Sunday, October 14, 2007

Dressing Up Games - Monetisation and Optimization techniques

One of my friend just brought my attention to a new site: The Dressing Up Games. I love researching sites, understanding how everything works and learning about monetization aspects of online projects, so I was really excited to learn about another player especially knowing that site belongs to the niche I was attacking all along.

TheDressingUpGames.com used a very simple technics: get all the games you can and see what will work. I noticed they used games from Stardoll, Roiworld, The Doll Palace, I-Dressup and many other popular online destinations.

Site uses GSS (probably 3.1) engine, that I reviewed before, but is obviously very -very hand optimized and I suspect many elements were recreated or heavily modified. GSS is very slow by it's nature and I noticed that TheDressingUpGames was very -very fast.

I checked the page source and found
""
as the first line. I checked other GSS sites and none of them carry that, so obviously some very special caching has been created for the pages. What was even more interesting is after login I found the following there
"
so caching engine is still used (pay attention that md5 is still the same) but now we see "DYN" there (probably for dynamic).

Monetization is only done with Adsense, I think owner could of do a much better job there, but I guess it brings the money he/she is looking for.

Game selection is really interesting. All categories are at the top ( I would probably put them on the side because it is way too many of them there) but site does not look busy at all, I guess large font and spacing help to get a "non-busy" page feeling.

Color selection and theme is light pink/white /yellow/.blue (I guess a perfect slection for the audience). I was stumbled many times trying to figure out what colors go with pink, and I guess now I know that warm yellow and white will work. I also liked the background flower (I suspect that could be a stolen idea from dress up girl, but hey... it works, flower loads really fast and makes user understand that "page is loading, please wait")

Another interesting element is "keyword cloud". I think cloud should be done properly and leaving everything the same size does not achive the goal, but still this was the first dress up site that implemented it.

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