KHPlanet – Version 2.0
KHPlanet.com is a kingdom hearts fan site that’s been with us for almost 2 years. Those of you who remember the original story will know that it was originally a completely different site under the domain kh-3.net.
Moving it to khplanet.com in 2009 and performing a very basic site redesign was enough to help broaden the sites appeal and help it pick up a larger userbase by covering more topics related to kingdom hearts as opposed to just “Kingdom Hearts 3″ (hence the KH-3 domain).
For 2010 it was time to add some more features and re-invest some of the income we earned back into growing the site further.
How It Looked ?
What We Did ?
There were a number of things on our todo list from 2009 but the most common request from our members was a darker website skin. To cater for this request but still remain loyal to our original blue/white look we decided to create a dual skin site. Creating a skin that looked just as good in dark as it did in white wasn’t easy but after 3-4 attempts we finally settled on a design and color scheme that we thought did the site justice.
To try the new themes out, head over to khplanet.com and use the skin switcher (bottom left of each page) to see how the new site functions.
The other major component of the KHPlanet 2.0 upgrade was the development of a new logo. Once again the designs we came up with had to conform to 2 major requirements, a) it needed to function on both white and black backgrounds and b) it needed to be blue and keep a general look and feel which was similiar to the version 1.0 upgrade last year.
The final part of the upgrade was more backend i.e. a vbulletin forum upgrade taking us from 3.7.0 to 3.8.4 and some new mods and plugins installed which we were previously unable to go to due to the 3.7.0 version restrictions. Those of you that are wondering why we didn’t decided to go to Vbulletin 4.0, well the answer is quite simple! We simply don’t feel 4.0 (despite being stable) lacks the support and compatiblity which 3.x versions provide with plugins and mods. This will change in the coming year(s), but until then all of our sites are firmly planted in 3.8.4.
Much cleaner and modern then the original version. Good job.