Websites and Advertising
From OELVN Community Wiki
Creating a game is one part of being an indie game developer, gathering fans and an audience is the other part. Having a website for you and your games is an important part of appearing professional and letting fans know that you're committed to creating games.
There are a variety of services on which you can have your website on, as well as many social media platforms that can help spread your games to a wider audience. This page is a list of suggested online platforms that may be of interest to developers. Everything you need to know about domain names, hosting and getting your first website up and running can be found here. Tips on using the Social Media Websites can be found here.
Contents |
Blog/Website Services
Hosting and Domain Registration
A web hosting service provides space on a server and internet connectivity. It allows you to make your website accessible via the World Wide Web.
Domain name is your web address (such as yourgroupname.com or yourgame.com). In addition to hosting, you need a domain name to run your site.
It is recommended, to use different companies for registering domains and hosting, as this allows more quality and reliable service in addition to being cheaper.
Free Hosting
- A free service provided by LSF user redeyesblackpanda to give creators and VN enthusiasts free website and hosting with no limitations. WordPress installation is available by default, supports HTML customization, PHP/MySQL, ad-free hosting, unlimited disk space and bandwidth. Also offers free sub-domain names on vnovel.com. Adult content is allowed. See this thread for details.
- Free web hosting which includes PHP/MySQL, free sub-domain names and ad-free hosting. 6 Gb disk space and 50 Gb monthly bandwidth.
Paid Hosting
It is recommended that you get a reliable hosting provider, as this will determine your website's loading speed, uptime, available options and limitations. The hosting providers below offer cost effective shared hosting packages with unlimited disk space and monthly bandwidth, PHP and MySQL are supported.
Domain registrars
Unlike with a hosting provider, domain registrars don't effect your website's performance, so it's best to just pick the cheapest one.
Content Management Systems and Blogging Software
Self Hosted
This is a list of software that requires a web host on which you install them.
- A drag and drop Content Management System built on PHP5.3 and MySQL.
- A free, open source Content Management System which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications.
- Web software used to create websites and blogs. One of the best known Content Management Systems based on PHP and MySQL. Read this page for key differences between the .com and .org versions of WordPress.
Remotely Hosted
This is a list of services that don't require installation or having your own host.
- As the name implies, this is a blog platform. Users need a Google account to create a blog.
- An independent, Open Source, community-centric home for writers, artists, and everything else.
- Easy to use blog service that provides 10GB to users at the start.
- An online journal service with an emphasis on user interaction. A basic, fully-functional account is free, while Paid accounts receive access to premium features.
- A blogging service made for personal and photo sharing.
- An OpenID enabled web application that combines the elements of wiki, word processing, and file organization into an easy, simple, and intuitive user experience. Users are able to write notes through a WYSIWYG editor along with templates and plug-ins that are continually being expanded for endless features and increased functionality.
- A micro-blogging platform which also doubles as a social media platform. Users mainly use the dashboard to view the posts of blogs they follow. Note: Tumblr is infamous for having the occasional long downtime (they went down for 2 days once, according to this article) and thus isn't ideal for your main development blog.
- A platform designed to be easy to customize for people with very little technical knowledge.
- No coding needed to create an HTML5 website, with 100s of pre-made designs.
- Suitable for enterprise and personal website building. Simple operation and delegate templates to build your website easily.
- A self hosted blogging platform, using wordpress.org software. Read this page for key differences between the .com and .org versions of WordPress.
Google Sites
Easy to use website builder provided by Google. It has customizable look and pre-built templates.
Remotely Hosted Wikis
- A space on the Web where you can share work and ideas, pictures and links, videos and media — and anything else you can think of. Gives you a visual editor and a bunch of other tools to make sharing all kinds of content as easy for students as it is for their teachers.
Forum Software
Self Hosted Forums
These require your own hosting and installation.
- Forum software made to integrate with WordPress.org powered sites.
- Easy to use board system for both users and admins.
- Free flat-forum bulletin board software solution that can be used to stay in touch with a group of people or can power your entire website.
- Easy to use forum with many powerful features for you as well as your users. An open-source project made by volunteers from across the world.
- Free open-source software to create a customized community that rewards positive participation, automatically curates content and lets members drive moderation.
- Simple and engaging forum software that can integrate with Facebook. Comes with other features, must purchase.
- Extensible and flexible community software, must purchase.
Remotely Hosted Forums
These do not require your own hosting and installation and are often easy to set up.
- Free phpBB3 forums that can be set up quickly. Hosting is free on a subdomain and upgrades are available for more popular forums.
- Free forum that can use phpBB, punBB, or Invision software to host your forum. Has several subdomain names.
- Free forum hosting with full customization via CSS, support for custom domains, and spam prevention.
- Easy to use forum with 2GB storage, automatic spam detection, widgets, mods and more. Hosting is free on a subdomain and upgrades are available for more popular forums.
- Free forum hosting designed to offer a simple platform with powerful features.
- Free forum hosting designed to offer a simple platform with powerful features.
- A simple forum with features focused on customer support. Can be used as a help desk or community driven support. Core features are free. Upgrades such as Get Satisfaction for Facebook and domain aliasing are available as monthly subscription.
Social Media Platforms
- A social networking platform with over a billion active users. It has become one of the most powerful advertising agents on the internet today.
- Estimated unique monthly visitors: 750,000,000
- A microblogging service that allows messages up to 140 characters long per Tweet. It has become one of the most popular advertising agents on the internet today.
- Estimated unique monthly visitors: 250,000,000
- A micro-blogging platform which also doubles as a social media platform. Users mainly use the dashboard to view the posts of blogs they follow.
- Estimated unique monthly visitors: 120,000,000
- A virtual pinboard. Allows you to organize and share images.
- Estimated unique monthly visitors: 85,500,000
- Social networking and identity service owned and operated by Google Inc.
- Estimated unique monthly visitors: 65,000,000
- A social news website, with a game development section, where registered users congregate to talk about creating games. Users submit content in the form of either a link or a text “self” post. Other users then vote the submission “up” or “down”, which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site’s pages and front page.
- Estimated unique monthly visitors: 39,700,000
- A popular website for artists. Anime is popular there so some people will try visual novels.
- Estimated unique monthly visitors: 25,500,000
Indie Game Portals
- Features indie games and also includes "essential resources for game developers" such as links to more articles. Consider looking at this list for more game portals not listed here, there's a lot!
- Community driven digital distribution service for gamers, putting the best games, mods and downloadable content from developers at gamers fingertips, ready to buy and play. Note: The community here is more accepting of VNs than Steam at this moment.
- A website with a bunch of free games featured on it.
- Supports independent developers and their games by providing them with a place to showcase their hard work (in-progress or complete) to fans seeking original gaming experiences.
- A website that promotes indie games for 96 hours. Games are bought with a pay-what-you-want price tag and a portion of all sales go to charity.
- Presented by the UBM TechWeb Game Network, which runs the Independent Games Festival & Summit every year at Game Developers Conference.
- A casual game portal that showcases "only the best games available on the Web." On weekdays they write about free online games and on weekends they review indie titles. More focus on gameplay rather than story-based games.
- About PC gaming – all of PC gaming, rather than just one of the weird and wonderful niches most other PC-centric sites confine themselves to. It’s written by four of Britain’s top games journalists, and it aims to cover everything from the latest breaking stories about the biggest releases to esoterica from the format’s obscurest peninsulas.
- A system that enlists the community’s help in picking some of the new games to be released on Steam. Developers post information, screenshots, and video for their game and seek a critical mass of community support in order to get selected for distribution. [Note: The community as-is doesn't receive VNs as 'real games' and the general thought is that they are all hentai/weeaboo games. You should probably have more gameplay elements or be cautious when applying for Greenlight at the time of writing.]
- The Independent Gaming Source: A community of independent game developers and players. Has a very active community and forums.
