Is there a video game that you can play day and night? Would you like to share your experience with the fellow gamers? By means of a gaming blog, you can deliver your opinions, analysis, and thoughts to the gaming community. As soon as you create a gaming website, you will attain a solid foundation to establish a better contact with the gaming fans like you, as well as take more step to become an influencer in your industry.
If you want to learn how to create a usable online games website but you feel unsure about the elements and functionality that you’d like it to feature, then you’ve reached the right place. In this blog post, we are going to discover how to start your gaming website right.
Esports Website Design Basic Features
If you are an avid computer and online games developer, then you won’t find it challenging at all to build an awesome esports website design. Before you get straight to the development of your site’s design and the content that you’ll post on its pages, you need to put the objectives of your next online project clearly. What goals will it pursue? What message would you like to deliver to your audience? What sort of data will your web page include? Here are several suggestions that you can use as a basis.
- You can use your online games website to post reviews of new games that you have tried.
- Also, you can share news about game projects, updates, and events that take place in your industry.
- You can provide the fellow gamers with a platform to play games online.
- This can be a platform where the members of the gaming community get in touch with each other to communicate.
- Also, you can add a couple of eCommerce tools in order to sell games and gaming items on your site.
Focus on Usability
You may post the best content ever. Still, if your site isn’t usable enough, then all of your efforts will be worth nothing. A website that looks cluttered to a visitor faces the risk of getting high bounce rates. In order for this not to happen, keep the pages of your online games website simple and spacious. It’s likely that you will share loads of data with your audience. So, in order to keep them focused on the essential pieces of data, opt for simple web designs that are readable and quick-to-scan. This grows that the users will find the needed pieces of content and stay on your gaming site for longer.
Make It Easy to Browse
As a rule, gaming websites feature more categories and subcategories than other web resources. That’s why it’s important to develop a well-organized navigation. One of the best options to enhance the on-page navigation is using a drop-down MegaMenu on your web page. Also, you can include additional content filters. Using these, people can narrow down the list of content based on the types, categories, and manufacturers to which those belong.
Make Your Esports Website Design 100% Responsive
Do you often use a desktop computer when you need to look up any sort of data quickly? I bet you will use your smartphone to access the web on-the-go. That’s what 80% of the modern-day web users will do.
In order to make all the content of your gaming website look great on smaller screen sizes, you need to make sure that your online project is mobile-friendly. One of the best ways to build a responsive site is choosing a Bootstrap-based web theme as its foundation. Working with a mobile-friendly website template, you may forget about the need to adjust your content to all devices manually.
Control the Page Speed
Your gaming website will be loaded with lots of data. Most of the content will be represented by means of images and videos. So, the page loading speeds face the risk to slow down. In order for this not to happen, you need to track your site’s performance stats on both desktop and handheld devices. Google PageSpeed Insights is one of the most popular solutions for this purpose. This is a free online tool from Google developers, which will help you make your web page load fast on all devices.
Content Choice and Organization
Content is an essential part of any gaming blog. That’s the main reason why people land on your page. A gaming website is likely to be loaded with plenty of visual, video, and written data. So, your primary task is to organize all pieces in a quick-to-scan and readable manner.
As you work on your esports website design, you will need to include several tradition pages like Home, About, Contacts, News, and Reviews. This is a standard set of pages that can be found on websites belonging to different industries. Still, this is indispensable for the complete presentation of you as a gamer and your brand in general.
As a user reaches a gaming site, they expect to find loads of visual content and media files. So, give them what they want. In order to deliver a well-structured presentation of your content, use galleries on your site’s pages and posts.
Video Content
Video content is the heart of any online games website without any exaggeration. You can share it on the front page, category pages, and separate blog posts on your site. That’s always a great idea to create a separate category with video content in the header menu. By means of large video previews, you can boost your site’s usability, and help your audience find the necessary pieces of data easily.
As part of your online strategy, you can record your own video reviews of the games you play. Such kind of unique data will attract a wider audience to your site and establish you as an influencer in your field.
Show Related Stories
It’s up to you to decide in what area of your site the respective block will be placed. You can share it at the bottom of blog posts or in a sidebar. The key reason to reveal a set of related posts is to engage your audience with more data, thus providing them with more alternatives for the data to consume.
Promote Your Content through Social Media
Social media is one of the most powerful online marketing tools on the modern-day web. There isn’t a better place to build an audience for your gaming blog. In order to make more users engage with your data, share different pieces of your data in Facebook groups where people discuss their preferred games. Be careful not to spam. Posting content that doesn’t bring any value to the audience will do more bad than good to you. Instead, focus on giving every group those pieces of data that will be the most valuable to them.
Include Contact/Subscription Forms
And finally, in order to keep your audience closer to you, do not forget to add a contact form and subscription form to your gaming site. Running a gaming blog let your readers comment on your publications. Never miss a chance to reply to the comments of your readers. This will show that you care about the time that people spent to look through your data.