I’d forgotten how much work creating a website is.
Sure, it is pretty straightforward these days to get a WordPress site up and start typing some blog posts. But since this site is meant to represent the games I create and my development journey, it needs to be more than just the default settings. And that’s where it starts to get complicated.
Is the default theme good enough? Eh, not really what I’m going for. How about downloading a theme? Well, there are several thousand to choose from. What about the themes for businesses? Still a couple thousand. How about themes just for app landing pages? Down to a few hundred now, and a lot of them require purchasing. How about just the free ones? Hmmm… maybe… let me try out this free one…. aaaaaaand all the features I want are in the paid version of it.
I certainly don’t begrudge the designers wanting to sell their themes to recoup their investment. I just don’t have a lot of money to spend, especially on something that isn’t 100% what I need. A lot of themes are involved because of the editing flexibility they offer, and that’s not something I particularly need. I’ve written and modified WP themes before for my wife’s websites, so I know how to do it (or at least knew how to do it at one time). But now this becomes the classic time-verses-money trade-off where I have to be careful where I spend my time because I still have a game to finish.
And getting a theme down is just the start. Do you have a company logo? Nope, still need to create that. How about the About page that introduces new visitors to your site? Nope, still need to write that. Well then, what about the large, gorgeous image to use as a splash image for your game? Nope, don’t have that yet either since the graphics for the game are still in progress. Color scheme? Button design? Basic layout? Nope, nope, and nope.
To be honest, the website is just part of the equation. At the moment I’m just targeting the Google Play app store for my game. To publish to that store I will need to write both Short and Full descriptions of the game, put together a Privacy Policy, create a Feature Graphic (1024×500 pixel image), Hi Res Icon (512×512), Promo Graphic (180×120), TV Banner (1280×720), a Promo Video, and 3-4 Screenshots. That doesn’t even take into account the advertising creatives I’ll need to generate for ad campaigns (video, interstitial, banner, Facebook ads, etc) in a variety of sizes in order to get the word out to everyone about the game.
If you have a company, you’d hire or assign all of these tasks to people who have experience in delivering each item. They would come up with possibilities and budgets, and you would approve their ideas or send it back for rework. When you are a solo dev, everything from coming up with the ideas to execution is on your plate, and all on top of the task of creating the product itself. Possible? Yes. I’m just being reminded now of just how much work it actually is. 🙂