web site hits
Luke:
Ryan points out three strong ideas for driving traffic to your site. #3 is by far the most important because very few people read those announcements and if people don't know about your game, they're not going to search for it.
Ben touches on another side to this process. Driving traffic is nice, but in order for the effort to pay off, you have to give people a reason to stay and a desire to return. Right now your site is poorly laid out and, as far as I can tell, has no forum or blog or any other type of interaction.
And if I may give some unsolicited advice: Get rid of the ads. Clean up the layout so that it clearly advertises your product, not a lonely masif. Place your logo in a visible, but discreet place on the front page. No one cares about your company. They want your product.
Seamus:
Quote from: Luke on December 11, 2009, 10:04:30 PM
Ben touches on another side to this process. Driving traffic is nice, but in order for the effort to pay off, you have to give people a reason to stay and a desire to return. Right now your site is poorly laid out and, as far as I can tell, has no forum or blog or any other type of interaction.
We are putting together a forum we hope to have operational soon. The most we have right now is our Yahoo Group.
I do agree with the layout, but I must admit, I am not the most tech savy person. We built our site using the Intuit service because it was affordable and usefriendly (HTML and I do not get along well). I have been thinking of turning our product page into our first page, but still the layout issue remains. I looked into Intuit's web design services but they are nearly 600 dollars for minimal projects. Way out of our budget for that sort of thing.
Thanks for the advice. I will see if I can work out a better layout.
Luke:
Fancy and expensive is bad. You have the capabilities to design a simple, clean web page: logo, product, blurb, links. You also have the ability to clean out all of the dross from your current template. Just strip it bare and put your product up front.
Look at other people's websites. Most of them are off-the-shelf software slightly customized. Most you should be able to download right from your host and install directly on your server.
-L
Eero Tuovinen:
As a contrast to Luke's advice on driving people to your site, a thread from a couple of months back comes to mind: Blog, Forum, or Website? deals with the issue of when and why you should use interactive content features on your website. I'm myself a firm believer in small press websites that are static and underdeveloped, as the other option so often is overdevelopment. Having a forum works for Luke, as he has several hundred fans all over the world willing to interact with each other on the forums. Unless your success is already on that scale, it's still too soon to start your own forum. It's an empty, superficial web-creature gesture. What's worse, developing the website is often work that is not being done on the real content - although this is not the case with you, as the webside design is effectively being outsourced by using ready-make solutions. An overall better solution for the humble small press publisher is to concentrate on making his presence known in pre-existing web communities by participating in them; this will drive traffic to his static website and inspire on-going discussion of his work on those community sites.
Speaking of ready-made, I agree with Luke's assessment - your site is chaotic and unnecessarily full of stuff. I understand that it's difficult to really control this stuff if you don't know the relevant web technologies, but perhaps you should go down even more steps in the tree of accessible sitemaking solutions. Like Luke says, there are plenty of off-the-shelf, free solutions that don't require anything more difficult than downloading and ftp-uploading the thing to your site. The trick is to choose a solution that's naturally good-looking, adaptable and well documented, so you can grow into a power-user with your content management system. My own favourite software that hits all of these points has lately been Wordpress, but there are many others as well.
Sebastian K. Hickey:
Hi Seamus,
My website gets very few unique visits per day (30), but considering I've done very little to promote it, I'm happy with the figures. To offer feedback on the subject, maybe as introduction to an ongoing failure/success story, I'll tell you what I've done to promote myself so far. I've blogged the design process of my competition entry for the Two Games One Name competition, I've put up some artwork from one of the artists working on the release version of that product, and I've popped my name (like you'll see below), on the bottom of the posts I make about the project.
I've also dropped a couple of playtest reports on RPG Net, and that's where most of my visitors come from. There are a few repeat visitors who must like keeping up with my design news.
I admit it may not have mass appeal, but I think it's a kind of simple, sexy little website in its own, spidery way. As long as those 30 people keep coming to the site, I'll be a happy chap.
In the past, particularly when the competition results were announced, the figures doubled. At that time, there were several threads in Story Games with a referral link, as well as the main competition website's link. In short, assuming that none of the posts were brash and annoying, the more links that existed in webspace, the more people visited my site.
Sebastian.
Cobweb Games - http://www,cobwebgame.com
Little tweets - http://twitter.com/SebastianHickey
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