Domain name problem - unified frontpage suggestion

[nUllSkillZ]

Yesterday id and Activision gave the community a great present by not taking a domain that’s in use of the community.
Thnx id and Activision.

Nevertheless there’s some confusion concerning the domain name and the content of the pages (official page vs. not official / fan / community page).
I’ve had the idea to create some unified / uniform intro page for all not official fan and community pages.
Suggestions:

[ul]
[li]a statement that this is a fan-/community-page and not an official page
[/li][li]linkpage with banner links to:
[/li][list:eb04760c74]
[li]the producer ( http://www.idsoftware.com/ )
[/li][li]the publisher
[/li][list:eb04760c74]
[li]international ( http://www.activision.com/ )
[/li][li]national ( for example http://www.activision.de/ for DE )
[/li][/ul]
[li]the developer ( http://www.splashdamage.com/ for W:ET and ET:QW )
[/li][li]the mainpage of the game ( http://www.enemyterritory.com/ for ET:QW )
[/li][/list:u:eb04760c74]
[li]and of course a continue link to your fan-/community-page
[/li][/list:u:eb04760c74]
The more content your webpage has the more banners you would have on this frontpage (for example Gray Matter http://www.gmistudios.com/Games.htm for RTCW content and so on).

[JBRAA]

nUllSkillZ: I’m not sure exactly what you mean. "I’ve had the idea to create some unified / uniform intro page for all not official fan and community pages. " An intro page where you have to click through everytime to get to the news page? That is a nice gesture for 1st time visitors, but daily visitors would use a bookmark for the news.php page, or in any other way auto-skip the intro page.

A common thing on other game fan sites, is that you have on bottom of each page where the copyright notice usually is:
“This site Site name, is an unofficial fan site to the PC game Game name. This site is not affiliated with Game Developer or Game Publishe. All trademarks are protected bla bla.”
Where the Game name is linked to the official game site, and Game Developer is linked to its official site and same with Game Publisher.

And that bottom text as far as I know keeps the lawyers away.

[nUllSkillZ]

Why not adding such an intro page.
I don’t see a problem
As you said: Visitors of the community will have bookmarks to the news pages.
And first time visitors aren’t confused.
id and Activision did something for the community.
Now it’s our turn.

A quick and dirty example using enemy-territory.com as fanside.
The logos have been taken from W:ET assets.
ET:QW logo was made quick and dirty from the official side (fanside kit unfortunately disabled).
E-T.com logo was taken from their homepage.
May be id / Activision / SD and the other involved companies could provide official logo’s that could be used if the community likes the idea.

I know it doesn’t look good.
But I think it should be uniform to all sides using such an intropage.
Alternatively a template of the fanside could be used.

[Fab]

Splash pages can be useful at times but what you’re suggesting would just be an annoyance to users.

[ayatollah]

It wouldn’t be an annoyance as regular visitors will bypass the page. This would be only to appease people who are looking for the main enemyterritory.com site but accidently end up on enemy-territory.com site. As has been said, bookmarks are your friend. Also it is possible for only new visitors to see the splash page. I think its a good idea.

[Loffy]

The main idea is great. To get some clearity and logic. The actual design is a matter of discussion.

[nUllSkillZ]

This is only a suggestion.
I think there’s a problem that has to be solved.
So other suggestions are welcome.

Edit:

Yes I know that I suck if it comes to design.

Edit:

Overworked the design a little bit.
ETQW logo has been taken from the SD.com homepage (from one of the news).

Edit:

last version

[RosOne]

Well, hmm… ok… where do I start…

Of course every fansite wants to have the highest search engine position for certain top keywords. In this case Enemy Territory, Quake Wars and so on. The road to the top of Google is a very long one. I won’t write about what you should do to get there, but rather what you should not do. The worse thing you can do is get penalized by Google. How? By a) having duplicated content from other sites b) being a link farm.

If a couple sites have the same frontpage (which is the page with the highest pagerank btw) Google will see the most important one as the content creator and reduce the importance of the other sites which could eventually lead to removing a site from the index.

The better the code of a site the better the possibility for higher ranking and in effect more traffic (content > code). Obviously every ET sites posts pretty much the same ET news, right? So the better you are in coding your frontpage the better for your site. Would you plaster the same spash screen on there? Nope, no way

Posting several outgoing links on your frontpage and a couple internal ones could get categorized as a link farm. Of course everyone saw them and knows what I’m talking about. Those sites are generally spam. The Google bot doesn’t play ET or any other games… it’s a bot… counts the links, checks for other content and decides what this page is. I’m not saying your site will get banned from Google, but it sure doesn’t have a positive effect on your site.

Ads get you most money on frontpages and it’s against the rules of some services to add them on non-content pages.

Your PageRank will decrease since you’re giving it away to external sites again decreasing the importance of your site.

To end this… it’s a nice but bad idea and no admin would do it. People pay lots of money for a backlink on PR5+ sites and there is absolutely no reason for any website to just give that away.

PS. And no, pop-ups are crap…

[nUllSkillZ]

Hmm, make it a sticky news (with smaller icons or only textlinks) on the frontpage.

[Nail]

we are in the process of adding disclaimers and links, hopefully we will have something very soon, I think bottom of every page would be best like JBRAA mentioned

[nUllSkillZ]

It wasn’t meant as E-T.com only.
It was meant as contribution of the community.
To honor id’s and Activision’s work and their behavior towards the community.
Seems that not so many community members are interested in such an action.
Disappointing.

[Nail]

I understand it wasn’t directed at our site, was just agreeing with you in my own confused manner

[ouroboro]

To put this all another way:

Open ETMain. See those icons at the bottom? Yeah, those people made the game happen. Give 'em a shoutout on your site.

Other notables include OSP which was included from the beginning, and ETPro for the 2.60 patch.

Click the credits button…

I don’t think a splash page is necessary, just add them to the button farm. It’s not like they need the traffic, it’s a gesture.

[Nail]

the old site had all the logos, unfortunately when we were hacked last time we had to put the site back up with the new forum software when it wasn’t really ready, since then both Easyrider and myself have been VERY busy with real life, neither of us are school kids. Logos and a disclaimer wil be added along with links

btw, I know who made the game happen, I’m not exactly new at this

[ouroboro]

Nail I wasn’t specifically addressing you, just people with ET sites in general. Relax.

[nUllSkillZ]

BTW is there an official W:ET side?
I only know the Wolfenstein page of Activision.
And that ET.com has a side about W:ET (as far as I remember a download only).

[Nail]

yepper, that’s the official site and pretty much the reason our site exists

[Hakuryu]

Don’t most games install a link in the start menu to their official sites these days?

Pretty sad that gamers cant find an official site when the link is installed lol.

[ouroboro]

That’s not the point here.

[GlobalWar]

I agree with RosOne. PageRank is very important if you want more visitors.
But if all the fansites have a link to the official sites (at the bottom) the pagerank of the official site will get higher so in that way we are helping the publisher and creators dont we?