CAWS.ws is widely regarded as the world’s biggest "Create a Wrestler" (CAW) website, which provides additional content, such as wrestlers, movesets and entrances for the .WWE SmackDown! game series. It also allows users to upload thier own CAWs for others to download.

The Beginning: How The Site Started

The site originated from a small personal website, owned by Tom Rice and hosted on Maxpages.com, and inspired by other websites belonging to users of the WWF Trivia room on WWF.com around 2000/2001. The site gradually developed into what became a website for CAWs" (Create A Wrestlers) for the popular Playstation wrestling game: WWF SmackDown! 2: Know Your Role.

Over the years, more and more content was developed for the website, including many new layouts, codes and scripts, and namely hundreds of CAWS. The site's needs grew and grew over time, and it switched host in order to accomodate them on numerous occasions, spending time on Geocities, Angelfire, and many other popular freehosts.

In 2003/2004, the site was serving content for WWE SmackDown! Here Comes The Pain, and by this time had got more and more publicity. Freehostz hosted the site for free throughout most of 2004, allowing the site to continue growing and developing without space and bandwidth restrictions.

During it's time at Freehostz, CAWs.ws also set up a free forum with Proboards, which went on to become extremely popular, driving traffic to the site and serving thousands of members for almost 2 years. During this time, CAWs.ws was receiving around 5,000 page views per day. With the release of WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW in 2004, this quickly grew to 20,000 per day. CAWs.ws was the first website to provide an extensive archive of CAWS for the new smackdown game, driving thousands of people to visit and make them.

The Website

The website has many sections for CAWs, Movesets, Entrances, CABs (create a belt) and more, with new CAWS getting added to the archives nearly every day. Some of the CAWs from the website are shown on this page, but to see more, you need to go to the website, and look at them for yourselves.
Tom Rice - the owner of CAWs.ws, now shares the website with his partner JohnB. CAWs.ws now runs on its own dedicated Dual Xeon 2.66Ghz servers to cope with demand. It houses the website - which has thousands of creations for Smackdowns 5, 6 and 7 - and the forum which gained over 3000 members just in the first 2 months of opening on its new IBP software. CAWs.ws now continues to expand and grow at a more and more rapid rate, now with its CAWs being served by a database, and providing popular services such as its own IRC Chat Server. The recently re-branded CAWs.ws is now a unique and very popular spot for Wrestling fans all over the world, and its aims are to continue providing an extensive, easy to use and feature-rich free service to all of its users.

CAWS

In the actual game they are called Create a Superstar (CAS), but website refers to them as CAWs. The term CAWs stands for Create a Wrestlers in the WWE games, this give you a chance to make your very own WWE superstar and get it to WWE fame. The CAW engine works extremly well to get the perfect face, so people can attempt to make old WWE wrestlers like Randy Savage or Sgt. Slaughter. People want to take their creativity to the next level, and make wrestlers that are already in the game, like Randy Orton or Triple H. There are also people making non-wrestling CAWS (Celebrities, Models, Cartoon Characters) or showing off their imagination with their own custom made CAWS (Original CAWS).

Saves

As well as CAWS, CAWs.ws and its CAW forum provide Game Saves which are CAWS put into one save ready for downloading for either MaxDrive, Xport, Codebreaker or Sharkport. (In PAL or NTSC format) Some saves have things such as hacks, like changing a CAW status to legend, or the infamous 'Hair Hack'.

CAWs.ws Forum

CAWs.ws have forums where CAW makers do there work, this is the place where new CAWs are shown off and get rated or suggestions for improvement. The community is growing at an alarming rate with people who want to post their ownCAWs and get them rated or included into the archive.

CAWs.ws Graphic Forum

Graphics have been a big part of the CAW.ws main forum. Graphic makers tend to make wrestling related images to show off in various competitions. Up until the start 2006, the graphics forum is now seperate from the main site due to growth.

CAWs.ws Featured In Books And Magazines

In issue #172 of Gamesmaster, CAWs.ws is featured on page 45 during a first look at Smackdown Vs Raw 2007.
Some of the CAWs from the website were featured in a cheatbook by OPSM2 (Official Playstation 2 Magazine). The Book was made to Update your roster with the CAWS, these included the likes of Ken Kennedy and Bobby Lashley

External Links

CAWs.ws

CAWs.ws's Forum

CAWs.ws's GFX Forum

CAWs.ws's IRC Network