The Beginnings of GameBrink
After finishing up school I decided to get back into the gaming website business after running Gamingplanet.com from 1997-2004ish.
My first thought was to make an Import Game store that would sell games from Japan to other audiences much like play-asia.com or ncsx.com.
I found wholesalers in Hong Kong, bought some stock and started to craft a site using Yahoo’s Ecommerce platform.
If I was smart I would have done some research about Yahoo’s RTML language, which is used by its Ecommerce platform, and I would have realized that it was outdated annoying and not worth touching unless you wanted to build a store with very very basic features.
Well that or become a master of RTML and all its quirks which I was hesitant to do but did anyways because I had already leaped forward before doing research.
ALWAYS RESEARCH THE TECHNOLOGY YOU’LL BE USING BEFORE YOU COMMIT TO IT.
I know it’s simple but I’ve rushed into projects without doing this more times than I like to admit so I thought it was worth mentioning.
So I bought a book on the subject, read up about it online, and went to work making a site.
Here’s a look at the embarassing site made back in 2005 via archive.org.
I’d like to say it’s so basic and ugly because RTML is awful but that’s only part of the problem, I was just out of practice after doing C++ for 4 years in college.
That being said it was all very functional, it was hooked up to merchant services that allowed me to accept credit cards which was a nightmare, and there I was open for business.
Only problem? Oh yeah people need to know about it, trust it, and actually order from it. Doh!
Thus begins my adventure back into the world of SEO I hadn’t touched since before google was popular so that’s to say everything had changed.
Because of this I made an amazing amount of damaging mistakes with the site that to this day keep it sandboxed, aka out of top 10 rankings, although still completely indexed.
Next time I’ll start to explain the many bad steps I took in the first few months of GameBrink so that you don’t fall into the same traps.
Yes you might be partaking in black hat seo without even knowing it and because of that google may be damning you for a long long time.
Until next time!
seodude :: Aug.18.2007 :: Case Study - GameBrink.Com :: No Comments »
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