This Is My Joystick – An ongoing success story
My hardcore gaming days are generally over. CounterStrike till 4AM? Gone. Team Deathmatch on a week night? Gone. Wii Sports when over at friends? Count me in! See that person with a ‘I’m a Casual Gamer’ badge? That’s me. That doesn’t mean I’m not involved in the gaming community anymore though. I give a little helping hand to the gaming site Immature Gamers, and have taken on the mantel of webmaster for the gaming editorial site This Is My Joystick.
About This Is My Joystick
This Is My Joystick are a UK based gaming editorial site that are starting to make some waves in the industry. They’re invited to the top gaming events such as the Golden Joysticks and get some good periodic coverage in the magazines. Andy Corrigan started the site a few years ago with no investment and has seen good progress in both userbase and coverage.
Redesign and Redevelopment
Andy asked me to redesign and redevelop the original site in mid to late 2010. I was game [pun intended] so set out a rough schedule for completion. The initial schedule I got horribly wrong due to my underestimation of both project development time and my available time. Overall it took 8 months of ‘free time’ from start to finish. In the future I’ll be posting up some articles about my working process.
Why Was It A Success?
The proof is in the numbers.
- Original Site:
- Monthly Traffic: 5000 visits
- Homepage File Size: 1.3MB
- New Site:
- Monthly Traffic: 23000 visits
- Homepage File Size: 600KB
We’ve seen a quadruple increase in site traffic since the relaunch. This comes down to a number of factors that I’ll divulge into further at a later date. Naturally the This Is My Joystick team were exceedingly happy with the results.
The homepage file size was halved even though we added more imagery and content. This was due to stripping duplicate and excess JavaScript files, using Content Distribution Networks, optimising image file sizes and minifying local content.
What does the Future Hold?
Our primary focus is improving the SEO [gulp] and making the site more interesting to investors and advertisers. We’ve set out our gameplan and will be looking to make heavy progress during the Christmas period.
In the future I’d love to see the site rival corporations such as Eurogamer, IGN and Gamespot whilst keeping it small. Naturally there’s a long way to go, but I wouldn’t be onboard if I didn’t have full confidence in Andy Corrigan and the brand.
Here’s hoping that I’ll still talking, designing and developing for This Is My Joystick in a few years time. Remember to keep an eye out for all my future This Is My Joystick articles as they’ll cover everything from the design process to the project management.
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