How should it look then?

After name comes…Design.

I have to admit I love wordpress, I’ve used it in various sites for years now and it’s just so damn easy to use that for someone like me who hasn’t got the time to spend weeks putting a site together just for the purpose to type some words, WP is easy to use (mostly, depending on how fiddly the theme is). What I always do get stuck on is choosing the right WP theme. I knew I wanted something that looked like a “blog” and not a portfolio or company site as I have another site for that, no this has to look like it’s sole purpose is for me to rant and express my thoughts, and nothing else. I also knew I wanted it to be responsive which I think is going to be the big thing for sites this year, websites that “respond” to the device they are on and display content accordingly, pixelPower was one of the first I looked at, and offers responsive design, and also is similar to tumblr, and what I like about that is that the posts are clearly marked as to what they are.

There might be some stuff that I’m going to change design wise, but I’m pretty happy with it. Hmm I’m pondering if I should have a proper logo, but I’m kind of getting used to laid back font used for it currently.

What’s in a name?

I was pretty much going nuts over the past few days tring to come up with a decent domain name for this blog, and as you probably already know most of the English language has basically been copywritten, by the fact that everyone and the kitchen sink buys domains these days (mostly just to sit on them of course). But to make matters worse I didn’t just want a good domain name, oh no, I wanted a name that I could then use across the web, on all the major social networking sites as well. These were my criteria for a decent name…

  1. Had the word “game” in it.
  2. Was not hugely long.
  3. ,com obviously.
  4. Was available on all major social networking sites (Twitter, Youtube etc)
  5. Hopefully descriptive in some way regarding what the blog was about.
  6. New domain, not from a reseller.

I thought I had it with “agamedeveloper” everything was there, apart from….Twitter AGH! I ummed and ahhed about it, can I live with a different name on Twitter? In the end I decided not, and quickly realised that finding a good available name on twitter would be harder than finding the .com.

In this day and age it’s not enough to just have a “username” you need a brand, even for a personal blog, and it’s also just for convenience so whenever I comment on another blog or website people know it’s the same person.

Eventually as you can see I went with GameViewPoint. It met pretty much all my criteria, there were a few other names I liked but they either too long for the social networks or not available for one of more of them.

Fresh start

This is the first ever entry in my new blog. I used to have a blog called FlashGameMaker (still there) but times have changed and I felt it was necessary to start afresh, there are lots of reasons for this which I’m sure I will go into over the coming months.

The other reason for this new blog is that well…I never really blogged. Like a lot of people some years back I grabbed me some hosting threw up a WP install and then nothing. Maybe 4/5 times a year I would feel a need to go public with some thoughts, but I was never a “blogger”. The reason is I never really a) felt the need to share my thoughts, and b) time, I was more interested in working and less talking about my work.

So why now blog? because I feel I perhaps have useful comments to make, also because daily I scour the web looking for new stories and articles that are relevant to what I’m interested in, and 9/10 I have a point of view about them, so why not share that view? that is the main reason for this blog, the other less important reason is to inform people what I’m working on.

What’s this blog about? Ha, guess I should say something about that, well the name/tag line basically says it all, it’s my views on everything related to the business and development of games, mostly that means social/casual games as that’s the area I work in.

So I hope you enjoy my rants and thoughts over the coming months, please comment if you agree or dissagree with what I’m saying, as they say “it’s all good” !

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