If there’s one thing you can be sure of when building a gaming website, it’s that your content will never run out. The gaming industry is huge and getting bigger. Niches are many, and more are emerging every second. The ways to approach the industry and create content from your own unique point of view are many and open to exploration.
The game is also part of the culture that arouses great passion in the people who like it. For all these reasons and many more, you may find something to say about the industry, the culture, or the technology that supports it. However, instead of looking for websites that will allow you to post content for publishing – or because you do – you would consider starting your own gaming website.
If this sounds familiar to you, you’re in the right place. We’ll help you with the basics of starting a gaming website with WordPress covering topics including:
The first question you might want to ask yourself is why do you choose WordPress for your gaming website and how much does the self-hosted type cost, not even the free type? The gist is the level of control and customization that comes with using WordPress. You won’t find it anywhere else – not even on WordPress.com.
For starters, WordPress is very easy to install. Many hosting providers offer things like one-click installation for WordPress. Some even offer managed hosting that takes most of the behind-the-scenes work out of your hands. You should consider these options when choosing a hosting provider.
Then again, you don’t have to go with a regular hosting provider. You can install WordPress on most cloud service providers, including Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services. You should always do a cost/benefit analysis when choosing a server as some may give you more than your gaming website really needs and at a higher price. But that’s a level of control you have with WordPress that some other website builders don’t offer.
With your own hosting and your own website, you can also choose which monetization model to use. You can use AdSense or its alternatives, offer affiliate links, have a shop section, put your content behind a paywall – you name it, you can do it with WordPress. How? With plugins of course.
Plugins and themes are also what make WordPress really great. Thanks to them, you can easily change how your website looks and behaves, add or remove functionality to it, and spend a ridiculous amount of time making sure every detail is exactly what you want. WordPress is a powerful enabler of your creativity, and it’s something you’ll learn to love.
The first question you need to answer is what kind of gaming website you want to create. There are so many different ways to approach gaming, as gaming is an incredibly diverse term that encompasses technology, culture, social phenomena, economics, and possibly even politics.
As you can imagine, building a fast-paced community-hosted website is quite different from, say, building a website for an indie developer. A normal gaming site with reviews and news may look completely different. Then again, if the website is a presentation of yourself and your gaming personality, or even your gaming team or guild, you might want to build something unlike anything we’ve talked about so far.
Next, you should consider whether you want your website to be game-specific or genre-specific. It could also be entirely devoted to geek culture and all the cool and interesting ways fandoms present themselves. You can create a website that tracks gaming events and tournaments or even a website that hosts them.
The possibilities are endless, but you’ll have to narrow them down as much as possible because it’s the kind of option that will affect other options as you progress. For starters, know what kind of gaming site you want to build.
We’ve already covered a wide variety of hosting options that you can review when launching your gaming website. If you decide to go with a hosting provider that is a popular choice despite the availability of cloud hosting platforms, you should take your time and research them properly.
Things you might want to review include:
Some other things to consider when choosing a host are whether they allow you to register a domain with them or if you need to go to an independent registrar. More importantly, if you’re building the website for it, you should make sure they have a package on it that will make it easy for you to build a game server. Demands will depend on the game you plan to run, so research ahead of time and check for spaces to expand on later.
Choosing a name for your website is an important step for several reasons. The name is part of your website branding and is therefore a recognizable symbol for everything you do on the website. But semiotics aside, it is also a word you might want to use in your domain name. It is best to have one before you register your website domain name.
How to choose a good name? This is not so easy to say, especially given all the fantasy elements that are easily found in games and expand the possible vocabulary tremendously. Things would be complicated enough without them, as the game is a truly global culture that draws on influences and vocabulary from various national cultures such as East Asian, English and even Slavic languages.
Still, some of the best practices to follow are:
Finally, you should always find a few strong options for your website name. In case the domain name is taken, you will want to do a fallback.
One of the best things about WordPress is that it’s ubiquitous, which means most hosts have an easy way for you to install it. WordPress is a feature-packed CMS, so even if it’s easy to setup, you’ll want to spend some time learning its way around it.
For starters, you should learn what themes are and how to install them. Your gaming website should have all kinds of elements and layouts depending on its niche.And while it’s possible to build them all from scratch, choosing the appropriate gaming WordPress theme can save you a lot of time and effort.
Let’s say you’re building a website to support a game you’ve published. You are likely to have a landing page with a large hero image.possibly even animated, and then shows a gameplay trailermaybe some copy about setting, some cards that show different races or classes that people can play in the gamea quote from someone playing an early version, maybe an email capture form, and even a countdown clock – why not. You can create a page with all this from scratch or find a theme with this type of layout for you to upload your content to.
The same goes really for any other type of gaming site. For an eSports website, you will need a theme that supports easy YouTube and Twitch integration, has layouts for match listings and layouts for team presentations. Leaderboards, tournament lists and timelines and player lists would also be nice features to have.
For a news type website that also does reviews, elements that allow you to rate games or products are also essential. You can even move away from gaming themes and look for a tech theme that might be better for your website type, like a blog or magazine theme. The important thing is to match the look and features of the theme with the feature you need for your website.
Then again, you can use plugins to make it even better. That’s the other thing you need to figure out about WordPress. – what are plugins and how to use them. Let’s say you don’t need plugins to live stream your website, but you will need them for security, updating, optimization and many other things. You can take a cue from their business website and look at the plugins they commonly use; this will give you a good idea of where to start adding your plugins.
After you’ve taken care of the domain and hosting, installed WordPress, the theme, and got a few valuable plugins to keep your website secure and up and running – you’ve launched your own gaming website. Congratulations!
But now comes the hard part. Whatever type of content you choose to create, you need to start filling your website with content. You’ll have to rush to promote the website, monitor its performance, look for ways to reach new audiences, patiently wait for the numbers to start showing that they’re being removed, while working hard on it. It’s infuriating, but that’s why we love it. I hope you too.
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