Making a game's website using Unity3D WebGL

Hello everyone,

Today I got this Crazy idea on my mind, thinking of creating a website using the Unity3D WebGL

The Website is not a game, it's a website about the game, but thinking to create the website with some 3D visuals.

I'm not serious about this idea, but wanting to hear opinions about what do you think guys!

 

As a web developer by profession, I've considered doing something like this for a while. Not even just with Unity, but using HTML Canvas, Flash, whatever.

The support for WebGL is surprisingly good, so it is feasible. A few downsides I see, though:

• SEO - You could add search terms and keywords and such for your actual web page, but as far as internal "virtual" pages of content, there's no way to indicate to search engines what's there. So getting visitors organically will be difficult
• Loading times - The more content you have, the longer your page takes to load
• Old browser support - Ah, screw 'em.
• Internal links - Not sure if you can pass query string parameters to the WebGL application or not, but if you can't, you wouldn't be able to link to specific content

Sounds like it could be an exciting challenge, though, and would definitely provide an interesting presentation for the content. I say give it a shot!

 

All of this.

Also, I wouldn't probably do a whole site with just WebGL. Using it in places for fancyness seems like a better idea to me.

 

Thanks everyone for the feedback, I'm no expert at web development but thought it will be a good idea to do that, anyways it seems that it'll workout for a game commercial site!

Keep the posts coming and I'll post an update if I've done something, properly it's too early for me!

 

One of my favourite WebGL based blog: http://acko.net

 

SEO? Easy, hidden divs that replicate what is said on the page (display:hidden) Google parses pages like text browser such as Lynx would so it's enough.
Loading times? That may be a problem unless Unity allows you to load resources as you need it, not as a big lump like it is/was case with webplayer.
Internal links? That MAY pose some difficulty. But if Unity can talk to "on site" Javascript (as in inside script tags), JS with jQuery could be used to "decode" query strings (GET only though) and pass it to Unity upon request.

 

Is this current information? I know Google used to be easily fooled with that trick, but I believe they've since updated their page parsing to be more sophisticated in order to defeat gaming of hidden content to increase page rank. By my understanding, Google views your page the same way a human would (with exceptions of alt and title attributes and such) when it comes to evaluating page content.

I guess one way around that would be to have a complex .htaccess/server script framework that detects incoming URL requests and builds each page with appropriate embedded search terms, heading tags, etc. You'd have to maintain that content in a database or something, and also provide a sitemap to guide Google where to go. And this, of course, assumes the URL query strings can be processed as well.

I have enough headaches with just getting CSS to match designers' standards... Maybe some day when I'm feeling masochistic I'll give this idea a shot, though.

 

Wow thats an awesome site, you go there and instantly it's in full high-res 3D. Exciting. It also looks like there's a way there for the scroll position of the web page to communicate to the 3d elements.. although I guess it depends if unity will support that (like in the unity web player).