New Anglo-Allied Army (AAA) WebsiteGents,
The new
Anglo-Allied Army (AAA) website is up & running. This site was the most complex to build in terms of size, scope & images/layout. It was being built from scratch too, so most of my time on the websites for the Coalition was devoted to this page. I originally sort of knew what I wanted to do & it evolved from there. A major overhaul was done based on what are generally understood website principles that I mention in the "Sites Concept & Force Structure" post.
The "New" Anglo-Allied Army (AAA) page: http://www.wargamech.ca/wc/nwc/Army_Web ... lo-Allied/The following below is optional reading about the site creation process, force structure, icon & leader portraits research, flag creation et al. Just some things that folks might enjoy reading about the process. I have broken it down by category, so you can skip where you please.
Order of Battle Choices:With these principles in the "Sites Concept & Force Structure" post in mind, we wanted to create a page that used a couple different things that now prevail across the whole Club. Unit icons, full & open Order of Battles, leader images, native/national languages for the unit names, music & extra graphical/images across the pages. The Anglo-Allied Army (AAA) Commander,
Jim Hall was most supportive of the idea, as was
Andy Moss, the Allied Coalition Commander in Chief. What they approved of was an extensive & complete order of battle for the British forces of the Wars. The OOB is centered around the
Peninsular Campaign Battle of Vitoria and partly off the
Battles of Talavera & Albuera, as well as the
1815 Waterloo (100 Days) Campaign. What this did was allow us the flexibility to add in as many units as we could. It also allowed us to have extensive British troops, but also a full compliment of Spanish & Portuguese troops too. On top of it, it allows us to continue the use of Hanoverian, Dutch-Belgian, Brunswick & King's German Legion (KGL) units.
With all this in mind, some stretching of the OOB concept had to be employed. The hierarchy of the Army is flexible in nature, based on part historical use and also the previous Club traditions of grouping the different national units that made up the Anglo-Allied forces into one command structure, for identity & Esprit de Corps reasons. So you have the majority of Dutch-Belgian & Nassau troops in the 1st Corps, you have the traditional Waterloo Campaign British units in their proper divisions in the 2nd Corps, with the Hanoverian, KGL & Brunswick forces all placed into their own divisions & units, in that Corps to create a sense of identity for them. The 3rd Peninsular Corps were a mix. The Spanish & Portuguese troops, were placed into their own national units, either based on a collection of the different OOB's used or along a more straight forward concept of numerical order by line infantry, light infantry (Caçadores) & cavalry, as was employed with the Portuguese troops. For the British units present, some divisions & units were present at Waterloo too, some were not. So it was decided that the divisions & units that were present at Waterloo, that were also present in the Peninsular battles, would generally be used in the Peninsular Corps. There is some stretching of divisions & brigades a bit for the British units in the Peninsular Corps, as the same division numbers & sometimes brigade numbers were used in both the Peninsular Campaign and the Waterloo Campaign that had different units in each. Also a lot of times in the Peninsular Campaign, a numerical designation wasn't used for the brigades and sometimes even the divisions, the commanders name was used. So in the spirit of keeping things the same, some imagination was used in employing numerical brigade names. This was applied to the Spanish & Portuguese troops too. It was the easiest way for consistency in the use of a multiple battles & campaign OOBs. For the Peninsular Corps British troops, where we could, we grouped the various regiments into the same brigade that served together in a historical OOB for one of the battles. We did this as much as we could.
It wasn't easy to find a way to have all the units present from four different key battles across a multitude of years in the Wars itself. This was the easiest way to allow unit, national pride/cohesion and generally historic layout while using a bit of creativity to allow a colorful & complex army to function, have proper structure & national identity. After all we are a wargaming Club & sometimes the historic goes out the window in favor of the experience members can have with the Club. I have always been more to champion the experience the members have and what we, as the staff try to do for them, over being completely historically dogmatic in our approach. The French Army might not understand this per say, as they are a much more cohesive force, but the reality of the Coalition & managing it is, it is a wide variety of national forces and much like the Wars themselves, those national forces & the personal interests of Club members often dictate what we do on this side of the Club. I've been an open & all inclusive OOB supporter for a long time now, as it helps recruit & build a sense of pride for folks, as often people have specific units or nations they favor. Even down to in a nation, a certain territory, province, county name or local units, which often prevails in the Coalition at large. So that's why we do this on our side.
But I've gotten a bit off track.
The AAA also has a Cavalry Corps again, We thought it was important to raise them to a Corps again, given their critical role in the Wars themselves and especially at Waterloo. We also further added in a Royal Artillery & Engineers Corps, various national units are in there too. The much celebrated British Royal Foot Artillery & Royal Horse Artillery are present, names of units that have just as much recognition and fame as their infantry & horseback counterparts.
Lastly the Guards Corps, which contains the traditional British Foot Guards & Horse Guards, in Waterloo based OOB and also the Netherlands Guides and some Spanish & Portuguese guards units.
So the full Corps count is:
1ste Nederlandsch-Belgische Korps (I Dutch-Belgian Corps)
II (Anglo-German) Corps
III (Peninsular) Corps
Cavalry Corps
Royal Artillery & Engineers Corps
Guards Corps
6 Corps' total & a full compliment of units. It is understood not all layers of command will be filled in right away, but with strong communication & support from headquarters & the Coalition at large, it'll keep things going. More thought to this is given in the "Sites Concept & Force Structure" post.
Unit Icons Choices:The next thing we worked on, that I enjoyed very much was unit icon research and making. From a couple unit icon files that we have for a couple mods, we worked to identify the icons used for each unit in the Mods & we hand edited & created the icons for each unit. We wanted to use icons, as well, we think they are cool. These Mods employ a much wider variety than any HPS/JTS game & I am a fan of the old style icons as is. So doing this for all those units, was a long, time consuming process, but it is something we love, as we feel it adds an extra appeal to an army & it again sets us apart from other organizations out there. It is the little things, we think, like this that make all the difference. Again we also used paintings & images to create a stock of banners, unique to each Corps and the army overall, from various artists out there. I always enjoy the hunt for the right image I like, which sometimes can take hours to find, but we have had many people over the years appreciate them, so that's why we do it. Nothing beats a good piece of art!
Leader Portrait Choices & Background Research:This then led to the most difficult, as well as time consuming task when doing the site. Leader portraits. Many of us love all the various artists that made portraits of our heroes of the Wars. The amount & accessibility of these fine pieces of work continues to grow each year, but the ability to find them sometimes gets more difficult, especially as the internet proliferates images far & wide and even the best search word structure can yield a lot of results or too little. So decisions had to be made. This with the fact that again, like the units themselves, the leaders sometimes served in both theaters. So we needed alternatives to them. Also many, many leaders did not have portraits done at all, especially at the lower level and the non-British units level. In fact the only reason why you see so many British officers & especially those beyond the high level commands, is mostly thanks to one man.
William Salter. The story of the British artist and the Waterloo Banquet panting is really interesting, he also, in preparation for the banquet painted a lot of the British commanders. Read about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sa ... 8artist%29 So then Wikicommons has a lot of the individual portraits:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Categ ... iam_Salter It wasn't straight forward per say, as even when we were able to identify a name, they might not have a Wikipedia page that uses the image to verify our research. Sometimes we had to spend time looking over dozens of Google search returns and various websites to find what we were looking for. A further issue was that several of the portraits we use, the leader we picked, wasn't a brigade or even regiment commander sometimes, though we tried to use the regiment ones, if we could, when no brigade leader portrait was available. Again, many did not have portraits done. So like the OOB, compromises had to be made. The compromise was, if we could somehow associate a leader, who has a portrait, with a unit in that brigade, we would use them, even if not 100% accurate, they still are in a unit in that brigade, during one of the battles. This was a primary issue for a couple of the brigade leader images we used in the Guards Corps & the Calvary Corps. For all the other Corps, we started to look for brigade leaders, but it became very, very clear, rather quickly, we had to stick at the divisional level, which again had its own issues. Those were that some leaders commanded two different numbered divisions at different points of the Wars, so again we had to find a compromise for what worked, along the lines of if Salter had a portrait of someone in a unit in that division, we would use them. It wasn't always easy. We ended up stumbling across a Google Book, that was free, that I wished I had saved the name, that was a post Napoleonics War publication of one of the British government agencies of the time, that highlighted muster roll names for units, leaders, battles & participation et al. It also was searchable and had a cross reference index of names to pages. It was a gold mine to finding ways to verify & justify using a certain portrait for a certain level unit. If we could verify the leader was in a unit a part of that command structure, they were used. This was the easiest way to get the work down without being too labor intensive. Overall the portraits used are accurate & correct leaders or an immediate sub leader were used. Which was super helpful. The ones we had to research, sometimes took a full day to find enough to justify their use.
Some of the Cavalry Corps leaders required the same amount of research & cross referencing. But I love this type of stuff & I learn something new every time I do it. The III (Peninsular) Corps leader portraits were generally a lot easier. We picked the key leaders of that Campaign for the Spanish & the British and made Beresford the Corps Commander. The Portuguese did not have easily found or usable portraits, so a edited image for an artist's painting was used. Also we picked a piece of art to be the Brunswick unit leader image, based off a piece of art Hakan Hen was using, that we thought was cool. Andy Moss does too.
The Dutch-Belgians were a bit easier, as less units had to be filled & again, portraits were easily found by using either the English version of Google or the Dutch version of Google. Again some flexibility was used. Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany was used as the Guards Corps Commander, in recognition of his service throughout a lot of the Wars as Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, but also because he was a Regimental Colonel of several Guard units. At the Army level, one of my favorite portraits of Wellington was used & to represent the Peninsular aspect, for the Army Chief of Staff, we picked Sir John Moore, an obvious choice.
Flags & Site Notes:Another thing to note, is the flag banners on the side. We found a great site that had different flag icons for the forces in the Wars, that we could cross-reference, verify and then hand edit them for use. The ripple effect is my favorite part. That alone took an hour or so to get all the flags done. Another online place, that is a hobby of mine, allows you to use flags in it for what you do. Some years back, they added the ability to make your flag have a "ripple" effect or like it is flying in the wind/breeze. It makes the flags look so much cooler. So each unique flag was loaded into the website, made into a ripple effect and then saved to our site. We then created a image file, that grouped them all together, in a smaller size, to create a side banner image, unique to each Corps. Some cases, like the Cavalry Corps, we used flags of the major nations. In the website structure, we left all of the images at each stage of the process. The images we found online, the edited (non-rippled) flag, the rippled flag and then the longer side banner. That way future webmasters can use different images if they want or we in the future can use them to create custom signature or images for Club members.
We also tried to impose an orderly & clean structure to the site, especially in the images folder, where we created sub folders for various types of images, as in flags, banners, icons, leaders et al. For the leader portraits, the site uses a reduced size, JPG based image, for reasons of bandwidth use & loading. The images we originally captured are much larger size wise & file wise, as they are the more robust, PNG files. Instead of chewing up bandwidth, with each page load, we simply took the original artwork and placed them in a folder, titled originals so that they don't have to be tracked down in the future if folks want to do something them. As a lot of times, looking for an image years later can be difficult and the image could also be gone or severally altered. So we felt it was important to capture the original at time of use. One too many times I've went looking for a better, larger image of something only to have it be gone and never relocated to another site.
Next Tasks to Do:Again, like the other sites, work will continue as we go along to make sure the finer points are taken care of and also that all ranks, medals, other awards are given out. Also the placement of some of the national units might move around, sort of for consistency reasons. Mainly the choice to move artillery & cavalry units around or not.
A couple things to note is, we already started the process today to allow the AAA officers to pick & move to whatever unit they want. This way folks will be able to have a unit that they can really identify with. We did this with the Prussians and it went over really well. Again these are good exercises in communication, participation & Esprit de Corps! Further, the medals used by the Army are being redone, well to be more exact it'll be expanded upon. Also the other subpages will be worked on as time goes on.
Translation Credits:One of the last items we wanted to note was the use of native/national languages for the national units & their spellings. We are very lucky that 3 out of the 4 languages got proofread. The following members from three different Club armies (including a French member) helped:
Theron Lambert (Portuguese), Ludwig Schmidt (German), Marco Rietveld & Eltjo Verweij(Dutch). Without their help, a host of units would not look as good as they do. Thanks guys so much!!
Final Thoughts:We know this was an exhaustive post, believe me, we've been writing it for two hours now.
But this site was very layered in it's concept & design. It also was a built from scratch site. It further required the most research. It took almost two months to build, mainly to have the time to do all the image editing and also the leader research and unit cross referencing. We are very pleased with how it came out and we really hope folks like it a lot & they appreciate the amount of work that went into it. Folks love images, or as Jim Hall calls it "eye candy".
I do too! We are website, visual only place, so these little extra things we always feel are important to do, that sets you apart from the rest. It is not a chore for us to do them either, we love this, as we learn so much in the process. We would of not discovered William Salter so easily.
In all this work, we felt the need to share the background context, so folks can understand why decisions were made they way they were. Call it transparency of process if you want.
We hope you all enjoy it a lot!
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