Baby on Board

I got a small amount of Console Classix work done last week, but not as much as I would have liked. That is mainly due to the fact that my lovely wife had our sixth child Friday at eleven thirty nine. That makes my third son's birthday 02/11/2011 around 11PM. If any of you are wondering, he is happy and healthy and we're all home from the hospital and getting back to normal. It blew my week up because of the baby appointments we had leading up to the actual delivery. Now that he's home I can get back to a normal work week.

So, what's been going on what is about to be going on? Well, I'll tell you! First, I put up our new and improved game info page last weekend. I may have mentioned that already, but it had some unexpected results. So far it has tanked our Google search listings. I have no idea why. The new page is almost exactly like the old one except for the fact that I fixed hundreds (literally) of HTML standards errors. The new page is seriously cross-browser compatible and I think it even looks a little better. Why this would have blown up our rankings I have no idea. Lord willing, I'll be making a few minor changes later this week. I turned off a couple of features until we saw how the page preformed. I plan to turn them back on this week.

It might seem like we could just go back the old page, but that isn't going to happen. The new page is better. We are just going to have to figure out what is going on with Google and press on to the future.

We are also waiting to see how the Facebook “Likes” are going to effect our rankings. Supposedly they are counted by Google just like any other links. If that's true it should really help our pages in general. I don't know that this information is going to help us at all because we're not going to be able to create more “Likes” ourselves, but I want to see what happens anyway. We might have some kind of “Like” campaign, although I'm not sure how we would go about it.

This week I plan to implement a Console Classix Wiki. I think I can have it setup in a few hours. The only problem is I'm not sure how to tie it to our current game info pages. I don't want to completely do away with the old ones (at least not for a while) and I'm not sure how I want to run them side by side. I think we should have an “Add a Wiki” button for any page that doesn't have a CC Wiki entry yet, but after the wiki page is up I'm not sure where the CC menu should point a user to first. Should we keep bringing up the old page with a link to the wiki? Should we bring up the wiki page with a link to the old page? What should we do with screen shots? Should we post all the screen shots on both pages or should each have it's own? Where will we fit in video when we start making trailers for the games?

Needless to say I have to think all this out. Still, I hope to have it in place Monday. Then I will contact a few people I want to be moderators. (Again, Brian, I'm looking at you.) Once that is done we should be able to roll it out in some fashion later in the week.

I do have at least one bug report I have to look into as well... Always so much to do....

Anyways, things are going well. We are getting there step by step.