I’ve started Gamedev.js Weekly half a year ago and now, when it reached 2000 subscribers I decided to move it to its own domain and polish the design a bit.
The newsletter started as an addition to the Gamedev.js website which is about HTML5 game development meetups and hackathons in Poland. I had the proper subdomain and the newsletter was working fine under weekly.gamedevjs.com:
The newsletter itself is sent using MailChimp, which is free for the lists smaller than 2000 subscribers and the best choice for this kind of job. Although now I have to pay for the software, reaching that mark was very rewarding. Thanks to the sponsors: Spil Games, Weeby.co and Softgames the costs are covered, so it’s not so bad. There are advertisements in the newsletter to keep it running, but they are carefully picked to give the readers only the best content. The paid stuff is the Jobs section and everything else marked with the light blue background.
I decided to move the newsletter to its own domain, so the obvious choice was gamedevjsweekly.com. I also asked Ewa for the new design as the first one was just my tinkering with the available resources and was suppose to be only temporary. So here it is, the new Gamedev.js Weekly newsletter website:
I hope you like it just as I do - it’s clean, simple and looks good. The only downside is that it’s not mobile friendy yet, but I’m gonna fix that soon. Running the newsletter is a challenge, because I have to follow the social media and always be up to date with the latest news to deliver the best, fresh content to the readers, but that’s what I wanted to do from the beginning. Thanks to all of you who subscribed, I hope you enjoy the newsletter so far!