PokéProject Dev Diary: Day Seven

This thing ain’t gonna market itself.

Image from Jason Rosewell / Unsplash / https://unsplash.com/photos/ASKeuOZqhYU

I’m running this ‘Development Diary’ on roughly a week’s worth of lag now, and after yesterday’s disastrous server-upgrade failure I thought it was about time I stepped back from the code and looked a little closer at marketing, specifically how to get some ‘organic’ traffic going towards PokéProject.

“Marketing a new website feels like shouting into the void.”

Getting a project off the ground technically is one thing, but getting it noticed enough for traffic to pick up and make it worthwhile is another thing entirely. Marketing a new website feels like shouting into the void, an uphill struggle to stand out amongst the background noise. I haven’t really marketed my previous projects and they haven’t struck success, so I really want to change that this time around. Trouble is, nobody will discover you until you’re on the front page of search results, and you won’t get there until the right people discover you and link to you.

Fortunately I’ve been clued in to some great articles about SEO — here and here (thanks Ben!) and while I’m not going to spend too much time agonising over strategies just yet, it has given me the inspiration to start blogging about the development process on Medium (which you’re not reading — inception!) and convinced me that I need to put a little more text on the website itself, if only to explain what it’s all about.

For my first version, I’ve settled on a elevator-pitch style introduction:

Add a slice of childhood nostalgia to your day with a Poké-themed code name. 
Ideal for top secret projects, Agile Teams or even just a little creative inspiration.

And then gone on to introduce the project a little more below the page fold with the section entitled ‘What is PokéProject, Why does it exist?” to give a proper introduction. It’s not an all-out SEO assault just yet, but hopefully it’s enough to avoid being penalised by search engines for lacking in content.

Next Steps

I think it’s time for a bit more of a redesign next — I’m not overly happy with the interface and I’d like it to have a bit more of a modern feel or a bit more impact, so I think that’s what we’ll focus on next.

PokéProject is online at https://www.pokeproject.co.uk