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Building Your Site
Build a Site – Define Objective
Before you begin, lay out your marketing plan and define the purpose and objectives of each site you
wish to build. This will help you determine what you should do about domain names, website
construction and hosting solutions. Here are some possible site types and their purposes:
• Custom Branded Casino Website. When you create custom branded casinos, we strongly
encourage you to build a casino website to go along with it. We make this easy for you, and it goes a
long way toward establishing your brand identity and providing a place for players to find your casino
on the web. We also recommend getting your own domain and using low-cost hosting solutions.
• Gaming Portal. This is a powerful marketing tool that helps to establish you as the dominant
gaming brand in your market. It can be as simple as a single page with links to all casino branded sites
plus all your own custom branded sites, or it can be a comprehensive site with gaming information,
tips, newsletters and more. For Portals, if brand identity and viral traffic draw are your objectives (and
they should be), we recommend your own domain and low-cost hosting rather than free hosting.
• Informational Site. This is a website that is designed to provide information for which potential
players are surfing the Internet. Not every prospective player is actively surfing for gaming sites. Some
do, but most prospective players are searching for something else when a banner ad or pop under ad
catches their eye and entices them into a gaming property. The Informational Site is designed to
provide the category of information for which potential players are actively searching, such as sites
about fly fishing, Formula One racing, adventure travel, movie reviews, fine wines... the list is endless
and bounded only by your imagination and understanding of your market demographics. Info sites are
designed to carry banners, text links, pop under ads, etc., which redirect web traffic to gaming sites.
There are two basic types of Info sites. The first is one in which you will be establishing some visitor
loyalty and brand identity, along with a newsletter and email database. The information may be well
researched, in-depth, unique or vital. For this you'll want to get your own domain and perhaps be
willing to spend a few dollars a month on hosting.
The second is a quick site meant to be used as part of a web ring. The information may be limited,
quickly assembled and intended to serve no purpose other than to satisfy the minimum requirements of
the ring in order to tap into the ring's flow of traffic. For this you can use free hosting and take
whatever domain they give you. If you're primarily building the site to be in a ring, the ring will see to it
that traffic finds you so you don't need to have an easy-to-remember URL. Since it's meant to be
simple, you can also use free point-and-click web page authoring tools that many free-hosting sites
include with their offer.
Jump Page. This is a simple, one-page site meant to enable off-line advertising through one-shot or
transitional media, like radio ads or sky-writing, where your audience will have to remember your URL
after only being exposed to it for a few seconds. The jump page merely has your encoded website links
and software download links to the gaming sites (plus a few graphics and perhaps some concise
promotional text). They are so simple they can be built by novices in an afternoon with free,
downloadable web authoring tools. But, they will require your own domain because you need to come
up with a URL for your ads that is catchy and easily remembered after hearing or seeing only once for a
few seconds. You'll also need to use low-cost hosting to keep your domain name.
Build a Site: Domain Names
if you are building a casino website, a Gaming Portal or a jump page, the first thing you'll need is a
domain name for your site. This will be the URL web users will enter into their web browsers to reach
your site.
• Why You Need Your Own Domain. There are a number of low-cost or free hosting solutions that
provide a domain name for you, but these are typically a long string of characters that are hard for
players to remember and easily mistyped, leading to "Page not found" errors which imply that your
casino doesn't exist. We strongly recommend getting your own domain name so you maintain control
over the URL, establish credibility with your players and build a stronger brand identity. This will also
result in a more effective search, because many search engines and directories only accept sites with a
dedicated domain name or will give priority to such sites over free Web pages in their search results.
• Register Before You Build. Getting the domain registered before you start constructing the site
design and writing the content is important because you may be building certain themes and graphical
elements (like site logo) around the domain name. If you build first and try to get the domain
registered second, you could have a problem if the domain you want is unavailable.
• Choosing Your Name. One of the most important things to consider when choosing your casino
name is to make it resonate with your target market and to keep the casino website's domain name
(URL) simple so it's easy to remember from offline advertising and word-of-mouth messaging. It's
always optimal to have the casino name match the URL of your casino website, but it isn't strictly
necessary. So you could have the Joan of Arc Casino at joac.com rather than joanofarccasino.com since
the former is easier to remember and less likely to be misspelled. It wouldn't hurt to also register the
joanofarccasino.com domain and have it redirect to joac.com so players who look for you at the full
name will still find you.
• Alternative Extensions. For many markets, the best "top level" domain extension to acquire is
".com", because that's what most people will assume when they hear your URL.We recommend
determining what the dominant extension is for your market and choosing a domain name that enables
you to register under that extension. We also suggest that you register your domain name under any
other extensions that might be inadvertently used by traffic - just to keep competitors from copying
your name and trying to siphon off some of your brand identity and traffic. So consider taking ".net",
".biz" and ".org" in addition to ".com".
• Registering a Domain Name. Registering a domain name is easy. There are many domain
registration sites to choose from, it only takes a few minutes to fill out a short online form and the cost
is typically less than US$20 per year.
Build a Site: Website template
Here's how it works:
Las Vegas Atlanta New York
Select a Package
Choose a Theme
Customize Look
Customize Content
Launch your Site
Cash in on the fastest growing and
most profitable business on the San Francisco Atlantis Miami
Internet today!
New Orleans Osaka Atlantic City
South Beach Old West Future City
Poker Only Templates
Beach Poker Aqua Poker Safari Poker
Winter Poker
Special Templates
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