Free Choice Games – A Site Made For WordPress
Site BuildsPublished April 7, 2010 at 12:55 am 3 CommentsFree Choice Games is currently (simultaneously) in final config and public beta for version one of the site build. As I said earlier, this is a fast-track build and deploy, but final release has had to be stalled to get GaMTEP online and at least partially set up. Therefore leaving Free Choice Games alone, for a day or so, to “settle in” won’t hurt.
The games catalogue is now auto-updating twice-daily with new releases, the download and purchasing systems are done, the management statistics and general admin tools are integrated, and the initial styling build is complete (subject to user popularity and acceptance). Contact Forms and onsite advertising systems are all complete, plus a bucket full of other stuff.
Obviously there’ll be some tweaking to what’s been achieved so far, maybe even some bug squashing to do, but the last elements to be added before leaving beta will be the newsletter subscription system (built but not yet integrated as of today). That is due to be run on another open source platform here at GaMTEP under the service name “Zykes”.
Future enhancements (to the public side of the site) will be to include a public rating and reviewing system for the games in the catalogue, as well as for articles and editor’s reviews. Links and icons for social networking need added (and their corresponding accounts and pages set up), and of course the newsletter subscription interface. Plus there’s that basic point of it all – the content. I’m not dumb enough to believe the site will succeed on just imported games descriptions and reader reviews. It needs a bit more meat on the bones than that, and I have several ideas to follow up (by blogging) as time allows.
Short term additional enhancements revolve around promoting the site. Additional plug-ins (e.g. to tweet posts automatically, update the blog services like Technorati and Google blog search, etc) will be needed in the non-public side of the site, it needs fan pages on facebook, MySpace and so on, and those need updated by RSS. Friends lists for them all will need built, and so the list goes on. A salutary lesson to beginners – building the site is the quickest part of the job, promoting it never ends – automate that as much as possible.
As soon as I have a few hours to integrate the newsletter system, hopefully in the next day or two, FreeChoiceGames.com will be able to move out of public beta status and into final release (version one). That’s when the hard work of creating unique content regularly, and marketing the site, really begins. Which is why the inclusion of the rating and review system earlier, rather than later, is a high priority.
I did try GD Star Ratings (by Milan Petrovic) early in the development of the site, but it’s more an application in its own right than just a plug-in, and is just far too complex and non-intuitive for rapid site development if you’ve never used it before. If I cannot find anything simpler and equally suitable, then GD Star Ratings is on the to-do list for v2.x of the site, due to its range of features and functions, although I’d still prefer something easier to implement and manage – anyone got any recommendations?
Despite that, I’d like to throw out a big, warm, “Thank You” to all the theme and plug-in developers whose work was used and abused to get Free Choice Games built and launched so fast, allowing me to scratch a personal itch. (Oscar speech warning…) Most especially I have to thank WordPress for being the core of it all. Who needs anything else?
Fantastic blog, I had not noticed gamtep.com previously during my searches!
Keep up the wonderful work!
Nice content. Thank you for your information.
First of all ,you have picked a really nice template. I think i might design something similar for a future project that i plan to build. On top of that, i honestly enjoy most of your articles and your different point of view. Good Job