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Let's get together and beautify the torque3d.org website.


noemen

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I've been using Torque3D for many years and what kept me working on it was the ease of creating a game. But when I entered the site for the first time, I didn't feel comfortable ... but what made me move on: Life is Feudal and BeamNG Driver was created there.


I believe that attracting more developers will make Torque3D grow. The site is the face of Torque3D, if nobody likes the face, how can they risk knowing it from the inside?


I say that, because it took me a long time to know that Torque3D is incredible.


And another ... I already created a project to improve the look of the site, but I was prevented ...


I see the potential of this community and I love you because it was here that I was able to escape my daily life.

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The Website was probably created from scratch in a hurry, so it has never been changed after that again significantly. The main reason was probably that the main creator went away and the repository was kind of hidden.


Now as we have a new Github repository I think this is the website: https://github.com/TorqueGameEngines/T3DLandingPage


No idea how you are supposed to work on the website, what software was used etc.


But what you are preaching is the same that I'm preaching for over 5 years now or so, nobody cares. Having a better website itself may be good, but will not help much by itself. You need to do SEO to actually attract people, a lot of it.


So far we do not even seem to have metrics about how many visitors that website has, if we don't have that, basically everything else is pointless, as we cannot measure our progress anyway.


So in order to make any progress at all, we need to organize some kind of team and especially get the people in charge to allow others to actually make contributions. As far as I know is @LukasPj the one in charge of the website and forum, so you probably need to talk to him.

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I’m only in charge of the forums, not the landing page.

The forums use phpBB and should be generally SEO optimized, but the design could use a helping hand.

@JeffR talked about organizing a “webgru” group to spearhead website efforts and general marketing I believe. Don’t know what the status on that is.

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The forum is fine and probably also SEO optimized, since it has crawler bots and of course spammers like our forum.


The problem however is, we have nobody in charge of analytics and marketing, so we don't know how many visitors we have or where they come from and so we do not know what our target group is.


Most Torque users come from the old Garagegames times, from there on we our growth rate is pretty much zero.


SEO optimization is not only about being visible at all on the web, it is about actually engineering the website so people actually go there. If we were a business (which technically we are) we would need a guy dedicated to that, meaning monitoring visitors every day and looking at the market which keywords are trending and which are not and then adjust the website according to it.


The primary reason to have a good website is to have visitors, but if we have no visitors, the website itself does not matter that much anyway. Biggest point of criticism for me is, that there is no "Download now" button, well there is, but it leads you somewhere, from where you sitll don't know how to get started and even I to this day still don't know out of my head how to get to the actual download page and indeed there is none, you have to click a few links and need to end up on the torque3d wiki where the actual downloads are. Otherwise the website design is somewhat okay.


I checked torque3d.org in an external tool and according to those it ranks very low meaning it is almost unknown, not completely dead, but close.


The forum I could not check since it uses the same domain, but it should have a lot more visitors, though it is hard to tell if those are actually humans, since the actual forum activity does not reflect the supposed visitor count we have.

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There is/was somebody working on a new consistent theme for the new site as well as reworking content to reduce the 'distribution' of stuff, but i'm not sure of its current status.


In theory the timing for all of it would be done best at 4.0 launch, where this stuff can be pushed along with official news of the migration to the new organisaton and repository.


As far as the download now button... Pre-NeuProjectManager, short of creating a giant installer containing a bunch of modules and examples, with specific instructions on where/how to get more/new modules i'm not really sure the best wat to appraoch this, but i agree a relatively quick and easy way to get stuck in should be a definite priority.

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