As a freelance web designer, you’re rarely given the opportunity to be as creative as you want with a project. The client usually has an idea in mind before they send you that first email, or a database of links of sites they love, or even occasionally a sketch of the layout they want you to build. I think this is a big reason web designer so frequently redesign their own sites; they come up with these great ideas that they’re aching to implement, and they’ve got to get it out of their systems.
In this particular case, I’m my own client. A few years back I founded the Aureus Knights with a handful of my friends, and I inherited the responsibility of maintaining our community’s site. We’re a guild centered around online gaming, and MMOs in particular. Maintaining an online community is always a rough thing; it requires patience with your users, an open ear to their wishes and criticism, and the willingness to adapt to their needs. For a community that centers around it’s web site as it’s leading form of organizing and communication, these qualities are essential in keeping the site fresh and exciting, and appealing to potential new users.
After the Redesign
A few months ago I sat down and began work on redesigning the Knight’s website, for a few reasons. First, our active design was too dark. We had a near-black background, white font, and fairly bland colors and graphics. While this looked appealing to me initially, we outgrew the look rather quickly. Likewise, the “dark” theme didn’t suite our membership terribly well, as we generally play “the good guys” and felt this gave the wrong impression about who and what we were.
Next, we relied on a combination of two content systems to communicate: WordPress and vBulletin. It’s well known that I love WordPress, but it didn’t work in this particular instance because we simply weren’t updating the site with news frequently enough to warrant it. You might say the overhead didn’t meet the demand. We decided we wanted to build our new site around vBulletin; to be able to deliver gaming and guild news to the homepage using the forums alone. Having two systems that can do the same thing (at least, the same thing we need them to do) didn’t make sense.
Finally, we wanted to more deeply integrate our wonderful Chatterous chat room and frequent Livestream coverage into the site somehow, and have a way to feature the tweets of our growing community. We always wanted a easy way to highlight the wonderful screenshots our users share in our Flickr gallery.
After the Redesign
After a few prototypes, we went forward with development on the concept you see above. The new design is a stark contrast to our previous look, with a clean, light scheme and a fluid layout designed to work on low and high resolution screens. The tab layout at the top draws attention, and the “feature ribbon” at the top funnels our members into breaking news and hot gaming topics that we want to build discussions on.
One feature I’m especially pleased with is the new “Chat” page. The tab uses the Chatterous API and a little jQuery to display the number of active users chatting in our channel, so people know when there’s a big chat going on. Likewise, venturing into the Chat page itself, you’ll enter a central communication hub for the whole guild; we have a live chat room, live streaming coverage from guild events and a Twitter feed from our members all in one location. This page has proven to be incredibly popular with our community since the design went live last week, and I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from our users about it.
Of course, all of the site content now relies on our posts on vBulletin. The new site is essentially a PHP wrapper around the threads on our forums. This has made our jobs a lot easier, and the caching system I wrote has done a great job of improving site performance for our members.
In summary, our redesign has passed with flying colors. It’s reduced overhead, boosted performance, increased user involvement, and we’re seeing seeing a tremendous increase in hits to the site, which I presume is due to our more frequently updated gaming coverage thanks to the new PHP-built vBulletin wrapper. There’s still room for improvement, of course. I’d like to offer a higher contrast theme that can optionally be used by our color blind members, and I’d like to find ways to further integrating our Chatterous room into the site and forums. I also intend on creating a mobile interface so users can stay in touch on their iPhones, Blackberrys and other mobile devices.
Site: http://www.aureusknights.com
Summary: Rebranding of the organization; redesign of website; leveraging of social aspects (chat room, streaming video, Twitter)
For those curious, I plan on open sourcing a number of the technologies I developed for this project, including my caching framework and vBulletin integration library, in the coming weeks.
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Great job on the page Evan, it’d be cool if you put up a pic of the chatroom where you mention it in the text too!