Chicken Smoothie Help: General

Who are the site admins?

The site creator is Tess, who takes care of the artistic direction of the website, including drawing and managing the adoptables and the website and forum designs. Nick is the admin who creates the code that powers Chicken Smoothie.

Will you please draw me something/make me a custom pet?

I'm sorry, but probably not. Running a site of this size keeps me too busy to take in requests for custom pets. If I were to make a special pet for every member for example, I'd have to draw over 70,000 pets. Custom pets are generally reserved for staff - to reward them for the hard work they do for Chicken Smoothie.

Which web browser should I use?

You should be able to use the site correctly with any modern web browser. This includes Internet Explorer 7 and later, Firefox 3, or modern versions of Safari. If you are using the ancient Internet Explorer 6 you will be unable to add items to your pets, you are encouraged to upgrade to a more recent version by using Windows Update, or switch to Firefox instead, it's faster and safer.

You should turn on cookies in your web browser, or you will be frequently logged out of the site and will be unable to use some features. You must turn on Javascript in your browser in order to dress up your pet.

Why do the admins take forever to reply to my messages?

Our admins are both university students with other jobs and a social life. Sometimes real-life just gets in the way. We're also from New Zealand so we're on a completely different time-zone to many of you.

If you haven't had a reply in over 2 weeks, it may mean your question was already answered somewhere on the site and we didn't bother to repeat it for you. Don't under-estimate the importance of reading all the FAQs and information on adoptable pages before mailing us.

Where can I email you questions?

If you think that your question could be answered by other players, please ask it in the forum. You'll get an answer more quickly and other people will learn the answer too. If you really need it, you can get private help at help@chickensmoothie.com. This account is checked by several staff members who can help you out. If you're just asking something we've already answered here, like suggesting that we make a new species or offering to be an artist, please don't email us.

How did you make the website?

Tess originally learned HTML and CSS, then built the website using her coding knowledge in the HTML-editor Dreamweaver. The latest version of Dreamweaver is called Dreamweaver CS4 and can be found here. If you understand HTML, you can write your website using any free text editor instead, such as the excellent Notepad++. You can find some tutorials on HTML and other web technologies at w3schools.

The website is on a paid host, but you can make your own website for free somewhere like Freewebs.com - no HTML knowledge required :)

Our current site was designed by Tess (using Photoshop), Nick wrote the code that powers the website behind the scenes using PHP.