After my post about our press release and all the help we got from awesome people, folks wanted to know more about the press page, so here are some diagrams I made in the spirit of Chris Phin.
There are two important ideas that went into our press page. The first is that journalists want basic, no-nonsense information, stripped of marketing fluff. They want to know as much about our product as possible in as little time as they have, so we give them the good stuff, right up front.
They want promo codes. We try to make getting them as painless as possible. Then the basic links: where we are on the various networks, and our press kit, which has all the important stuff on the page zipped up and waiting, so you can download that and be off the site in 30 seconds. We try to provide the site and its content in every language we are localized in, and make that immediately obvious.
Since our press release is concise enough to demo, we include the whole thing, right above the fold, right next to the basic information that should accompany any press release: what the product is, and how people can get in touch with us. Oh yeah, and high-resolution logos and screenshots. Making high quality assets available makes it easy to cover us, which brings me to the other second important idea.
Journalists are just as lazy as I am. The easier we make it for them to do their jobs, the more they are going to love us. We tell them lots of clever things to notice about the game in our heavily illustrated reviewer’s guide. We want them to know everything they need to know after 20 minutes with our product.
Hell, we even prerecord that 20 minutes with extended format Let’s Play videos. You can play them full-screen on your iPad and it’s like playing the game without using your hands.
I figure, I was a journalist, and I like to jump to the bottom of the page, so we made it a bit of a mini-site, with minimal gimmicks, and minimal chrome. The way I see it, by the time you get down to the press page, all we can do is let the product speak for itself.