NintendoCity Redesign
Nintendocity.com was a site we acquired back in 2008 and one we felt could be developed into something a lot more marketable. The original site was a fantastic shrine of nintendo fan submitted comics, articles and other material making it a unique and interesting specimen for development.
After taking over the site our intention was to not only remain true to the fan base but make sure what ever we developed continued to encourage the submission and sharing of fan contributed material. This after all was a core part of the sites success and growing it further meant we needed to keep that element of the site alive.
How It Looked
Take a quick look through the pictures below and if you want to browse the old site you can even check it out live over here.
What We Did
Well apart from a complete overhaul of the sites design we moved the complete implemention over from a bunch of static HTML pages to fully compliant XHTML/CSS running on a heavily modified wordpress backend.
Due to the sheer scale of content involved (i.e. the site was continually updated for over 3-4 years) a pretty extensive migration strategy had to be put in place. Moving a site like this to a new platform was a bold decision to start with but making sure all of the content was moved and formatted correctly was a huge responsibility on our part.
Thankfully the process despite taking longer than we thought completed successfully earlier this year with many thanks going out to Amatamomba the community manager over at the NC forums. This was a really positive team effort which worked out fantastically for all involved.
Note: As we speak the forums are still using the old look and feel but are scheduled to be re-designed to match the main site in the near future. Watch this space.
How It Looks Now
You can check out the live site here or simply browse the screenshots below.
Very cool redesign. I grew up with Nintendo being the “console of choice” until about PlayStation 2 was released. Ever since then Nintendo has been on the fall, but hopefully the Wii changes this disappointing trend.