What website tech do You the community use for your game site/blogs?

Hey yall! New Guy here

Began using Unity early in 2014, better late than never I guess! Followed a few Tutorials, good results - very impressed with capabilitys. Previous code experiance.. not much; only RPGToolkit's RPGCode, HTML & CSS. Professional background? McDonalds (lol).

I have to say... I LOVE UNITY !!! I am eager to learn AS MUCH AS I CAN AS QUICKLY AS I CAN ! Well done to all involved in making this fantastic engine!

Jumped back into tutorials recently like in 2015. Pong Game, Roll-A-Ball, Space Shooter, currently the Survival Shooter. Programming/Scripting in C# only. Beggining to understand scripting in C# & Unity, but only like 1.2% !

27 year old. Male. United Kingdom. Open-minded but not empty-headed! Aspiring Game/Software Developer. Dabbles in Art and somtimes Sounds. I Look forward to spending many great years in & with the Unity community.

I have a question relating to Blogs/Websites...

This post has got me wondering whether or not to continue building my site custom (please forgive its basic nature Its a very young site) or to look for a similar service to the one in the linked post for my own site project. My site is just HTML & CSS, nothing flashy or sparkly like I could have with Wix for instance. I have used some free web-builder services in the past but I rarely like the template-layouts they provide, I just dont like the generalisation of things, I know they can be customised tho.

I am wondering if any of you use such services and what recommendations you may have? which may be more easily or broadly customizable or which aren't as good?

I am planning to post on my website about the future projects I develop and perhaps use it as a ground to promote my products upon. Obviously If do create any half-decent games in the future then I would like a half-decent place to provide them and showcase them to any potential players, websites are useful, blah blah ect.

What do people think? Cr*py custom HTML or a free flashy site building tool. which is best? I guess it would be far easier to get traffic and attention using a service like wix as they come with social Icons ect

Thanks, dey.

 

Welcome to the forum.

Custom is always going to be better than with a site builder, but obviously that's not always going to be within a developer's reach.

I don't really know of any good site builder type tools since I do all of mine from pretty much scratch with php, etc. My games (PC) and their sites generally make heavy use of custom back-end databases on a dedicated server to handle a lot of traffic, so ready-made site templates don't work so well.

What you go with totally depends on your own personal needs of course. For what you've said you want to do, like posting updates, etc. I would imagine WordPress would be a good choice. There are a ton of themes so you don't have to worry about that, and setup takes a few minutes to an hour or so. That way you can be up and running with a great looking, easy to use site in no time, freeing you up to focus on development instead of web design.

 

Work moved over to Wix and, despite my usual preference against such tools, it actually worked out quite well for us. Sure, we have people on hand who could do cool custom stuff manually, but we'd rather they spent their time building stuff than working on our web page.

One thing worth mentioning is that Wix isn't that hot on old browsers or slow connections.

 

I'm using bluehost + weebly addon. It's been pretty affordable and the weebly addon has been great since I used the free version of weebly before. Keeps things easy to maintain and update with little hassle, lets me focus on actual content.

 

I did forget to mention I'll probably also want to be hosting any potential game files on my site, and that I have effectively zero budget at present - so I would only have the free options available if I were to use a service like Wordpress ect, from my experiance these are usually limited in regards to file-hosting. My current setup is free and somewhat limited but obviously not as limited as I have found some website-template services in the past.

In the future once I have completed a few single-player style games I am interested to look into network-style games, small scale ofcourse but multiplayer none the less. Im a PC gamer myself, so any multiplayer game I do make will be for PC firstly. I have ZIP experiance in network games however, but at that point, I'd imagine a forum and a decent news page would be desireable. SO I have just got myself a PHP & MySQL book, I have not done anything in either language/tech before, but gaining knowledge in those two is obviously going to be important step for me.

Thanks for your help folks, and the welcome Ony think I will stick to custom web creation for the time being, as the saying goes - or the lyrics more accurately: "Things.... Can Only Get Bettter... Yeaha"

 

I would strongly recommend you use something like wordpress, drupal or joomla, building your own only means reinventing the wheel.

I put this site together last week: http://www.cubica.net
it has blog, forum, wiki, chatbox, it is responsive (works great on mobile), users can register and set their avatars, it took me 3 days with wordpress, and I can simply go back to do what I really want to do: make my game. I purposely chose a minimalist theme, as I like clean and simple sites, but there are hundreds of themes available off the shelf to pick from. Switching between them is just a matter of a few clicks, and you can always edit the templates to make it look anyway you want.

I also want to point out this is the first time I use wordpress, so it is not like there is a huge learning curve.

 

WordPress is also something that you can install on your own host, you don't need to use their service. It's super easy to install and get going with. Anyway... If you want to have control of your stuff, start learning about php, mySQL, and all that, AND get a web site up and running in the mean time, for very little money, here's what I would recommend:

Go to HostGator.com and sign up for their cheapest hosting plan, which is something like $3 a month. I have a dedicated server at a different host (choopa.com if anyone is interested - I've been with them since 2009 and they rock) where my larger sites are, but I do still have a couple of smaller HostGator sites still up and running and I let some friends use my account there as well to host their sites. Start there and then as your business grows, if you need more power, etc. then you can think about other options.

For now I think this would give you the best bang for your buck. You'll have plenty of space and bandwidth to serve your game files from, you can set up a blog or whatever kind of site you like (they even have a site builder on there if you want to use that), and you can start learning about CPanel and mySQL and php and running your own site and all that fun stuff you seem to be interested in. And it is fun, most definitely.

 

Bookmarked.

Thanks Ony

 

I have a wordpress site on StableHost.com. Pretty easy to setup even though I know nothing about web development.

 

If you don't have much experience with websites, something like wordpress on a cheap webhost (like already mentioned, hostgator for instance) is really easy to setup and to maintain.
Besides, there are thousands of templates to change the look of your wordpress website (free and commercial .. but rather cheap anyways)

If you know a little more about websites and programming (php/sql/js) you should probably go for something like drupal or joomla or even typo3 as the basis for your website. Those are a bit more complex compared to wordpress but ultimately more flexible since you can add/customize a ton of additional things/modules.
Template wise its pretty much the same as with wordpress. Loads of free and commercial templates out there that you can use and/or customize.

Anyways... if you can, I suggest to write your own site from scratch. Ultimately it may be a bit more effort at first but nothing beats a tailor made website. If you want to add/customize something to your site you know exactly where everything goes in the code and the database so you're way more flexible and the site is less bloated with stuff you don't use anyways. And/or you could still integrate 3rd party scripts for specific things like a forum ... I would definitely not recommend writing that on your own, but with solutions like IPB, SMF Forum, etc... its really easy to integrate into existing sites.
Besides .. its really fun I do that stuff for a living

Tl;dr:
get wordpress

 

If you don't want to spend time I would recommend Wordpress or Drupal. you can learn PHP and customize these a bit.

Alternatively you can learn PHP and use a micro framework like Silex or a framework like Symfony, Laravel, CakePHP etc.

PHP is an easy language to learn and has a decent job prospects with a lower entry barrier.

 

I find E107 CMS (Content Management System) really easy to use.
There are free themes, but most cost money, you definitely get what you pay for with E107 themes.

But I find the Admin section superior to any CMS I've used like ever.

 

I use wordpress because its easy snd theres tons of plugins to change stuff without doing any work. I want to impress people with my game and have my site be as simple and unobtrusive as possible.

 

I don't bong but I do have a free and plain website with a business domain name (costs).

 

NOTE: If you plan to make a mobile game, make sure your website displays well on mobile devices.

Wordpress has a good selection of "responsive" themes that automatically adapt to look good on PC, Tablet, and mobile screens. The default twentyfifteen, twentyfourteen, and twentythirteen themes are all responsive. A search for "responsive wordpress theme" will come up with a bunch more options.

If you want a more hands-on approach, I recommend the foundationpress theme from ZURB. Foundation is a proven framework used to make professional websites including the mozilla website and fandango. With a little knowledge of PHP and CSS you can make a very non-wordpress looking website. I made this website in about 3 days with minimal PHP and CSS (and a little graphic design experience )