Frequently Asked Questions
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Why is it better to host my gaming blog with you guys rather than one of the “big boys”?
There are several reasons why we think we can offer you a great place to host your miniature gaming blog on 6sided.
Firstly and most importantly, we are gamers ourselves. So we understand what it is all about. You can be confident that we have the interests of developing and publicising the hobby at heart.
Secondly, publicity. 6sided is run by Jason and Ian. both of us are SEO & SEM experts by trade (basically we know how to promote websites!). We will be doing a lot more work promoting the blog network through the search engines, as well as through marketing. On top of that we have measures in place to ensure your blog gets visited quickly by the search engine bots, meaning a good indexing rate for your posts.
Thirdly, traffic. We aim to make 6sided a destination in itself. This means more gamers finding your blog directly through visiting 6sided.
Fourthly, cost. A blog on 6sided is free. Using your own domain is free. If you use wordpress.com, they charge you around $18 a year to use your own domain name for example, blog.com charge around $30.
Finally, support. Every admin panel has access to contact us by opening a support ticket. This allows you to get help direct from us.
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Is your service Ad supported?
The free account’s are ad supported. We may display a standard-sized banner advert under a post/page on your blog. It will be a relevant advert from a reputable advertiser. For a small annual fee (currently $10) you can become a supporter, which removes ads from your blog.
To give you a comparison, blogger is ad-supported, with no option to remove advertising. WordPress.com and blo.com both charge $30 a year for ad removal.
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How much storage space does my account come with?
Free accounts can use 75Mb of media storage space, supporter accounts 150Mb. As the service grows, we will continually monitor those levels and should they prove inadequate, then we will up the levels for both member-types.
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Can I alter the look of my blog?
There are dozens of themes to choose from. Each theme is also very customisable. You can upload your own header image and change the colours through theme options. Each theme uses wordpress “widgets” which allos you to add content to the “sidebar” of your blog (the column where you usually place links, where latest posts are displayed etc).
We have one “super theme” called “WEAVER” which has so many options to configure, that you will never get bored. We recommend giving that theme a try first and seeing what you can do.
We also have more straightforward themes. Many of these have relevant images included, such as our ACW theme. So you can just pick a relevant theme and go!
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I’m not sure how something works.
Our first advice is – play around with it! Try altering the theme options, or changing the plugin options for example. You can’t break the site by trying stuff in your account. If you get stuck, try the FAQ section in your account, or open a support ticket and we will help you out.
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I already have a blog elsewhere, can I still use your service?
You certainly can. In your 6sided account are tools to import existing posts from wordpress.com, blogger.com and livejournal.com. We also have an RSS importer which should import from most other formats.
To use the RSS importer you just need to know the URL of your existing RSS feed.
By importing your blog you can try us out while knowing that if it does not work out for you, that your original blog and posts will remain exactly as they were (our importer imports copies only).
If it does work out, you can just do a post on your old blog, pointing people to your new myname.6sided.net blog.
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What are the blog categories on the sign-up page? How can I classify my blog?
When you sign-up, the form asks you to categorise your blog. Simply select the subject your blog will mostly be about. If you blog about more than one genre of gaming, simply class your blog as “general”, or hold down the CTRL key and select multiple genres.
Why do we categorise blogs? Simply, we intend to use the data to allow us to easily see how many blogs we have in each category. If one category is not getting many blogs, we can target recruitment/marketing to reach out to those gamers and continue to broaden the scope of 6sided evenly.
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Is my blog and data safe?
We do an automated back-up of the site databases daily. This backup is posted to and stored on a different server . We also do a weekly backup of the entire site structure, includin all images stored on the server. So we are confident we can restore data should something happen.
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Why are you guys providing this free service?
We are passionate about our hobby, and we could see that by offering the 6sided blog service there was a way we could give gamers something better than what already existed. Using 6sided puts your blog into a shared space with other gamers, rather than having it isolated. Using the friends tools and the fact that we list blogs in a directory etc, means that more people will find and read your posts. This is something that you get free, without having to publicise it yourself. You also get a more powerful blog than you get on either wordpress.com and blogger.com, backed by us personally through the members email helpdesk. Put simply, you will get more options, more power, more help and in the long-term more traffic on 6sided than you will get using blogspot or another non-specialist bloghost.
As to why we are doing this work free, we (Jason and Ian) are both professionals in search engine and online marketing disciplines. 6sided is fun to do, and is giving us some good info towards other projects, so its a win-win for us on a personal and professional level. And yes, 6sided will be around for a long, long time, so your blog is safe with us.
I have a question/issue related to your download store.
General instructions on using the download store are available on the main download store page. You can also view the terms of sale for download products there.
