HOW TO START?
Video games have long been a passion of mine, and starting a video game blog was a thoroughly rewarding way of sharing my opinions, analysis and thoughts about the gaming industry – and not to mention a sweet way of getting the very latest releases sent to me by publishers.
If you want to learn how to start a video game blog but don’t know how, are unsure about some of the specifics or need some expert advice, you’re in the right place. We’ve been writing about video games on the internet since 2005, have experience working for one of the biggest causal gaming companies in the world, and are amongst the blogging industry’s leaders.
In other words, you’re in highly capable hands.
This post is going to share everything you need to know about how to start a video game blog. We’ll give you the details, the specifics and the step-by-step instructions you can follow at your own convenience. If you’re a beginner you’re in good hands and if you know some details already you can skim the basics but pick up our pearls of wisdom throughout.
Making your video game blog: deciding which platform to use
To start a video game blog, you need to make a number of decisions about how the website is set up. You need to choose the platform you’ll create your site with and the name of your website.
Choosing a platform is pretty straightforward. You’ll want to use a ready-made website platform which does 90% of the legwork for creating a website for you. There are four major platforms to choose from:
- Self hosted WordPress (also known as WordPress.org).
- WordPress.com
- Squarespace
- Wix
WordPress.com, Squarespace and Wix are all “website builder” platforms which make it very easy to get started. These include pre-made templates which you can customise, typically through a drag-and-drop style interface. You pay a monthly or annual fee to use these platforms, with this fee typically including everything you need.
These platforms are very popular because of their ease of use, excellent new user “getting started” experiences and – frankly – advertising budgets.
The downside with these website builder platforms is that you’re locked in and can only make the changes or add the features permitted by the platform. If you want, for example, to sort your video game reviews by review score, you’d find this impossible with any of these platforms.
This creates a “walled garden” which can be frustrating once your video game blog gets past the early stages; there’s no easy way of switching platform once you’ve made the initial decision. To add extra features you effectively have to re-build your website from scratch on a more flexible platform.
Thus, for all but the most casual video game blogs, we’d recommend self-hosted WordPress. Self-hosted WordPress has a slightly higher initial learning curve, but offers a similar user experience – but with the major advantage of being highly customizable and flexible. You’re in total control of how your website looks, how it performs and what software it runs.
Self-hosted WordPress powers over a quarter of all websites, so you’re in excellent company: the same software you can use to start your video game blog can be used to power your site if and when it starts receiving hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands of visits. Self hosted WordPress is also probably cheaper than any of the website builder platforms (we’ll get to the costs involved later on).
Just one final note before we move on: very simple video game blogs should choose to go with WordPress.com. If you only want a simple blog, WordPress.com offers a hassle-free experience – it’s just not extensible in the same way self-hosted WordPress is.
Now that you’ve decided how you’re setting up your site, let’s start getting it set up!
