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going to be slowly updating the official website to a new format, to show off the models and talk about the game more. Here's a quickie preivew

http://www.blackwatergulch.com/index3.php

Sgt Wilde is just a placeholder for now, I'll have different ads going on there, mostly just to show off new releases.

I'll be building out the Game Guide section to feature a lot of articles and guides, and taking submissions from anyone that wants to send me stuff If you have a good idea for a new game scenario, or want to do a battle report for one of your games, and eventually I'll have a bunch of how to play videos too, articles about different kinds of terrain, hobby articles.. stuff like that

The Infamous Gangs section that will be where all the different gangs are listed, with more photos and artwork and fluff.

So if anyone has anything you'd like to add that you think other players will like, let me know

edit: had the old, old, old URL before...

Nice start, only thing I'd say layout-wise is that the newsletter box is rather in your face, especially if you've already subscribed. If you're targetting the home page at new people (which makes sense) then it would be good to have a bit more scene setting/introductory stuff. People are unlikely to signup to a newsletter without having some reason to. It doesn't need to be much (since people don't read much text until they've been hooked in first) but something that covers the it's a skirmish game, with miniatures, set in the old west basics.

Have you checked it on mobile? There was some weird zooming in going on for mine, I vaguely remembered having to fix this myself once before so I can look it up if needed.

Looking forward to seeing the rest. I probably can't produce any content for you at the moment but I'm happy to proof read if you need it ;-)

Yeah I just wasn't sure what to put there, I think I'm just gonna make at a "Get the rules" box, with a new/featured product image to the right. And then I'll make the news & game articles be just the title in a smaller box with some basic about the game kind of stuff for the content area, on the homepage anyway.

Just not sure where to put the newsletter stuff but I'll think of something. Also, gonna be doing a whole separate site for mobile, so if you're on an iPhone or something, it will be a whole different template so everything will be sized to fit on the smaller screens

I've been trying to think about the stuff I want to know from a wargame website, since they're usually terrible. Even the Malifaux one, it looks nice but why does it have to be so damn hard to see the actual models for each faction?

So I guess in the beginning I want to know what the setting is and how things look, that can usually be got from the artwork and pictures which the site is doing pretty well already except for showing off actual minis. I wonder if it'd be worth having something on the home page that highlights the Infamous Gangs section (assuming that's where your minis are going) because people have an amazing ability to fail at reading and they might miss it up top.

After that I probably want to know playstyle (skirmish, model by model activation - whatever that's called, maybe that it's D6 since there's some D10 stuff happening of late plus Malifaux has cards) and some idea of the scale of things (in the sense of how many models I'm likely to be playing with). Some sort of elevator pitch or longer version of the usual strapline would likely cover the basics on that and then I guess more info would be in the game guide?

The fact that the rules are available online is a great selling point and not obvious from the 'Game Guide' heading so I definitely think you're right to want to feature that somewhere on the home page.

Are you doing much with the Infamous Gangs section over and above what you have now? Just thinking that when you have the minis for all of them, obviously people want to see those but would be a shame to lose the artwork so maybe you could do something cool in there.

Anyway, just ideas :-)

Yeah I'm thinking I'm gonna change it up a bit. So at the top I'll swap out the newsletter with a get the rules kind of thing, new product ad on the right, then below that some brief about the game stuff with some pics, and then under that a column for the newsletter, news headlines and recent articles.

The game guide section is going to be all about how to get into the game plus things like modeling and painting articles. Infamous gangs will be kind of like now, only each gang's page will get lots more info

OK, got the homepage more or less done.. hopefully it's not too texty.

http://www.blackwatergulch.com/index2.php

Gonna start building the Infamous Gangs pages next Just trying to decide if I want them to be plain ole static pages, or do them as part of the blog in Wordpress.. really only using that for the news right now but I was thinking it might work good as a content management kinda thing too.

Not too texty and covers everything nice and succinctly I feel. I like what you've done with the top feature area bit.

I'd appreciate a bit of an increase in font size myself, it's a little hard to read for me especially as serif (Dakka text is pretty small too but bearable, possibly because of the sans maybe, not sure)

WordPress is very capable of managing your page content, so seems like a good idea, it can make it easier to do small adjustments to things in the long run if needed. I find I'm more inclined to update stuff or add new pages if I don't have to FTP in.

Not sure if you've got it already but the Jetpack plugin for WordPress offers some nice features such as site stats, things for comments, broadcasting new posts to Twitter/Facebook and spell check. Worth a look if you haven't already.

Working on a new design for the gang bio pages, making it a little more interactive
http://www.blackwatergulch.com/clancy-gang/index2.php

I only have Wilt Clancy done so far, and still have to add the gallery. Also trying to figure out a good way where people can easily send pics of their models for me to add to the gallery too.. but I'll probably have to the the old fashioned email the pic and I update the html kind of way...

Looking good.

I'd suggest manually updating the pics. Any system where people can automatically add their own to the page is bound to lead to someone posting something inappropriate.

Yeah.. i was thinking it'd be cool if there was some way someone could automagically submit a pic and then I could approve it somehow.

Kinda takes a while to build the pages like this but I think it'll be better in the long run. Don't know if it's easier or more efficient to download all of the cards in 1 big pdf, or 1 at a time.. or how many folks even want to download them in the first place. Just thought it would be handy in case someone loses their card or whats to see how other gangs are equipped.

Hmm, how about downloading cards by box. So each starter box would have their cards in one file, while a 'booster' box of three characters would be available in one file. That way you can preview a product before you buy it without needing to keep redownloading the same big file.

Yeah that could work.. thats how I have it now, I guess that's the easiest way.. and I can just add the new cards to the main PDF once we get around to expanding the gangs.

For the overall look I was kinda trying to steal some of the layout they have going with the new Playstation store, like this


But it just doesn't really work well as a vertical webpage layout. Been thinking maybe it would work better if each gang page was in a widescreen kind of popup window.. that would also work good for tablets going full screen.

I'm a web designer, so I don't think I'll ever be able to stop fiddling with the site.. the game's been out a little over a year and I think there's been like 5 different sites so far...

I do think that there is a risk that if you make the website too slick and modern, like the Playstation store, for example, that it would sort of detract from the product, which is a wild west game.

Wyrd, for example, went with a website for Malifaux that tried to capture the feel of the game. I don't think Wyrd was entirely successful, but a website that has too much of a "futuristic" feel may take away from the content more than it enhances it.

Think I finally got a basic layout nailed down ..
http://www.blackwatergulch.com/blackwater-gulch/

now I gotta do the content..

Took me a while to get it working right, but you can shrink the width of your browser window down to 300 pixels, so the little content area boxes will shift and reposition on the fly depending on if you're on a PC, tablet or smartphone. can also make font sizes increase or decrease on the fly too It won't have tons of boxes in the end like it does now, but I can really do as many as I want, or 1 big solid area for blog posts.

Also the URL structure is going to change so gangfightgames.com will be the main site, and bwg and other games will be sub-sites. All will use the same layout, they'll just get a different "skin"

I don't have any iPad.. does anyone have one and can you check and see if the positioning looks ok?

Nicely done!

Looks fine on my ipad.

cool thanks for checking

Just tried on my android phone (HTC Sensation) and it came up great. There were some issues with what appeared to be the background scrolling, but that was minor.

Cool.. yeah I just got a new Android phone too, that kind of prompted this whole design since I have a real smartphone now and can see how bad it looked on one before. I also have an iPod touch I can use for testing too, but it's older. Just wondering how it will work on a high res/retina display since I read that it can make normal images fuzzy.. so for some images like the logo they're double sized but i use the HTML to set them to be half sized hoping they'll look crisper on a high res screen.

Also have a random image thing going so every time you refresh the page a different character shows up under the logo gotta fix the big background image too so it won't scale and stuff

I think pretty much just the homepage and maybe game guide will have the boxy look. the rest will be more like a solid texty page.

So, I didn't like where the last new site was going.. the boxyness was becoming too cumbersome.

So I'm going to go with something less "dynamic" like that with all of the different boxes repositioning for different devices and just do something more normal

http://blackwatergulch.com/index3.php

I want the focus to be on the world of BWG not so much the game, since there will be different games and books coming soon and all that. So, there will be a whole section just for the skirmish game, for the adventure game, and for books, and later on another one will get added when we do the card game but that won't be till next year. I'll also have a big downloads section for rules, new scenarios, and character cards for the skirmish game and the adventure game since they will be slightly different in the end.

I still have to do the content part for the homepage, but that will just be news with other boxes down the side for the newsletter signup, events calendar and other little things like that.

Suggestion:

Remove the "games" classification from your site.
Many employers arbitrarily block any site categorized as "games" to keep their employees from playing games online during work hours (like mine). If you removed that categorization, said employees could freely peruse (and purchase from) your site from the comfort of their desk chairs.

Just a thought.

Another Suggestion, since you're a web designer and could probably do it easily; Printable "Build your own character" cards. All we do is go on there, put in our character's information (maybe upload a pic) and "BAM" print out a BWG card specific to that model.
An option to print a whole GANG like this, as well, would be AWESOME!
You could even have a disclaimer that you retain the rights to publish that card/character (with changed artwork, if it isn't a BWG model) on your site for public use.

Eric

not sure how to not mark it as a game site.. I think because of the google keywords and stuff it's just always going to end up listed that way.

I thought about doing a printable gang page kind of thing, but if I'm going to go that route I'd rather do it right from the beginning and have an online gang builder app, where people can subscribe and then save their gangs or their heroes or custom monsters or whatever, and share them with friends and all that fun stuff. But I don't have the programming skills for that kind of thing and can't afford to pay anyone to do it, not yet anyway. But it's definitely something I'd like to do sometime

Wow. That's a cool idea.

Here's me, wishing again that I had the time to learn how to create and update files for Army Builder! : )


Eric

Launching the new site today

http://www.blackwatergulch.com/

Lots of old pages still haven't been updated, but I'll get around to em. I mostly just made it all live now because I wanted to get the new rules updated.

Looks great!

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