Website for Game Industry Employment

Just wanna say that this is a really good incentive for the australian game community. Great Job!

Spammed with popup ads... I won't be back until that's removed as spam drives me friggin nuts!

Yes,

I have nothing against the initiative, but the ads will clearly keep this from ever taking off. Spamming users with adds will have a pushing force on consumers, so you will need to have an opposing pulling force if you want to keep people coming back, let alone entice new people.

That pulling power doesn;t exist yet. To the OP; I would strongly reccomend dicking all the ads untill the website is set up. You are effectivley competing against websites like this and many others out there which do not spam users into submission, and at the moment offer nothign in return.

I too won't be going back.

Just had a look at the site, and I have to share the sentiments of the other posters about the ads. It's actually quite extraordinary how many kinds of ads you have on there! On my first visit, I've been hit with a full screen "click this button to skip this ad" ad, and then there's the standard cross banner ad, a side banner ad, a pop up banner that slides back down at the bottom of the page, a roll over ad which covers half the screen in the top right of the page. On other pages, there are word ads on your content, and if I click on the jobs button on the navigation bar, boom, I'm hit with 3 pop up windows of ads. And all of these ads have the subtlety of an elephant on crack, all flashing and vying for your attention.

It's simply way too overkill. It's just going to frustrate visitors and not make them want to come back. In my opinion, click-through ads are a waste of time anyway, unless you're pulling in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of unique visitors. On an initial launch of a site with an understandably small amount of content, it's too early for it.

I've never considered click-through ads on Sumea / tsumea in the 8 years we've been around (we never even had ads or sponsors for the first five or so years of existence either). The visitor numbers are simply not in the hundreds of thousands a day to make it worthwhile. Remember, games development is a VERY niche audience, and Australian games development is a very smaller part of that pie. If you're concentrating on Australian games jobs, that is a really, really, really tiny pie.

However, if you are intending to cover game related jobs world-wide, then boy, are you up against some *really* heavy hitters. If you want to compete with them, and you're thinking of replicating some of their services, I'd recommend something other than Joomla. Maybe it's much better since the two years since I last looked into Joomla (Sumea was hand written since 2001, and we made a major the switch to Drupal 2 years ago), but back then, it simply couldn't even cut it doing the stuff I had already done on Sumea.

The other thing about the site is that it seems more suited for gamers interested in games rather than developers. You've got game reviews, software reviews, playable games, games videos, games related blogs - it's hard to see if there's any focus on game jobs at all.

Anyway, it's always good to have more sites on the local industry, so all the best!

Hey guys. Thanks for the feedback. And yes I completely agree about the ads. The site is not being put out live yet and currently just the test one is up there at the moment, as such different advertising companies were being tried which seemed to overlap for a lot of people.

All of the pop up/pulldown/ annoying ads have all been removed now and they were never intended to stay there. I had written a few posts on the frontpage and in the forum explaining the ads so guess you guys didn't look in there. Sorry that you had to visit it while they were being tested.

And Souri thanks for your feedback also. I do have to agree that it is a small market for the Australian and New Zealand game industry but I think that it is something that needs as much help as it can get. And I know when I was attempting to get into the industry there is just very little help out there aside from the main training institutions which a lot of people can't afford to invest in straight up. This site is in no way going to be competing with the international websites and it is not going to even try. I am not trying to make a profit from this site as I simply began making it as a way to get more contacts in the industry and am hoping it will do the same for the members.

As for the jobs section it will be coming up fully once the site is released since obviously it involves the most work with outside companies. I am currently in discussions with many of the Australian game developers and educational facilities to set this up correctly and once it is completely finished users will be able to create their own web page/portfolio in the site with an unlimited amount of storage to put all your work in which the client will be able to view. The other pages are all set up for the community to enjoy and all the blogs, reviews etc are all written by members of the site who wish to be more involved.

I hope to see you all back on there once the site is live and once again sorry for the spamming of the ads, they were just there for testing and I had not expected to get 45 000 hits in the week that the ads were being tested.

I applaud you initiative.
It's refreshing to see this kind if thing being done. ( not that Souri hasn't been doing an awesome job, he really has)
Anything which can raise the profile of games development in Australia is worthwhile and deserves our support.