A while ago there was talk of indie developers banding together to link to each other and generate more sales. Nothing ever came of it, but whilst trying to increase hits on my own site recently i came accross a great free web counter at www.thecounter.com. This stuff lets you get a look at a detailed log of visits to your website, including the all important referrer information that tells you where you are getting your hits from, which is very interesting reading! You can even make the counter invisible like i did (i kept my regular demon counter). There dont appear to be any drawbacks at all. I have no connection with the company at all, just thought I would pass on a tip to fellow indie developers. One of the problems I spot with indie games websites is that they just seem very amateur, and cant compete with the likes of the bigger publishers. Anything that helps us indies increase web traffic (and thus sales) has got to be good eh? http://www.positech.co.uk

I could knock up a simple kind of "Game Indie Ring". The advantage of doing it instead of not using others, is that it could be customised brilliantly - I think I am up for the project cos I need something else to add to my website (bar content ).

Anyway, tell me if this is what you were meaning?

Philip Lutas
CEO of Optical Realities

If someone wishes a banner exchange with me for a week contact me. Banners will be placed at the top of both sites or at the bottom (depends on agreement).

My sites:
Main Site
Smugglers website

Edited by - Jester101 on May 26, 2001 8:53:24 AM

I have to say that I hate the big websites of big companies, they look nice but no content, I prefer doing stuff with notepad, using frames (tables suck) to have a menu at the left and stuff at the right, and option for the menu being simple, like "download" for the demos, "games" showing screen shots and a description of each game, "buy" to buy the full versions online (never using the word register), "news" could be below the main picture at the right frame, "message board" with a link to a free board at beseen.com or others, "FAQ" if needed, and the most important "CONTACT" with at least a shitty hotmail address, I hate sites without a contact email address, this is an example but basically I prefer sites that are simple rather than boring and annoying flash shockwave animations.


Edited by - Roman Arce on May 27, 2001 5:53:46 AM

I am interested in having a simple indie games banner excahnge, but as the original indiedev website group agreed, it would only be for pretty serious indie outfits, those with at least 1 finished game for sale, of good quality, and getting at least a dozen or so hits a day. It no good linking to lots of still under development webistes or those with no hits.
Anyone who is interested in being a part of this just email me, you can take a look at my website and games to get an idea of the level I am pitching at.
Jester, your site looks very interesting, and the game sounds similar to starlines so we might do well to swap links, I''m downloading smugglers as we speak.
Keep Coding Team

http://www.positech.co.uk

Sure cliffsky. Contact me at contact@nbsd.de and we work something out. I have about 2000 unique visitors each month and more than 10.000 hits.

Edited by - Jester101 on May 27, 2001 8:12:39 AM

yeah, bravenet.net has that sort of thing too.


A CRPG in development...

Need help? Well, go FAQ yourself.

I recently started my shareware website. The main page only has 500 hits or so, heh. I think it gets like 20-30hits per day which is pretty crap. My emulator site generates around 200-800 hits per day depending on if i update it regurlarly or not. The emulator site has been around since November and currently has 45,000 ish hits(really 55,000 since there was a counter wipe at 10,000 hits).
I think the thing is shareware sites dont really get that much traffic. My emulator site directs 90% of the people to my main shareware site. So maybe the problem is more of a ''not many high rating sites are linking to my site'' or something. Anyways Positech guy, my friend showed me your stuff it looks pretty good, and Jester although I havnt tried smugglers, I hear it is good. I''ll link to both of your guys webpages if you like, under my links section. Just email me your banners or whatever you want to be shown. I only have one sorta crappy Chess game released so far, no one has bought it, but I realise now all the problems with it(ie Who would buy a chess game where you need to get a friend to play it with, if you know what i mean, and also good competition . I''m working on a game soon, that I will probably be able to finish in a month or so(I code pretty quick), but anyways, enough talking, more doing, eh .
email-jstarr@freezesoftware.com
web-www.freezesoftware.com

-Jason Starr-



---------------
Freeze Software
---------------

My banner URL (for everyone interested) is:

Banner: http://www.nbsd.de/Smugglers/images/banner.gif
Link: http://www.nbsd.de/Smugglers/indexE.html

I am going to try and find a good banner rotating program that will let us get something organised here, if anybody knows a good one let me know, and anyone with a suitable site just post to this thread. I guess we are looking for sites with finished games, preferably more than one, with good, professional content, good banners and of course quite a few hits. I get about 160 - 200 hits a day on my site.

http://www.positech.co.uk