1. Directory listings. This is an old technique, but true and trusted. Simply submit your site to free directories, such as the Open Directory Project or small niche specific directories in your market, and you’ll get both traffic and backlinks to help with your SEO.  The DMOZ is by far the largest and most useful of all online directories, and is free but all submissions are human reviewed meaning there is no guarantee of acceptance, and it can take a while to get listing.  It is however well worth taking the time to submit.

2. Social networking. Networks like Twitter and Facebook have come on leaps and bounds in the past couple of years, and are a fantastic way of getting in touch with your potential customers and getting traffic to your site. My adding re-tweet buttons to your articles you can even get your visitors voting for your content and driving even more new visitors to your site. If you won’t already have a Twitter account, get one today!  Linkedin is also worth joining, as are any social sites specific to your market.

3. Exchanging links. Google sees links to your site like votes, the more links you have the more authorative Google assumes your site is, and the higher you’ll rank. Find out which sites are linking to your competitors with this simple Google search: “link:yourcompetitor.com”. Then see if you can get links from those sites too!  They might accept guest posts or articles, or have a place where you can leave a comment, or they might simply want to link to you if your content would be of value to their users.

4. Offline. Traffic doesn’t only come from online sources. You should also take every advantage to promote your site offline, on your business cards, stationery, or newspaper and magazine adverts.  We have even designed signwriting for vehicles in the past and that also gets good results for local businesses.

5. Build a list. Once you have a visitor at your site, you should really offer them an incentive to give you there email address. A free report or newsletter in exchange for their subscription means you can promote to that same customer again and again, making list building the most profitable of all the traffic techniques in the long run.  Aweber is the best solution for building and managing a list, and is very reasonably priced.

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We’re also looking into developing a multi-player Texas Hold’em game in Flash, so watch this space.

Other current projects are rather hush hush at the moment while we’re working out the details, but 1 involves a major games company and the other a large UK based charity.  We’re hoping to have the details worked out over the next couple of weeks, and once done they will be 2 very nice high profile additions to the Kernow Web portfolio.

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You can read the profile here, but I highly recommend heading over to the FFD website and subscribing to the magazine, where you’ll also find my tutorial on developing arcade games in Flash/Actionscript.

The tutorial is also featured on my Flash Games Classroom site where you can download the full source code to the game if you’re interested in learning Flash game design and development yourself.

With such a great start to the year, I think 2010 will be big for Kernow Web… a big thanks to everyone involved in Kernow Web collaborations over the past 12 months, and here’s to even more success in the future.

Billy

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The run up to Christmas has been incredibly busy again this year with a number of clients wanting viral Flash games to promote their brands, and of course the Elf on the Shelf project continues to keep us busy year on year as we develop more games for them (they actually hit the nuber 1 best seller spot on Barnes and Noble this year – well done!)

So, just a quick heads up.  Kernow Web will be closing up shop on 23rd December this year, for a nice family Christmas followed by a spot of snowboarding.  We’ll be back to work properly from 3rd January but as usual I’ll have a cell phone and laptop with me in case of emergencies

So merry Christmas to everyone, and a big thank you to all of our clients who have helped make 2009 our best year yet at Kernow Web… and 2010 is already shaping up to be even better.  We have some exciting new games projects already lined up, and our Flash Games Classroom project will continue to grow and move towards the launch of our course in a few months time.

Finally, we’ll be starting the year off with a bang as Kernow Web will be featured in the January edition of Flash and Flex Developers magazine so keep an eye out for us there!

All the best,

Billy

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Jungle run is an arcade action game, plain and simple. Developed for a children’s party company, our brief was to create a game which looked as good as it played. The jungle theme matched some of their existing content, and do Jungle Run was designed and developed around an explorer character, trying to survive in the jungle.

Each level gets harder and harder as the player has to avoid rolling logs, elephants and even a T-rex while collecting bonuses and powerups. The first 8 levels get more complex, and from level 9 onwards a routine generates dynamic levels to prevent the game from becoming too predictable.

The game uses pre-rendered 3D graphics to give it a great modern look, while still being lightweight and fast in Flash. Levels are designed in a modular way to make it easy to create new levels, obstacles and powerups in the future should the need arise. Click the link below to play the game…

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Keep In Touch was a game designed around a simple concept – that you need to keep in regular contact with your friends, or you risk losing them!

Promoting Orange’s SMS text service, the Keep In Touch game is simple, yet fun and competitive. Lauched on the Facebook platform the game is a perfect example of viral marketing at its best. Friends play the game and post their highscores on their Facebook walls, and invite teir friends to try and beat them.

We worked in collaboration with Active Web Services and designed the game around the “keep in touch” concept. The game generates a number of “friends” – blobs – which bounce around the screen. To keep in touch the player drags a blob to one of the orange areas and the blob turns orange, but only for a few seconds. To keep in touch with their friends the player has to keep dragging blobs back, reinforcing the marketing message that repeated use of SMS messaging helps friends to keep in touch!

Play Keep In Touch on Facebook

Social integration was done on the Facebook platform. The game asks the user to input their name, and then offers them the chance to post their highscore to their Facebook wall and invite their friends to play.

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If you’re wondering what’s up with the site today don’t worry… we’re in the middle of a major overhaul of the entire site! Things should be back up as usual within a few hours so apologies to anyone having problems viewing the site today, but believe me it will be worth the wait!

The old Kernowweb.co.uk design was getting rather long in the tooth, and didn’t really show us in our best light. Most of our time is spent working on our cleint’s projects, so housekeeping on this site sometimes gets behind, but no more!

The new design is a vast improvement, as you can see from these before and after shots, and will focus primarily on our portfolio, the main reason people visit the site. We’re right in the middle of updating it right now, but check back in a day or two and you’ll see the featured projects in all their glory, and where possible there will be playable versions of many of our games!

Hope you like the new design, do leave a message and let us know what you think!

Billy

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Our brief for this project was to design and develop a game suitable for promoting a paper company, and the end result was a viral game where players compete at throwing a paper aeroplane through a busy New York street.

The players set the angle and power of the throw, and the plane soared its way through a busy street, avoiding obstacles such as taxis, cyclists, and even a hotdog stand on fire along the way. Extra lift was found in the steam coming from some of the sidewalk vents, and with a good throw the plane could travel a significant distance. The player’s 3 throws were accumulated to a final score which entered them into a competition.

Viral integration was achieved by collecting the player’s names and email addresses, since the highest scores would be eligible for a great prize – a trip to New York! The game interfaces with Twitter and Facebook, posting highscores as Tweets and wall posts with an invitaion to other players.

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We were approached by Cre8ive Websites, LLC to develop a series of online games as part of The Elf on The Shelf 2008 Christmas marketing campaign. The games were to be themed to match the national TV advertising campaign.

We developed 7 games in total including a jigsaw puzzle, slide puzzle and 2 memory games, along with an action game called ‘Count the Elves’ (based on the old fairground Whack-a-mole game). We also developed a hide and seek game, and an activity application called Make a Cookie for Santa where the player selected a cookie dough, and decorated it with different frostings, icings and decorations before seeing it get packaged up and sent to Santa.

The games can be viewed and played at the Elf on the Shelf website.

“Billy, I can’t thank you enough for your professionalism on this! Hopefully you enjoy this sort of thing because I think you’re awesome at it and would love to be able to continue have you putting things together for us!”
- Carrie Burns, Cre8ive Websites, LLC

Count The Elves action game The player has to Count The Elves by tapping them with the finger of a cartoon hand as quickly as possible as they pop out from their hiding places in the tree!

Hide & Seek game After a short intro the player switches off the lights and the elf hides. The player then has to guess which object the elf is hiding in or behind. Play then moves off to a new location!

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After almost 8 years of developing Flash games we’ve finally started to share that knowledge and experience in a series of Flash game tutorials at a new site – ViralFlashGames.com

The first tutorials have been uploaded already, and many more will be put online over the coming weeks and months, so if you’re interested in learning how to make your own Flash games be sure to drop by and take a look!

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