Who doesn’t know Wargaming? Probably every fan of war-based gaming is aware of their award-winning legendary games delivered across PCs, consoles and mobile platforms reputed for their authentic gaming experience. World of Tanks: Mercenaries is one of their recent popular title releases that was also published for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. So, when Wargaming’s Consoles department approached BLEND to assist them with the department’s website which covers everything related to their console we were elated.
We were very honored that the Console team trusted us with taking over their official website and for establishing a great on-going relationship between us. We worked with their team in order to re-design but also re-build the website on a more versatile user-friendly platform.
Wargaming
Cyprus
Visual & User Interface Design
Web Design
Web Development
It was imperative to adopt a mobile-first approach for this project since most gamers use their mobile while playing on their consoles. Therefore, during our discovery phase we paid a great attention to this factor when creating our wireframes and website structure.
The look & feel of the site was also created based on a flexible layout structure. In fact, we made it as such to be fully controlled via the backend; while the content and graphics can easily be updated to future title releases. With a touch of grungy effects, the overall style we established was based on the brand-guidelines of the Mercenaries title. The News section was the most improved part of the website. This entails a more engaging presentation and structure, especially on mobile. As well as integrated social media feeds and social sharing on each article page.
A detailed style-guide was created for all typography, colors, and font sizes rules. This also covers multilingual stylings, for the Japanese language as well. We deliberately avoided too much unnecessary effects to ensure the site is fast and flexible in terms of development and content updates. Finally, even though we proposed new fresh designs, we eventually kept the header & footer of the original website to work across the entire Console sections. This is because some sections will remain under a different platform than ours.
For the backend we were required to use Wordpress as our base platform as opposed to the existing one they were using. This was one of the main reasons the Wargaming Console Publisher chose BLEND, for our extensive experience with Wordpress website design & development. Especially given the fact that we have extended the Wordpress base with our own solutions and custom approaches providing our clients with a more secure and versatile custom solution. We used Bootstrap 4 for the responsiveness of the website along with HTML5, CSS3 and the latest JavaScript libraries. To enhance the overall user experience, we used TweenMax for the subtle animations we applied.
The website is multilingual, and can accommodate up to 7 languages with easy content control for each one. Finally, we also developed a social Aggregator module to automatically import posts from their social media channels and make the News section more community centric as requested.
"It is a pleasure to work with the highly motivated and professional Blend team. They implement all of our requests and provide their vision and experience. In addition, the Blend team is ready to support us 24/7 and are not afraid of the challenges in working with big companies in a constantly changing environment."
Anastasiya Bulanova
Audience Management Director, WoT Console
Front-End Development
Usability & User Experience Design
Web Design
Graphics & Illustration
Usability & User Experience Design
Web Design
Web Development