Team 17

We began by giving far more prominence to featured games and daily news articles at the top of the homepage. We felt users should be able to view and access details about far more of their games directly from the homepage without having to scroll a long way down the page or utilise a carousel to find them.

We pulled the darkness and density away from the site and decided white had to be the background colour to provide a strong offset for the large amounts of featured game artwork yet allowing text areas to be clearly legible. The colour palette of greys and the accent purple allowed us enough scope to break up content areas and provide strong visual cues for users to access the content.

Of course, the site needed to perform across tablet and mobile devices and this is really where the newly revamped site outperforms its predecessor. We pride ourselves on thorough format testing, yet even here a great deal of time was spent testing various responsive layouts on these devices ensuring the use of far more intuitive touch functionality, even in the more content-dense sections, is far more user friendly.

The WordPress backend had become increasingly complex and convoluted over time as more and more features were required to accommodate the changing needs of the business, and more and more data was subsequently duplicated. The first challenge therefore was to exhaustively filter and transfer what we needed for our much newer and cleaner WordPress theme. The real success of this approach was to retain all of the data previously used, yet unify multiple sections into one, simplifying user engagement and ensuring future-proofing into phase 2 of the web-development project later in the year.

We have ultimately provided Team 17 with a far easier to use backend from which they can add new games, news articles, job posts and also make changes to most content across the site as the business grows and evolves.