Creating A Website For A Game Development Studio

Having just launched our brand new site for Incubator Games, I figured I'd talk a bit about its development.

Initially we had thrown together two quick splash pages, one for Incubator Games and one for Tribes of Mexica. They contained only basic information and served as good placeholder, but it was time to upgrade. Before we did, though, I wanted to do some research.

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1). Preparation

  Small developers have the advantage (and the obligation) of self-promotion. Without the red-tape of PR, concerns over trade secrets, time-lined marketing campaigns, etc., we can much more freely engage our audience. 

Now community involvement is a rather obvious point, but there's more to indie game sites than just having a blog. To pinpoint some other themes, I visited 2D Boy, Wolfire, Tale of Tales, Introversion, The Behemoth, thatgamecompany and various other websites. Here are a few common things that popped up:

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With all that in mind, we designed a site that would look fairly sleek and uncluttered, and would fit the motif of our logo.

2). Wordpress

Once we had a visual design and a good idea of what content to include, we had to decide on the best way to actually create it. I had previously used WordPress for my blog and got pretty comfortable with it, so I decided to try it out for our website.

WordPress provides an integrated system for posting news items complete with comments and RSS, and an easy way to implement static pages. Its customization options are pretty good as well, and I knew it'd be able to support most (if not all) of our desired features.

What's more, WordPress has a huge community behind it that creates various plugins. These plugins greatly enhance and append to the functionality of WordPress, and there's one for just about anything you can imagine. The plugins we're currently using on our site are:

We had to tweak some of these plugins for our own purposes, but it wasn't hard to incorporate them into the website.

As a side note, Pods is a plugin that can bring WordPress much closer to a fully-fledged CMS. We didn't have time to try it ourselves, but we've heard good things and might give it a try in the future.

3). Nuts 'n' Bolts

One of the most useful resources for web developers (especially ones that are a bit rusty) is W3Schools. The site is filled with numerous tutorials and one-stop references for HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP and many more areas of web development.

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Of course it's often browser cross-compatibility that gives developers the most headaches, and that's where developer tools come in. These include Firebug for Firefox, Dragonfly for Opera, IE Developer Toolbar for Internet Explorer, and Web Inspector for Safari and Google.

All of these applications share a lot of functionality, including the ability to inspect the properties of any element on the website. In short, they allow the user to easily track down a component and view its box-model and HTML/CSS attributes. This might not sound like a lot, but it helps to visualize how the browser interprets and outputs the markup, and how rendering problems can be mitigated.

Another useful resource for browser cross-compatibility is BrowserShots. This free service can render a website as it would appear in various browsers at various resolutions. The screenshots it outputs can be viewed on the site or downloaded in a single zip -- definitely useful.

In addition to these tools -- and WordPress.com Stats -- we're making use of Google Analytics and StatCounter. All three of these applications are used to monitor traffic, but they also contain various levels of complexity and unique features that make each one worthwhile.

4). Promotion

Our webhost provides search engine submissions, so we took advantage of that instead of searching online for similar services. Providers for search engine submission certainly do exist, but the free ones seem to require a link-back, and we can't personally vouch for the paid ones as we didn't use them. 

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Social bookmarking sites have generated a fair amount of traffic for us in the past, so we made sure to include them on our new site, particularly the ones targeted at game development such as IndieGaming and GameDevKicks.

We also submitted our site to Open Directory and sent out a press release using Games Press.

One final -- and quite vital -- source of traffic I'd like to mention is conventions. GameOn Finance and Vortex were recently held here in Toronto, and we wanted to make sure that we had the new site ready for them. While at the conventions, I met lots of people and saw a significant spike in our direct traffic and referrals from LinkedIn.

And, of course, it's just good to get out there and make yourselves known.

Radek Koncewicz is the CEO and creative lead of Incubator Games, and also runs the game design blog Significant-Bits.