Summary
Hollow Knight is a successful independently developed video game for multiple gaming platforms including Playstation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, and more. We rebuilt and redesigned their website with the goal of improving sales conversion. In our initial analysis, we identified many usability and design speed bumps that lowered sales and diluted the messaging of the website. We worked with a quick deadline: 2 weeks to redesign and rebuild their website on a modern technology stack, improve usability and sales conversion, and allow for non-developer to edit site content. We knocked it out of the park and delivered a beautiful new website in just 10 days.
Identifying Usability and Speed Bumps to Conversions
We identified a few issues with the old Hollow Knight website: First it was a single page design with a lot of good information but disorganized in presentation. This muddles SEO because there is too much variety content on one page. Another issue we identified was that the direct links to purchase the game were hidden halfway down the page. There is a significant percentage of users that never scroll, it also does not allow links directly to the buy section, which drives sales through sharing and social media. The website was also a whopping 7.82MBs large, with a content load time of 14 seconds on a simulated 4G connection. Vastly too slow, with research showing that over half of users leave a website if it does not load within the first 3 seconds.
Design and Engineering Intertwined
Our secret sauce at ETD Interactive is having strong software engineers who also have extensive design experience. This means we're always on the same page between design and development because they are handled by the same person. There's no unnecessary back and forth, no miscommunication, and it is the reason why we can deliver beautiful websites fast and efficiently for our clients.
Delivering Success
We made a conscious design decision to showcase the game's beautiful art throughout the website, and used subtle animations to convey the ambiance of the game without being distracting to the content and messaging of the website.
Fully mobile responsive down to 368px screen sizes and up to 2440px ('theoretically' there's no upper limit here)
Tested on all major desktop, tablet and mobile browsers.
SEO configured using industry best practices.
Optimized images, videos; in order to achieve fast load times. The old website was 7.82 MB with a content load time of ~14 seconds on a 4G connection, that's too slow and most new visitors will just leave. We got that down to 2.12 MBs and 3.8 seconds on 4G and that's with more graphics, art and videos.
We're not just here to build a website, we are here to deliver success, and we choose our clients carefully because we are invested in their success. That means we go the extra mile when designing and building their online presence because we know how important it is. We want you to be successful as much as you do, because happy, successful clients for us become reoccurring clients. If your business takes off, ours does too, so we are personally invested in each one of our client's successes.