If there’s a few pieces of advice I’d give anyone in the games industry right now, it’s these:
- don’t use Caard, Linktree or one-page websites as your main site or first port of call you send people to
- any website builder you do end up using, spend as much time as possible learning about SEO and how to submit your site to a search engine
- stop wasting your time on social media with pithy comments and write long form for your own blog
- don’t lock your best writing or work behind Patreon or similar platforms
The reasons for this advice are simple and obvious – these are all punished for discoverability via search.
Search engines hate one-page websites because they’re static, so you’re bottom of the pile for ranking and SEO. That’s why it’s really important to pick a website platform – WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Strikingly, whatever – and learn how to tweak each page so it gets picked up by a search engine ahead of others.
Then, once you’ve done that, learn how to submit your site to the main search engines like Google and Bing, this step still matters!
Patreon, Substack (which has its own issues…) and similar platforms are designed to lock you away so you have to be on them to discover the content; they’re not readily accessible via search if at all.
And social media just sucks your time and prevents you from actually using your writing muscles and grey matter the way they were meant to be used, you develop a literary atrophy by thinking in 280 characters.
This advice is especially for people in narrative design and game writing, with the job market being such a shit show, the last thing you need is to make yourself and your work invisible.
Your website is an example of personal worldbuilding; make it count.
I think I might knock up a page on my website and put links to other people’s sites, happy to include anyone who reads this and wants theirs listed.
I miss web rings…
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