Web Design, SEO, Coding, Copywriting

KHPlanet.com Launched

Site Redesign & Rebranding

KH-3.net needed more than a redesign, the domain which stands for “Kingdom Hearts 3″ (the 3rd game in the Kingdom Hearts series) was purchased with the goal of bringing in fans who were readily anticipating the 3rd game which incidentally hasn’t even been announced yet.

The search traffic for the term “Kingdom Hearts 3″ is what this domain was all about and it did a great job of pulling in large amounts of parents and young teenagers who were looking for news about the game.

The gamble paid off and the site did better than expected, helping it to build a great forum community and to a lesser extent a news reporting main page.

A short term success story but as with all short term winners the problem is, how do you keep the site going. We came on board to help build this site into a stable brand and one which carried authority for the overall Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy RPG genre. We quickly established 3 main objectives:

• Select a new brandable domain.
• Create a fun, but authoritative design
• Migrate it to its new home without losing its search rankings

Choosing A Domain

After much discussion we finally settled for the name KHPlanet.com, which we felt was short, catchy and more so perfect for aligning the site with a broader more authoritative feel.

What It Looked Like ?

When we first saw the site, despite looking a little amateur and slightly cluttered, it at least had the right colors, and suited the colorful mix of disney and final fantasy that the game covers. Take a look at the thumbnail below to get an idea of how it looked.

In the end we decided to stick with the color scheme but modified it slightly so that we could enhance the blue tones whilst removing the orange so that we could keep more whitespace.

What’s Changed

The main news section of the site was implemented with the Expression Engine CMS. Despite being a great piece of software we decided to move it to wordpress due to its greater plugin support and better SEO performance. With a big domain move happening down the line we felt the better SEO urls would certainly help the site keep its rank and help it grow further even after the migration was complete.

The forums were and still are implemented in Vbulletin, no need to change that but we did make some tweaks to the VBSeo plugin thats setup there. The forum skin and domain which are still resolving to KH-3.net are scheduled to be migrated later this month. We didn’t want to make any drastic changes when playing with the domain forwarding so took a phased approach moving the main site first, followed by the forums later.