How to attract visitors...

[fujita]

Hello everyone.
I have a personal plan of making a website about games, either PC or console. In that site, the visitors can discuss about games, solving problems, exchange informations, changing ideas and something like that. But I lack of great ideas on how to make the website attractive, not in term of appearance, but in term of value. I want to ask for your opinion and ideas about this matter. One of the question to be answered is, what are the things than gamers and visitors of that website found it attractive? Any comments and opinion is highly appreciated. Thank you in advance.:)

[Thorgal]

Imho, you already answered your own question. Your ideas aren't bad at all and could certainly attract visitors, provided the ideas are implemented correctly, technology-wise. That means using scripting languages such as PHP, get a slick design and a .com and you'll get your visitors.

That is, ofcourse, if you're up to all that ;)

[password0k]

Thorgal: What is imho?!? I must know!!

fujita: offer a lot of shareware and freeware, that's c00l. And register w/ google 'an stuff. You also should make it w/ dreamweaver or something to make it look nice, then add your forum-type stuff.

[Nezzar]

IMHO means In My Honest Opinion
You don't need to register at Google "registers" you itself. There was a thread about this some time ago.

[edit]: The thread is here: http://www.ngemu.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11193

[Bobbi]

The main thing you need for good visitor numbers is either a never seen idea (rare these days) or actually much time ... take NGEmu ... we started with 4-5 visitors a day up to around 30.000 daily now - but it took time, the growth was with a good rate.

Additionally, you'll have to be willing to invest some money to get started ... you'll need a .com domain, possibly a commercial message board solution (see the one you're using right now), a good webhost for your site (you *may* find free ones for gaming sites, can't guarantee you that though as the banner market is difficult right now).

Your ideas sound interresting, though I don't know if many other sites like that exist - but what it will certainly require is much time (as any other site does BTW (by the way)).

Much luck,

[Thorgal]

The "H" in imho can also mean "humble", ie. "in my humble opinion". Well, that's what I believe it originally stands for.

As for Google, you don't really need to submit your url as Nezzar said, although personally I'd make a sitemap with links to all the pages of your website, then submit the sitemap url (not the index page) manually to all major search engines. That way, you're sure you won't be missed.

Offering shareware/freeware isn't really 'cool' imho, there are loads of sites which do the same and probably better than you can ever do. You can, ofcourse, still offer freeware progs 'on the side', just don't focus too much on it. Your ideas are much more interesting than that.

Also, why does everyone seem to associate Dreamweaver with sites that look nice? :p kinda crap program if you ask me..

[Nezzar]

Originally posted by Thorgal
The "H" in imho can also mean "humble", ie. "in my humble opinion". Well, that's what I believe it originally stands for.

As for Google, you don't really need to submit your url as Nezzar said, although personally I'd make a sitemap with links to all the pages of your website, then submit the sitemap url (not the index page) manually to all major search engines. That way, you're sure you won't be missed.

Offering shareware/freeware isn't really 'cool' imho, there are loads of sites which do the same and probably better than you can ever do. You can, ofcourse, still offer freeware progs 'on the side', just don't focus too much on it. Your ideas are much more interesting than that.

Also, why does everyone seem to associate Dreamweaver with sites that look nice? :p kinda crap program if you ask me..
Uh, right. 'Honest' makes no sense :emb: (what means humble?).

Dreamweaver is no crap it writes a clean code. I write my sites with a text-editor. That's best and you can be proud of it.

Since shareware increases you're bandwidth (if you have to pay for it) load dramatically I prefer linking to the sites.

[fujita]

Hello everyone.
Thank you very much for all your opinions and advice, fellas. I'm sure that it would help me very much in my website development. Thanks again.:)

[404]

Originally posted by Nezzar

Uh, right. 'Honest' makes no sense :emb: (what means humble?).

Dreamweaver is no crap it writes a clean code. I write my sites with a text-editor. That's best and you can be proud of it.

Since shareware increases you're bandwidth (if you have to pay for it) load dramatically I prefer linking to the sites.

Dreamweaver is no crap, but it sometimes writes unecessary codes, that is intended for 'compatibility reasons' or other ****. But if you can clean the code by yourself, i believe you can trim the html codes made by Dreamweaver up to 30% ;)