Wanted: Website Review Recently Launched Casino Site

[mcharalambous]

Guys,

Myself and my team recently launched www.roulette.co.uk. I was wondering if you guys could tell me what you think? It's actually a standalone site with basic PHP at the moment, but we are finalising it's move to wordpress over the next few days to ensure it's easy to manage.

If you have any design advice, or thoughts on added functionality, I'm open

Thanks!

 

[Edwin]

There's a lot of material on there, but it suffers from looking too "blog-like" (a design trend I've seen a lot recently). Blogs imply a particular type of site: informational rather than transactional, chronological (with older stuff implicitly "less relevant") rather than evergreen, etc. For what you're trying to promote, a more "regular site" look might serve you a lot better.

 

[mcharalambous]

Edwin: never had a response like that before, if you could elaborate on that i'd much appreciate it. Maybe give me an example of something that could work better? (should you be able to pick your brain for a site).

Also, i should mention that this website was recently taken over and re-designed, therefore still has some old content (we're slowly replacing this) so don't judge us on that content! Haha!

 

[doodlebug]

It does look a bit Wordpressy but it's definitely good enough for web users, what I like is that your reviews on eg, William Hill are based on the actual roulette games and not just William Hill in general.

Seems a decent amount of content and a domain like this deserves it.

 

[mcharalambous]

Doodlebug: thanks for that, i'm glad you've noticed the content is actually relevant. We do try and keep relevant to our domain names, rather than conquer everything!

I keep thinking about what Edwin said and would love some examples. though i do get it, most websites these days look like news/blog sites. Maybe we should aiming for a blog section, rather than that feel across the site! Though, i'm not sure our casino pages (http://www.roulette.co.uk/casinos/william-hill-casino/) look like blog posts?

 

[Edwin]

I've been trying to find a good counter example and I can't, but it still nags me because as I mentioned there are certain automatic expectations which come with a "blog-like" site, expectations that are most likely irrelevant in your case (i.e. timely content, consumed in chronological order, with the "older stuff" basically ignored since it's no longer current)

While it's a great tool, Wordpress has also done a lot of harm by being almost "too easy" - it promotes the creation of a very specific style of site, unless the person deploying it is adept at making the plethora of changes required to change the thus-generated site from blog-like to site-like, i.e. to transform Wordpress into a general CMS tool. But very few people go to those lengths, especially since they would also require the creation of custom templates since those readily available on the market are inevitably blog-like in layout.

 

[max99x]

in my opinion putting wordpress on a domain like that is a waste. Get a big backer and build an actual casino specialising in roulette, partner with an existing one casino is option too

 

[mcharalambous]

max99x: I can't agree with that personally, as somebody who is involved in both sides of the online casino world, i know first hand how hard it is to make an online casino work compared with an affiliate site. Though, both options have been looked into.

We are not simply using wordpress to create a blog, that would be shocking, we are using it as a base platform to build on...

 

[orchardapple]

i dont know but to me its screaming out for some user interactivity on the main page, live roulette spinning wheel, call to actions, Mr X placed £X and won £XXX style

just 'looks' at present too affiliate based and theres plenty competition in this space agreed not all on such a good domain name!

Quite how a partnership with a casino would work i wouldn't know but this really could become the 'only site' for roulette

 

[mcharalambous]

orchardapple: to be honest, your right about the user interaction - then again i don't want to steal peoples focus away from the end goal. Though usually "Mr X placed £X and won £XXX" is onyl on casinos themselves, it could be a great idea - i'll look into it thanks!