and sharing them with the internet.
The name Sora means “sky” in Japanese. The site’s colour scheme (blue and orange) is supposed to represent Moltes’s two types (Flying and Fire respectively).
Why Moltres?
As you’ve probably already guessed, Moltres is my favourite Pokémon. I first fell in love with the fire birdy when I purchased a Moltres beanie toy from eBay. I loved its design; its large, beautiful wings of flame, its powerful but graceful body. I started looking up pictures and information on the internet, and soon realised that compared to some of the “cooler” looking legendaries of the Ruby and Sapphire era, Moltres was a rather underappreciated Pokémon. There wasn’t a whole lot of fan art of it either. I decided to dedicate a good portion of Sora’s content to the Pokémon Moltres; since there were no other shrines to my favourite legendary bird, I would make one myself.
History
Before Sora, I made many, many attempts at creating a Pokémon website. As I soon found out, it was much harder than it seemed and none of my other websites were ever actually published. Once I began planning for Sora, however, I knew this was the website I wanted to stick with. I have kept notes and plans that date back as early as 2007, though the website you see today wasn’t published until 2010.
Sora was nearly published in early 2009. Everything was in working order, and I was ready to publish. I’d set up a paid hosting account, but I ran into a lot of problems which, with no thanks to the unhelpful staff of the host, I was unable to fix. Eventually my year’s worth of hosting expired and I couldn’t afford to renew it. So for a long time, I forgot about Sora.
In mid 2010, I became aware of Weebly which hosted websites for free and didn’t have any advertising. I signed up immediately and I was able to copy and paste the code directly from Dreamweaver. Publishing the site had never been easier- with a click of a button, Sora was finally on the web! The design was a simple table layout and looked like this:
On the 1st of January 2011, I made a brand-new layout, which is now the current layout for Sora. Having always been reliant on tables, working out how to design a div-based layout was quite difficult- but it was worth it in the end =D
