#making pages

Stats, including: Full name

Age

Gender and sex

Species (if non-human)

Job (if pertinent) 

Hair and eye color

Maybe weight and height

And, if you plan to ship, sexuality and availability

Who their faceclaim is (if applicable) 

An intro paragraph that tells us a bit about who they are. If playing a canon character, this should be canonical information. (This is a good paragraph to write IC)

A second paragraph telling what you might play different from canon, and/or what time in canon you play them. If you play after series and your character canonically dies for example, this is a good place to say how you've brought them back.

This might take a third paragraph as well.

A brief discussion of what they can do if they have any magical powers makes a good fourth paragraph. If you catch this getting too big, you might want to consider an additional page for powers and abilities, but you should mention at least a bit here if they are superhuman in any way. 

Fifth should be any MAJOR developments that have taken place in RP that anyone RPing with them needs to know. If Edward Elric now has a huge scar running across his face from a fight with a behemoth, you should let people know that here. 

And that's it really. If you're getting longer than that, you need to split it up into other pages. Chances are, in that case a lot of what you have is headcanon. Save that for another place and time, my friend. Also, you should keep those paragraphs on the shorter side. No more than say, 5 sentences. Don't go thinking you're James Joyce and give a wall o'text. No one will read it. Sad but true, it makes people go all glossy eyed. 

Now, a bit more about those paragraphs, and some stuff to avoid: Do not copy from the Wiki. I've seen this so many times, and just...no. We can Google them on our own, thanks. We need to hear it in your words. This tells us who YOU play them as, and what parts of their character you think are important. You can link to the Wiki of course, for more info, but keep anything actually on the page in your own words. 

Secondly, don't give us a sob story here. While the the tragic deaths of their parents at a young age may be valuable information, I can promise you that we have all seen 857 pages that start off with it. If you must, add it in the top stat block under Family: Father's Name, Mother's Name (both deceased).

"But I worked really hard on the story and it's important to who they are!" Good. Cool. Let my muse find out why, or add it in a headcanon or drabble later. Don't shove it at me right off the bat. If it's that important, you can add a Backstory page that goes more in depth. The About page should only skim the surface, getting me interested in learning more. 

Other pages you NEED to have are:

A Rules page that lets us know what guidelines to follow. 

If you ship, and if yes, if you smut. (Note that if you are underage, you should REALLY put that in here, so people know, as it is illegal to smut with you.)

What you will RP, and what you won't. Some people love angst, but hate writing fights for example. Others do not like to roleplay certain scenarios. 

Restate if you are open to multi-fandom RP's, and if so, any guidelines you may have for them. Some people for example, will play outside the fandom, but do not consider it to be part of their main timeline.

Restate your shipping policy. If you only want one, main relationship, then you are a single-ship blog. If you are cool with more than one, you are a multi-shipper. Being either of these is PERFECTLY FINE. Also, if you are a multi-shipper, you should state if those relationships are to be considered AU from each other, or if your character is polyromantic/polyamorous.  

Whether or not you accept random starters, M!A's, meme responses from people you haven't threaded with, etc... 

If you have any triggers you would like tagged, put them here. 

Anything else you feel the need to make sure people know about what you are comfortable doing or not doing. 

Headcanons! 

I like to set mine up as url/tagged/headcanons rather than making an actual page, so the link will go to anything you have tagged with 'headcanons'. It makes it easier to add them, and just looks nicer to have them in individual posts rather than a wall or in bullet points. 

Some other, optional pages are:

Relationships 

You won't have any of these yet, but you can add them later! Just set it up with 'Coming Soon' for now. 

Powers and Abilities

You can go into more detail about what they can do here.

Backstory

This is especially great if you have an OC from a world of your own creation. People can read their story here. 

Last piece of advice: You might have noticed that I've littered this and my own pages with block quote insets, bullets, italics, and all sorts of other things. Do this. It adds visual interest and breaks up the text wall, making people more likely to keep reading. The internet is primarily a visual medium, and while you as an RPer are here to deal in literary text, the design and browsing part of your blog should follow normal web text conventions for interest. Here are a couple places with more info on that, in case you are unfamiliar. 1 2

A few pictures here and there are great for your info pages too! For example, why describe an attack your character has when you could add a cool gif to show it? Just don't go overboard with that, or you'll make the page hard to load.