At an upcoming regional conference, my wife will be presenting a number of horseback riding games that she has adapted for her work with special needs folks (i.e. “equine therapy”).
In that she has developed far more games than she will be able to include in her presentation, I’m thinking of purchasing a domain to populate it with descriptions of all the games she’s developed and adapted. The idea being that she can pass out the URL at the end of her talk.
While I’m at it, what’s involved in adding a blog and, for those games that use commercial products, affiliations to that domain?
BTW I’m reasonably familiar with PHP, flavors of html, mySql and CSS so I think I can handle the technical challenges. I’m more interested in your thoughts on the visitor dynamics.
I guess you could have a blog that also has pages, or have a site with pages that also has a blog. eg.
Each game consitutes a “blog post” and there are other pages like “about”, “contact” etc.
Or a site that has “content pages” and has a blog associated with the site.
I’m unclear as to what you mean by “commercial products” and “affiliations”.
That is, are you using content from other sites? (if so get permission).
You want to get “credit” for any visitors to your site that click through to an affiliate site? (use referral links?)
It is good that you are thinking about user dynamics. This is an important aspect to good UX design.
You can think up some “personas” to get an idea of what various users might be interested in, and then think of ways you could organize things to make finding, getting to, and using the information as easy as possible for them.
Once you get a prototype set up, you should have others try it and get feedback from their experience using it.
Note that user testing does not need to be on a “live” site that has already launched. You could put the demo-test site on a localhost server and use that. Or you could put up a “coming soon” index for a domain and use something like domain.com/test-index.php to get to the test pages. (this method would be more involved and be an expense, so IMHO a localhost approach would probably be better)