freeg131: Philip Gamble

Robin: why would version 8 users need a different site?

(upon hearing I had registered GameMaker8.com)

It is now just over a week since I developed the single page GameMaker8.com into a multipage site in an attempt to provide better content and also enhance monetization opportunities.

A comparison of various statistics taken from the week before the changes and the week after are posted below. Revenue is not disclosed as this is against AdSense terms. The large percentage increase is partly due to the fact I was using a different network before where the site was performing very poorly.

Everything I wanted to increase did see a noticeable change – traffic levels, revenues and the amount of traffic passsed on to Game Maker Blog. Nothing sold via Amazon yet though.

I decided to expand GameMaker8.com from a single page promoting Game Maker and my blog about it to a mini-site with several pages.

Traffic to GM8 has been very good considering the minimal amount of time I have spent on it since registering the domain.  The top Google ranking for “game maker 8″ went pretty quickly to YoYo Games after the final public release of version 8 but traffic still averages about 9,000 page views a month.

Old website:

New homepage:

As well as providing more content, which should keep people on the site for longer, I also turned my attention to trying to monetize the website. The small homepage box ad from Project Wonderful has been replaced with a larger Google Adsense block and the page about Game Maker books gives me the opportunity to plug my Amazon Affiliate links.

I will watch traffic and revenue stats with interest over the next week or so.

Many of the people I know online have blogs and personal websites but the vast majority of people on my course do not (or else they do a good job at hiding them from me!).

Yesterday I set up a website for a friend on my Computer Science course – Joseph Gardiner.   He was surprised at how easy and cheap it was to setup (goDaddy are currently doing .infos at $1.18 for the first year).  In the past I have helped a few of my friends set up something similar but most let them expire after a year or so and don’t maintain them – and these are people who can easily get the .com of their name!

I think having a personal website is pretty important if you work in programming or some kind of creative computing industry as you can use it to showcase your portfolio of work, learn new skills and advertise yourself to potential employers and clients.  A simple WordPress blog is easily customisable and doesn’t require any particular skills to maintain.