I'm working on a new site which I've recently put up. It's a simple kind of mini-gamespot directed squarely at indie and shareware titles. This is a spare time effort for me and not a big commercial endevour. I think a site like this was needed and I hope to eventually mature it. For the moment I just wanted to get the basics in place. Once there's more content I will do a little advertising to try and build up some traffic.

Anyway... have a look and let me know what you think.

http://www.sharewaregaming.com

(anyone who has some interest in helping out on a purely voluntary basis let me know.)

hmmm

well, its a great start.

had just a prob with it:
what i thought to be the features (game reviews/articles)
turned out to be commercials...

so here's a couple of tips:

1. Make any commercial open in a new window, that way
it wont drive people away from your site.

2. i thought that "A snake's life" & aargon deluxe were your
main features... dont flood your page with advertisments,
and when you do, make sure people will know if it's advertisment
or mag content.

3. reviews are great, nothing to add.

4. try to keep pictures alongside with the features,
and also add a few descriptice lines like in the news paper.
look at gamasutra's features at
http://www.gamasutra.com/features
or maybe
http://www.gamer.co.il
(i know its in hebrew, but its the same kind of magazine)

5. make market research. i mean about magazine outline
and kind of features you can add.

just my thoughts.

Gil

Already sent you my details, I am doing a similar thing on part of my site, albeit without my own domain name yet. (skint).

I think there is a big need for this kind of thing and I support it 100%. Trying to get news onto bluesnews or ve3d.com is impossible, there is a set list of games from the 'big boys' and we are supposed to believe these are the only games that exist, its really pretty tedious. How many million screenshots of vapourware like Duke Nukem forever are we supposed to consider news anyway?
I'm bored with seeing 'previews' and 'screenshots' just tell me when the goddam demos are out so I can actually PLAY them!

Anyway, like I say we need sites like this, on my own I am trying to play down the number of puzzle games, as I believe that shareware and indie are becomming synonymous with puzzle game (RealGames are helping this view, although hopefully Planetary Defense will be a success and turn them around...).
I would rather see more strategy, action RPG and sim shareware games myself. If anyone has any (good quality, finished ones) then let me know!

>> well, its a great start.

Thanks

>>1. Make any commercial open in a new window, that way
>>it wont drive people away from your site.

Yes. I planned to do this also for screenshots and other things.

>>2. i thought that "A snake's life" & aargon deluxe were your
>>main features... dont flood your page with advertisments,
>>and when you do, make sure people will know if it's >>advertisment
>>or mag content.

Ok. I'll try to clear that up.

>>3. reviews are great, nothing to add.

OK. Cool.

>>4. try to keep pictures alongside with the features,
>>and also add a few descriptice lines like in the news paper.
>>look at gamasutra's features at

OK.

Thanks. Appreciate the feedback. Will move forward slowly on these sorts of changes but it will be continuously worked on.