Monday, August 10, 2009

New Site live!

I put the new version of my games site live last Wednesday. It was pretty much the first thing I did once we finally got the internet set up in our new house.

At first, of course there were lots of bugs, dead link where I had typos when uploading, and the rating system wasn't working, but that's all mostly fixed and I'm reasonably happy with how the site looks and works. At the moment it doesn't have very many games, so I'm going to try to get the numbers up as quickly as I can. As I said before, finding the right games and formatting them for upload is looking to be almost as big of a job as making the actual site.

My immediate plans are, in order of importance:
1.Get the search working properly.
This is a big issue. I'm trying to use the google site search, both so I don't have to write one myself and so I could potentially get ad revenue. My problem is that google doesn't seem to be referencing my pages - they're all dynamic links, but since you can get to every page from other pages in the site I assumed it would work it out. This doesn't seem to be the case. I'm going to look into it, but if I can't sort it quickly I'm going to have to ditch google and do my own one.
2. Change the thumbnail info to include rating and plays.
Hopefully this shouldn't be too much work. I just want to add the rating, date added and plays to the game thumbnails. Also I need to clean up the css and structuring of that element.
3. Make an admin page and image upload.
I really want to have a game upload page where I can enter in all the info and upload the image and swf. If I can do it properly so it error checks the paths and info I can avoid the annoying typo errors I've been making while uploading games using ftp and phpadmin.
4. Make and add some games.
In order to generate traffic I'm going to need to make some more games linking back to my site. Probably the hardest task, and I'm not sure when I'll next have time. I'm slightly regretting licensing Bug Squad, since it would be really cool to have a game to launch with.

I'm working on site at the moment at an agency, probably for the next week or two. I'm hoping that there will be a natural break where I can work, but I don't feel I can turn down work at the moment, and I don't expect the site to make any significant income in the near or medium term. Unfortunately if I don't pull my finger out it won't even in the long term. Oh well.

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