Malte Paul's Blog

Entrepreneurship & Co.

playnik.com has a new design!

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On Friday, 30 July 2010, we have launched the redesign of playnik.com. Although playnik.com is clearly targeting the segment of core and hardcore gamers, the former website looked quite a bit casual. Now it is darker, more comprised, centered even more around our games and just does look more hardcore.  And every day I look at it I like it even more. Users that know playnik.com for quite a while might say “hey, there are no new features, what did you do all the time?”. But that is not entirely true: we have fully reworked the source code behind the portal making it even more scalable than it was before and fixing quite some bugs that popped up over time. So this new portal is a step forward.

From the process that brought us to the redesign of the portal, I have learned 3 main lessons:

1: Nearly everythings takes longer than expected

We actually wanted to bring online a redesign of our portal as early as December 2009. Now it became July 2010, nearly August. Yes, we have done much more on our portal than expected, but we also did not succeed in putting something online in December. This delay is just an example of many things that in implementation need much longer than generating the idea in the manager’s brain.

2: Launches on Fridays can work (but they don’t have to)

Programmers always say: NEVER launch on a Friday. This time we did, and it worked. I will tell that to my programmers the next two years I guess (or until the next successful Friday-launch). But I have also ssen the opposite (but even that was in the end faster than if we would have launched on a Monday)…

3: Design – Discussions – Democracy?

Redesigning a product that everybody in the team (even if it some kind of inner circle) knows for a long time leads to loooong discussions. I have learned that it is of utter importance for the senior team members to have a strong and clear vision about how the product should look like after the redesign and have the discussion go along those lines. Even if an internet start-up often is a funny thing, it is not a democracy. In case you forget that, look at learning number 1 ;-)

And now, go check it out: http://www.playnik.com

Written by Malte

August 5th, 2010 at 9:32 pm

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