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Ask HN: Feedback on my Weekend Project

2 points by mdolon 18y ago

The site: http://pikagame.com/ Over the past month, I've been working on this site during the weekends. It's a flash games portal, similar to the many out there in an already saturated market. You might be wondering why I spent my weekends working on it if I already knew this so let me give you some background info... Two of my college friends both run very popular flash game sites. Both of their sites are ranked by Alexa in the top 5k and they both earn a decent chunk of change from relatively easy work (adding a few games a day). After looking into the market myself, I was surprised by the number of really crappy flash game sites and even more so by how many of them were profitable. In the end, I decided that it would be worth it to spend a few weekends to give it a shot, adding a few improvements of my own to (hopefully) improve my chances of it succeeding. The idea behind my site relies on rewarding users with real world items for participation. Players earn points for playing games and other social networky things, which they can in turn use to redeem prizes. In the end, development and design took a month of work primarily during weekends and it did not impact progress on any of my other ventures or client work, so I really lost nothing but time. At the very least it served as both design and a programming practice, something I'm sure we all can use. I'd appreciate any feedback or thoughts on the site. If you have a weekend project that you've made I'd love to see that too. (maybe for more inspiration? =)

halo 18y ago
Looks pretty good. There's not really much to it to comment on - attractive design but fairly generic Web 2.0 these days so I'm fairly immune. Hardly a deal-breaker, but if you redesign at some point I'd consider making the navigation smaller so people don't have to scroll to play games if they have 800px vertical resolution (such as on a typical 13" laptop). Your images don't display under "link to us", you might want to fix that. I think there's a bit too much on the front page - if I were you I'd consider dropping the tabs near the bottom, which seem largely unnecessary to me. Perhaps you could also offer points for referrals to try and make it go viral? Although, admittedly, it might encourage people to abuse the system. Edit: One more minor thing, your "More Features" link is a little ugly and doesn't match the rest of the site, and clicking the clicking "Sign up" and "View Prizes" in the pop-up doesn't work correctly.
- mdolon 18y ago
  Thanks for the excellent feedback! The referral idea is a really good one, I hadn't considered that yet. I'm not sure if referrers would find points as a suitable incentive to send traffic but it's certainly something I wouldn't mind trying. As for the "link to us" section, it looks like it's working for me. What browser are you using?
  - halo 18y ago
    Ah, it was a problem my end - my Adblock was blocking it because of the 'banners' subdirectory. Apologies.
    - mdolon 18y ago
      Not a problem - thanks for the prompt response.
  - answerly 18y ago
    FWIW- I did a ton of research on friend to friend sharing in a previous gig. I found time and again that site based currency (like your points) was the most attractive motivator to encourage users to refer friends to a site. If you do incent users, you'll want to make sure you have suitable fraud tracking system since users will go out of their way to figure out how to game the system. Your site design is really clean versus other flash game sites I have come across in the past. Nice work!
many 18y ago
Only looking at the site, it seems you could do better than make me wonder what "real prizes" might refer to, before signing up. Probably emphasize the reality up front. Now, after reading your entry here. . . Well, hm. I think the only question is: how well are you doing compared to your friends?
many 18y ago
oh, maybe I'm wrong to block ads & popups. too real for me.
babul 18y ago
I actually like it. It may not have many good games on there yet, but this works to keep things simple and you can tell what you are going to get in each section and page quickly and accurately. League tables are always a good idea, so good to see that. Plus having community forums would be good too. It would help if you allowed feedback on games as an indication to new visitors what is popular or fun. Also, for new visitors, why not try something different but fun such as a quick personality test that can be used to then recommend some games.
- mdolon 18y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. The personality test is an intriguing idea.. I guess it would match terms derived from selections the user makes in the quiz to tags the games have? I'll have to look into how recommendation systems work.

2 points by mdolon 18y ago

halo 18y ago

Looks pretty good. There's not really much to it to comment on - attractive design but fairly generic Web 2.0 these days so I'm fairly immune. Hardly a deal-breaker, but if you redesign at some point I'd consider making the navigation smaller so people don't have to scroll to play games if they have 800px vertical resolution (such as on a typical 13" laptop). Your images don't display under "link to us", you might want to fix that. I think there's a bit too much on the front page - if I were you I'd consider dropping the tabs near the bottom, which seem largely unnecessary to me. Perhaps you could also offer points for referrals to try and make it go viral? Although, admittedly, it might encourage people to abuse the system. Edit: One more minor thing, your "More Features" link is a little ugly and doesn't match the rest of the site, and clicking the clicking "Sign up" and "View Prizes" in the pop-up doesn't work correctly.

mdolon 18y ago
Thanks for the excellent feedback! The referral idea is a really good one, I hadn't considered that yet. I'm not sure if referrers would find points as a suitable incentive to send traffic but it's certainly something I wouldn't mind trying. As for the "link to us" section, it looks like it's working for me. What browser are you using?
- halo 18y ago
  Ah, it was a problem my end - my Adblock was blocking it because of the 'banners' subdirectory. Apologies.
  - mdolon 18y ago
    Not a problem - thanks for the prompt response.
- answerly 18y ago
  FWIW- I did a ton of research on friend to friend sharing in a previous gig. I found time and again that site based currency (like your points) was the most attractive motivator to encourage users to refer friends to a site. If you do incent users, you'll want to make sure you have suitable fraud tracking system since users will go out of their way to figure out how to game the system. Your site design is really clean versus other flash game sites I have come across in the past. Nice work!

many 18y ago

Only looking at the site, it seems you could do better than make me wonder what "real prizes" might refer to, before signing up. Probably emphasize the reality up front. Now, after reading your entry here. . . Well, hm. I think the only question is: how well are you doing compared to your friends?

many 18y ago

oh, maybe I'm wrong to block ads & popups. too real for me.

babul 18y ago

I actually like it. It may not have many good games on there yet, but this works to keep things simple and you can tell what you are going to get in each section and page quickly and accurately. League tables are always a good idea, so good to see that. Plus having community forums would be good too. It would help if you allowed feedback on games as an indication to new visitors what is popular or fun. Also, for new visitors, why not try something different but fun such as a quick personality test that can be used to then recommend some games.

mdolon 18y ago
Thanks for the feedback. The personality test is an intriguing idea.. I guess it would match terms derived from selections the user makes in the quiz to tags the games have? I'll have to look into how recommendation systems work.