Netharuka Reboot Continued

I’ve been playing with the code on this website off and on for the last couple of days. Don’t worry, you won’t see any more of the weirdness you’ve seen in the last couple of days if you’ve visited, since I decided to put most of the changes on the test site first and not make the changes directly to production.

As I mentioned in my other post, I decided that this site needed a conceptual and visual face lift. One of the things I’ve dispensed with are the category thumbnails and the featured content gallery. They looked nice, but manually configuring them every time I put a post up just took too long. I could implement some code that could automate it, but in the end, I’d still have to use custom fields, etc. to link the thumbnails to the main article. One side benefit I’ll be gaining is the ability to use long titles. I disliked how long titles screwed up the formatting the category thumbnails due to how they interacted with the cascading style sheet.

The site hopefully looks cleaner after these changes. This will probably make my bounce rate higher, but for now, I think I’ll let my content rather than my site design keep and attract readers.

I’m going to clean up the sidebars too. The sidebars are overly cluttered and some of the ads and banners are going to go. The only stuff that will stay for sure are the RSS feeds and largely because I made an agreement for each of them for their placement on the site.

This gets me to the content. The original focus of this web site was games, anime, science fiction and fantasy. I thought there was a lot of cross over in these fields, since visual media tend to traverse these genres readily.

However, when it got down to actually write about these genres, I faced a rather odd dilemma. Games and anime are just too huge of a topic to give it adequate coverage. While I won’t abandon writing about these topics, I will most likely need to pick a niche for gaming (PCs, consoles, gaming news) and just pick one or two series at most to write about for anime.

Science fiction and fantasy topics present other difficulties. While there’s plenty to write about with science fiction, I’ve noticed that the science fiction posts I’ve written don’t get read. I really thought I was going to end up writing a lot about Star Wars and similar topics, but it seems that I’m among a small minority to find these topics interesting (or maybe my writing in this area is lacking). Science fiction will probably be written about only as they relate to upcoming movies.

I’m probably going to retire writing about fantasy altogether. Fantasy as it relates to video games will probably get some coverage, but that’s about it. I don’t want to end up like one of those very sad sites that continually reminisce about fantasy movies that were made years ago or conjecture about whether Drizzt Do’Urden would trump Legolas in a fight.

I’ll be narrowing and expanding the site’s focus in the following ways:

• Games - niche to be determined, some general game related news
• Anime - one or two series, some general anime news
• Geek Culture - which broadly gives me the license to write about what I happen to find interesting

Most importantly, I plan to simply improve my writing. One of the take aways from my experience from Sankaku Complex is that good writing does matter. People look for it since there’s so much bad writing out there. Honestly, I never gave it much thought, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

This will mean that for a while, I’ll probably write less but focus on delivering a higher quality. Unfortunately, I’m not one of those naturally gifted writers that write wonderfully at the first pass. I struggle with writing and to improve the quality of mine will probably means much tighter editing and a longer revisionary process. I will also focus more on writing more original content as opposed to rehashing stories from other sites.

I’m sure the changes I make won’t help my traffic numbers. I will definitely attract less people. However, I’m hoping that the people that do visit will like what they see and read. I’ll be writing on this site for a long time, so these changes are focusing this site towards slower, but steadier growth in readership.

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