Website design: In House or Outsource?

[merc_fx]

As you all know by now, I'm new and Mercury Effects has its first title coming out soon. If you take a look at our website you'll see we have a lot of content..................sigh. Ok, ok, I know we need something up. As I mentioned in another post, our web design guy is busy wrapping up the finishing touches on the game and having him break away from that task will only delay our launch date. Would the ability to get people to know about the game be worth the delay in launch? Or should we hire someone to do it for us? Do you have any webdesigners to suggest that are reasonably priced? Should I just step up the plate and do it myself? Should I just get a quick geocities page with some neon spirals in the background and post screenshots? Any advice would be great.

[o0Dekker0o]

Hi merc_fx

We can provide you with a website for your game at a reasonable price.
Please contact me at seb@picomputersolutions.co.uk so we can discuss content, template design and price.

[Fantus]

Question is, how important is it for you to launch the game on a specific date. Usually such a decision is made because of marketing reasons. A lot of indie games could be published at any given date, it'll hardly affect the sales. However, a good site will. If you have a webdesigner in your team I would let him do it (I do some occasional webdesign, in half a week you'll have a working site including a sell system). Your designer has some thoughts about the site, I'm sure. If you hire someone, the hired guy and your webdesigner will probably argue a lot. Possibly delaying the launch just as much.

[Fry Crayola]

Give the guy two weeks, and he ought to have a pretty decent site if he's good enough.

Which will then serve as a good way to generate interest in the weeks leading to the launch, if you get previews at places like GameTunnel.com.

Of course, without a game, few people have a reason to visit your site, meaning the end choice is really up to your team. Can you offer anything on the site at all that will give people a reason to come? Even some hyperbole about your game should do the trick.

[merc_fx]

If you hire someone, the hired guy and your webdesigner will probably argue a lot. Possibly delaying the launch just as much.

Hah, I'm sure they would. You're probably right. We'll do it, I was also just kind of interested to see how many teams created their own or had outside sources create them. And no, we have no release date, we're just eager to get it out. But slow and steady wins the race, I guess.

[Evak]

I created our web site, was a real pain as I'm not great at 2D graphic design and don't like the way that nothings locked down and pages expand automaticly when your editing them.

I much prefer the look of simple flash stuff and the chance to make an all in one menu rather than having sliced graphics in tables, but I don't like waiting for flash stuff to load and worry about compatibility and that many don't have flash installed.