New Trench Wars Website Design

[kthx]

Well now that you came through with your end of the bargain I will come through with mine, lets get together in game and discuss how much money I will have available to talk to flash game designers with.

Edit: The new website preview looks good besides a few minor things that need some tweaking that people have mentioned earlier in the thread.

[renzi]

Light blue or grey just doesn't fit a spaceship game.

i may be mistaken, but if i remember correctly, wasnt the old site some kind of grey or light blueish thing?

[Fork]

lol, where did you come up with those statistics? Our main target audience is towards people who don't care much about the graphics but more towards the game play and community atmosphere.

With our current website, we have a .006 download rate. That's 6 people that download for every 1000 new people that visit our site. My goal at this point is to increase that download rate, and then subsequently increase the number of people that visit the site.

Getting a player to actually DOWNLOAD the game is 75% of the battle. The rest is up to the community and how they choose to treat newcomers. Staff has implemented several measures to identify a new player and have an actual person (<ZH>) greet them as soon as they enter the zone (first saying hello, detailing the game, explaining the concept and answering questions).

Now that they’ve downloaded that game, it might be a few weeks from now, but they’ll be bored one day and see that little Continuum icon on their desktop…It’s only a matter of time before they open it up once again to see what we are all about.

It shouldn't require any donation money to upgrade ships/graphics or to improve pub. We have several developers who donate their time and effort towards this initiative already. There also have been several updates to pub (pub money system) that for many make the game more appealing and fun.

What will keep players here is having a friend on here. Think back as to why you stayed? Even when you started, there were games with much better graphics. I had a friend introduce me to this game and played with me online, which made it much more fun.

If we can’t have players introduce friends, then how about current players make friends with new players to entice them to come back?

Getting a new player on a chat or on a pub squad would make a world of difference in getting them to come back.

Anyways, just my thoughts,

-24

Obviously it wasn't actual statistics... it was just how i feel (exactly like when u mention "Getting a player to actually DOWNLOAD the game is 75% of the battle"). What statistics you really should obtain is how many new players enter the game- how many of those new players are still playing after 1 week/ 1 month etc. If you get only 10% of new players staying after only 1 week... then you know things need to be improved- this statistic needs to be improved. I support this website and getting people to download the game but the real challenge is getting them to stay playing this game to the point that they understand how addictive this game can be. Believe it or not this game is complicated... from the tips and quirks thread it seems that old players are still learning commands/ things they did not know. Still new players entering think its only about pub- nothing else... once they stay long enough to understand that they could join a squad and battle other squads and other kewl stuff- they are more likely to return and those statistics of new players staying after 1 week will improve

[fiS]

i may be mistaken, but if i remember correctly, wasnt the old site some kind of grey or light blueish thing?

The current one is somewhat orange / dark red / white / black
I'm just saying it needs more Space.. More Trench Wars

If we can’t have players introduce friends, then how about current players make friends with new players to entice them to come back?

Getting a new player on a chat or on a pub squad would make a world of difference in getting them to come back.

Anyways, just my thoughts,

-24

And already on that we are currently working on.

[Twenty Four]

And already on that we are currently working on.

Yes, we as Staff are. I was suggesting the players do this as well; that would be much more effective.

-24

[Twenty Four]

Obviously it wasn't actual statistics... it was just how i feel (exactly like when u mention "Getting a player to actually DOWNLOAD the game is 75% of the battle").

I actually laughed at myself as I was writing the 75%, expecting it to be thrown back at me as a made up statistic.

Per your suggestion, I'll work on getting some real hard statistics on how many new players stay and how many don't so that we can get our head around what is happening. Then we can slowly make changes/updates and record the effects of those changes. (help/hurt).

If we can get 10% people to stay, that would be AWESOME. That's a really really really high number as our turn around rate (educated guess), is around 98+% (leave after a few minutes).

-24

[Twenty Four]

Well now that you came through with your end of the bargain I will come through with mine, lets get together in game and discuss how much money I will have available to talk to flash game designers with.

Sounds like a plan to me,

-24

[Reaver]

How can you be sure the people bouncing after a minute or two aren't people already playing TW or some other zone?

You can try to increase the click through rate, or you can increase the traffic to the website, or you can do both. If you're going to try and increase the traffic to the site you can read some books on SEO, or find an SEO expert. I can give lots of tips on search engine optimization but I'm not an expert. Your ultimate goal is to show up in google on the first or at worst second page for searches like 'free online game' 'free online games' 'free mmo' 'online game' and so on. An SEO expert would do research on how competitive each of those long-tail keywords are and provided it has enough search traffic go after the least competitive one. You can spend a lot of money showing up as an advertisement on google and when the money runs out your ads end and thats that, or you can spend a lot of money showing up as a result of the search on google, which can last for quite a while (although not indefinitely).

If you are looking to advertise I'd recommend doing a google search for 'adult gamers' or 'adult gaming forum' and pick a few, contact admins and see what their advertising costs are for a banner. That's just my opinion, some people might think its better to bring in young gamers

[Twenty Four]

The statistics are separated out Reaver. I'm looking at people coming in from outside (google, links, etc). Not direct type-ins.

You wouldn't go to some other site, just to go to www.trenchwars.org. As a player, you would type it in directly.

As far as SEO goes, that's definitively part of the game plan. We had great SEO before trenchwars.org went down for a month. (6 months ago?). Now we pretty much have to rebuild it from scratch. Also, w/ the new website being a CMS (ever changing content), SEO will be easier to get as well. I think the best bet is to have multiple websites linking to ours.

As you suggested, the one section of our strategy is to have banner ads across multiple sites that appeal to our target audience.

I'd be happy to get w/ you and talk about this a bit more. I have experience in doing this, but I'm always looking for help.

-24

[Jones]

why dont you two come jd with me instead

[Twenty Four]

I'm at work.

-24

[Nockm]

Looks nice. It's not slick or inspired at all, but I guess it'll do. I'd say it is better than the current tw.org with regards to links being a bit simpler to find and overall a bit more spacious. To be honest I was expecting more, mainly because this was paid for. Putting on my pedant-hat:

- Although it looks clean, it's still a bit needlessly cluttered on the top.
- I'll be in the minority here but it irks me when a website forces everything to be in a narrow column. (Just from a usability POV.)

Good effort though, the fact that it hasn't been ripped to shreds in this thread speaks volumes - well done

[Twenty Four]

- I'll be in the minority here but it irks me when a website forces everything to be in a narrow column. (Just from a usability POV.)

I believe we have the option of expanding it based on user resolution. I have 2x 27" widescreen monitors and it looks fine on there. I don't think that will be a concern on this site. We are using Joomla (a CMS) so you are going to have the "column view". I think when we get done w/ everything you'll be pleasantly surprised. I still have high hopes for this project. (As you pretty much stated, can't please everyone)

Thanks for your input and support,

-24

[Burnt]

I noticed trenchwars.net redirects you to trenchwars.org. Then when you're on trenchwars.org and you go to TWD or the forum it goes back to .net. Would that be bad from an SEO perspective?

[Jason]

yes. horrible, in fact.