Website needs a revamp

[Clean0nion]

I'm going to start off by saying this: the website is bad. Sure, it's not terrible, but it's not perfect, either. 

What I'm going to do here is go through most of the pages on knucklecracker.com and state a few improvements, from the perspective of a newcomer. Why? Because a certain games developer deserves more customers for his work. Virgil, I direct this post at you and you alone. 

So the homepage. I see a list of the three creeper world games; a few links to other parts of the site. But that's it. 
Rule One: people are stupid. Everyone is stupid. I am stupid. You are stupid. Everyone reading this is stupid. My cat is stupid. The guy on the other side of the road, waiting for the bus; he's stupid. 
You want a webpage to advertise your games; it has to be clear what that game is. 
You know sometimes, when you load up a flash game, you see an ad that says the name of the game and then a button saying 'play now'? Do you ever click that button? Is a title ever enough to make you want to buy something?
"Wartune: play now!" "Grepolis: play now!" "Runescape: play now!"
Are you tempted to play any of those games?
The likely answer is no. Virgil, if I arrive at your webpage and see three names of games, there is no way I am going to click them. 
You better get some info in there. Tell me what this game is. Is it fast paced? Is it relaxed and slow? Is it a shoot-em-up or a puzzle game or, as the name implies, a rip-off of Minecraft? I don't know! A title isn't going to tell me. You better make sure you tell me what it is in a paragraph at the top. Show me some reviews. Give me a link to CW:Training Simulator. I know it's old but it's free, and that's what people want. 

Let's just say I'm interested. I click into Creeper World, because it's first in the series. I'm greeted by the following text:

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- Overview -
Imagine an enemy that is everywhere and moves like a giant, organic mass across the map.
Imagine your base and your people surrounded by a blanket of crushing destruction from all directions.
Your only hope, well what hope?
Then you take the high ground and pound this enemy into oblivion. You've saved the day just so
you can do it again and again. Do you have what it takes to save your great city and all of history?
This text, the first piece of text that a potential customer will read, is rubbish. It says nothing about the game. I'll rewrite it so it's better, so it makes more sense, so you know what kind of thing to put there. 

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- Overview -
You are the commander of Odin City, the last hope for human civilisation. 
You are surrounded by an enemy the name of which strikes chords of fear throughout the galaxy: the Creeper. 
You know you have no hope of destroying it - its onslaught cannot be prevented - but you can escape. You can repel it. 
Creeper World is a game in which you must use a plethora of weapons to prevent the malicious Creeper from reaching your civilisation. Build a vast logistical network of weapons and construction packets to fend off the menace, whilst delicately balancing your energy with your needs to avoid deficit. 
Fight the Creeper over thousand of levels in the Chronos (I know nothing of CW1, please forgive me) and custom made levels, etc. 
Click here to play the free training simulator demo and save your race from destruction!
Make sure you have pictures and videos on this page. 

What I know of CW2 is even less than my knowledge of CW1 because I played two levels of the demo and thought it was rubbish. Others will disagree but I'm not even going to look at the web page for it. 

Now I'll start on CW3. This is the text I'm greeted with:

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For billions of years empires rose to greatness. Each fell to the Creeper till none remained.
Now all hope appears lost. Who will stand against the Creeper? Experience this extreme and massive expansion of the Creeper World franchise. Nothing will ever be the same...
Massive maps, custom units scripting, terraforming, Gravatars? Can you handle the challenge?What I'm going to do here is not continue my description from where I left off from on CW1, but repeat it. Do you ever pick up a book and nothing makes any sense in it, until you realise that it's a sequel? That gets very annoying. The same goes for films, particularly Harry Potter 7 and 8. 
If a potential customer reads that text, they don't want to know that it's an expansion of a franchise. They want to know what the game is about. So again, I'll to an extent rewrite it. 

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Billions of years into the future, a man is awoken from an age-long sleep: the age of Creeper. That man is Skarsgard Abraxis, and that man is you. 
Alone on a spaceship in a dying solar system, with the only the ship's computer for company, you see that an old enemy is waiting on the nearby planets: the unstoppable Creeper. 
It is your duty to destroy it, ever last piece of Creeper, and to find out why you are here, so deep in the future. Civilisations and species have risen and fallen as you slept, always destroyed by the Creeper. Only you can make a stand. 
Creeper World 3 is the latest addition to the Creeper World series of games by Virgil White (is that your surname?). Build a vast network to generate energy and force that power into a final stand against the menace that is the Creeper. Fight on massive worlds, change and manipulate the landscape to suit your needs, and employ Anti-Creeper to repel your enemy. Face the Creeper-conducting digitalis, take down the destructive Runners, and fend off hordes of bombarding spores. Dial-up randomly generated levels, play through thousands of pre-generated levels, or just make your own. Even script your own enemy Creeper or friendly units using the versatile CRPL: Creeper Reverse Polish Language.
Can you handle the challenge that is Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal?

I only have a few more points to make before you can get rid of me:
1. The background images that show screenshots of the game: darken then by about 30% and decrease the saturation by about 25%. 
2. The forum: make it, if you can, more reminiscent of the homepage. If you don't do that, at least do it to your blog. 
3. Change your slogan. "Fresh ideas in gaming" doesn't really apply if your only three games use the same concept. 

I've made this post just to help. My main goal is to help you, Virgil, attract more customers and get more money. All of your previous players, the devoted ones, have probably bought the game by now. I consider myself pretty devoted but I wasn't aware that CW3 was in development until Dinnerbone tweeted about it, and I've only bought the one game. Not as devoted as I could be. 

The time is nigh for me to shut up. I bid you good day, and good luck to your endeavours. 

[J]

Don't change the forum. It is the only forum I know left that has a clear overview at first glance.

[Grauniad]

I'm going to start off by saying this: the website is bad. Sure, it's not terrible, but it's not perfect, either.

I don't know what the cultural conventions are where you come from, but where I come from we have a saying "It's easier to catch flies with honey than with vinegar."  People are more likely to accept advice that is presented in a non-derogatory, supportive manner than when they are being denigrated and taking the advice is like swallowing a bitter pill.

[Michionlion]

Well, despite that, G, I really do like clean's summaries better.  The forums should stay the same, but that text could definitely be changed into something more engaging, like your example, which was very well written by the way.

[knucracker]

Take a look at this to calibrate your reference points:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130604201447/http://knucklecracker.com/

[MizInIA]

Don't change the forum. It is the only forum I know left that has a clear overview at first glance.

I will third that!

I also want to say that while people may not think Knuckle Cracker is the best web site it is not anywhere close to the worst. the Recent changes that were made at the release of CW3 have it a nice face lift. there are major market game houses that have worse sites and tell you less about what is in their games. the difference I guess is they don't have to tell you anything because all their games are about something know. i mean who hasn't heard of football, basketball, soccer and car racing. And then every other game is a modernized high graphics version of DOOM. ok so they move the setting to Germany in WW2 or some alien planet instead of a labyrinth of hallways. but still the same game. so i guess my side point is that I believe "Fresh ideas in gaming" does apply

[Clean0nion]

Take a look at this to calibrate your reference points:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130604201447/http://knucklecracker.com/

I'm not too sure what you point is there - but my main point is that you make it clear what the game is so people will buy it. By popular demand the forums shouldn't be changed.

[knucracker]

Well, I have google analytics for the whole site and have since 2009.  The overwhelming number of new people that come to the site come here because of some link somewhere else (like one of the kong games, or a indie review site) or because they have googled for "Creeper".  The people that google for "Creeper" are split between those that can't remember the website name and people looking for minecraft stuff (and some small percentage of word of mouth referrals).

The drop rate on the landing page is about 25%, which is normal given that a healthy chunk come here looking for something else.  The website has existed in three main forms over its life since 2009.  The drop rate on the main page is around the same or worse even when the landing page looked like this:
http://web.archive.org/web/20091118153639/http://knucklecracker.com/?

What I'm saying is that the amount of text on the landing page doesn't seem to affect what happens next.  Could I put some text line at the top that says "Awesome fluid physics strategy game"... yes, and I may when I get some time.  Will it suddenly make a statistically noticeable difference in sales, I'd be very surprised.

The navigation path for the vast majority of new visitors right now is landing page -> CW3 -> Trailer/Screenshots.  All those stupid people you talk about (I count myself in their numbers) click on images and hardly pause to read anything.  The path from landing page to trailer to demo-download is working fairly well right now and is visually driven.

Now please don't think I'm being dismissive or argumentative... I like to think I'm an open minded guy.  On the other hand I have extremely limited resources and time.  So I have to evaluate anything I do against the likelihood it will increase exposure and sales for the games.  Before I make any changes on the web site, I have to have very compelling reasons for the specific changes. 

As for the text changes regarding CW1 (which you refer to as 'rubbish', no offense taken btw:)), the existing text begins:
"Imagine an enemy that is everywhere and moves like a giant, organic mass across the map."

Nowhere in your rewrite do you describe the nature of the enemy... which is the quintessential element of the CW games.  Your text would work perfectly well for any RTS title with discreet enemies called the "Creeper".

Lastly, if you are worried about sales and such keep in mind that sales are a function of external exposure for the game.  The finesse that goes into the website here makes nearly no difference to overall sales, unless something is totally broken.  So long as there is a very visual way to see a trailer and get a demo, people do it.  This is why so many high profile games have such marginal websites.... it just doesn't matter.  It's the ads and marketing that bring people in and motivated.  The website is just the checkout line for many games.  This is why 80% of my time since launch has been spent on driving external exposure.  I hope for most of this to pay off in the coming month, but we'll see.   Put another way, the website could literally be a trailer, a demo download button, and a Buy button on one page (no text anywhere other than the checkout process) and sales would barely be affected.  On the other hand, if I pickup a review on a popular indie blog, sales double for three days.

[Clean0nion]

Well, fair enough. Sometimes I overthink things. Sorry if I seem rude or obnoxious, I just wanted to help. To you I bid good day, and good luck to your endeavours.

I am, however, left with one small question: How's Colonial Space going?

[knucracker]

I've been spending about 10% of my time on it... but I'm about to have a development surge to wipe it out.  I have most of the core structure in place, it's just a matter of dealing with some interesting SQL, some unity gui, some web services, some php, some graphics apis, and a dash of data structure work.  Simple, right? :)

[Clean0nion]

Sound pretty easy. I could lend a hand if you want.

Spoiler

I DONT EVEN KNOW WHAT ANY OF THAT MEANT

[close]

[Grauniad]

This thread is now officially dead and as such I will strongly resist any attempts to revive it. The website, and positive, constructive ideas ideas or suggestions for improvement may still be made. :)