1st recommendation- I found a nice FREE webhost that can handle Coppermine! Great for retired shows where you don’t have tons of pics, or for hosting fan art. You get 350 MB free space plus the databases and software installed automatically for you. NO ADS on the site- you can customize things nicely.
http://supernatural66.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/free-gallery-hosting-coppermine-for-dummies/
2nd recommendation- Magnify! My favorite video boards- you can customize your channels to match your website and have control over what is posted. Their new video player has a nice looking viewer when you embed videos. If your content is bigger than the 50 MB limit- try converting files to flv before loading- usually you can shrink them to fit. If they are still too big you can always load to Megavideo or Youtube or whatever else and import the links to your channel.
An example of one of my Magnify channels is my humongous Smallville and Supernatural clip library
http://tvpromosntrailers.magnify.net/
3rd recommendation Choosing a blog
If you are not a programmer and are not keen on learning a lot of coding, then Blogger or WordPress.com are for you. Blogger is part of Google, WordPress.com is a separate site, both blog set ups have some nice templates you can choose and you can either name your blog with a domain you have purchased or you can choose a name for your blog that is a sub-domain of the blog service.
My two Smallville blogs are both on WordPress.com and that is how I got comfortable using their system so that when I wanted to launch a fully customizable site I already knew the ins and outs of how to post things and how to set things up.
The OSCK Smallville Blog http://osck.wordpress.com/
I have also worked with blogger as a contributor to SpoilerTV. SpoilerTV is hosted by blogger but with a lot of extras to pay for their space needs and the ability to link in several separte blogs into one interface.
http://spoilertv.blogspot.com/
When I chose to do my own hosted website- I chose WordPress for my blog because I like the flexibility. It is not perfect though- all blogging software requires PHP and a MSQL database and the scripts which make the calls to the database tend to hog a lot of server resources . I ran into an issue with my first hosting company because they couldn’t handle the scripts even though they advertised that they could. This is one nice thing about Blogger or WordPress.com- you get unlimited bandwidth and nobody hassles you about these types of things because you can only customize so much- the coding is pretty well fixed. Best bet for a casual fan? Go with a free site , pick a template and work on customizing your header and don’t worry about the rest!
If you want to work on the coding and are planning a blog to just showcase a few things a month- maybe for your fanfic or fan art- my free website guys at 000webhost are pretty good at that too. You can install a fully customizable blog and manage it using standard webhosting tools. If you run out of space or bandwidth it is pretty easy to move a WordPress blog to another site ( back everything up once a week and make a copy of your backups on your hard drive!) or you can upgrade your hosting with them pretty reasonably.
What now?
You have a gallery, a video channel and a blog site. How do you tie this all together? How do you cross promote your sites?
If you know how to code in css you can easily add links to your channels into your blog coding. If you are not a CSS person ( I AM NOT) then you can cheat and use links and widgets!
Coppermine allows you to enter your home page url in this box in the theme set up menu entitled “custom menu link name” enter the name of your site in this field and then input your site URL in the next box. That is it! Now you have a link on your Coppermine gallery with the name of your site pointing it to your site.
Magnify allows you to link to any home page you like in the user/channel menu settings. Additionally you can add links and banners for your site as I have using simple HTML coding in the headers and footers on your site.
WordPress.com and Blogger allow you to add links using html and their widgets – I have a number of them in the sidebars on my OSCK blog. This is done with VERY simple html coding entered into a text widget box. I load a photo to my photo host ( I use imageshack- also free!) , it gives me linking code for the photo,I add a little text and the correct code to add the link to the photo pointing people to the site I want them to visit and VOILA! Linked pages.
I will post more recommendations in this category. Feel free to add your own awesome free/easy to use tools too!