In the early hours of Friday, September 26th, 2008, years of ambition and months of hard work personified itself in an unorthodox manner… I’d like to introduce you to Mighty Ape:

Mighty Ape is our new online shopping site, built from the ground-up to a be complete replacement for Gameplanet Store, which launched five years ago in September, 2003.

The biggest surface upgrade that Mighty Ape introduces is the introduction of books and toys to our range. Our team is passionate about both and I believe that we have already become one of the best online options for New Zealand consumers in both categories.

Technically speaking, Mighty Ape has been a massive challenge. The addition of books has seen to this, as the sheer scale of the book range means that things need to be as optimized as possible instead of just “good enough”. (With GP Store we could get away with this somewhat, thanks to a relatively tiny product database.) The end product is something many times more complicated than GP Store, and the fact that you can’t really tell the difference is something I’m proud of. It can a little irritating that most people don’t seem to see Mighty Ape as complex project compared to GP Store, but hopefully the fact that we’ve lost no speed despite the additions is an indication that we’ve done it right.

It’s been a week and a half now since Mighty Ape launched, and so far it’s holding up well. We installed a fast new server last week to help with the extra load has been generated and although our web team is working flat out to fix things, it’s nothing that we can’t handle. Overall, I’m very very proud of what we have achieved.

For the science buffs and technical boffins curious as to how Mighty Ape came to be, the following diagram illustrates the evolution of the GP Stoiran (2003-2008) into the Mighty Ape creature:

Dylan has an interesting post on his blog today about the “keep it simple, stupid” concept and how his team is applying it to the new happysheep newsletter, which debuted in inboxes everywhere earlier today.

Now, I’ve always been a strong supporter of using text e-mail over HTML in my daily e-mails - despite the fact that more and more of the Internet population seem to disagree with me - but we’ve been sending very graphical HTML Gameplanet Store Newsletters for years and it’s very much a habit that, so far, we haven’t tried to break.

With that said, one of the things on our list for our new site is a newsletter renovation. I think that we should take a leaf out of happysheep’s book and simplify so that the newsletters are 1) easier to write; 2) easier to read; 3) hopefully less likely to be filtered as spam and 4) easier to prepare.

Another thing we need to redo is the structure of our actual mailing lists. At the moment, if you’ve bought a PC Game, you will receive PC Game e-mails. That’s more or less how you subscribe to the list. What I’d like to do is give site users more options so that they can manage what they do and don’t receive without manually asking us to subscribe them, and without having to purchase anything first.

I’d love to hear thoughts on this…

I missed a generic work-related call at home tonight because I was busy, well, working, and it got me thinking - when I’m busy doing something I find that it’s not particularly productive to be interrupted for something completely off-topic.

On that note, I am a huge advocate of using e-mail for almost all communication and reserving the phone for truly urgent matters. As an example, a suggestion for a new feature or a chase-up on the progress of something is an e-mail. Conversely “The web site is throwing database errors all over the place” is a phone call.

[accidental snip - to be rewritten shortly]

Yesterday afternoon we received a batch of HD DVD movies at clearance prices from suppliers so we’ve created a special “Clearance Sale” page with them all listed at the hot hot hot price of just $14.95.

Unfortunately for me I panicked when HD DVD was discontinued so I had already bought about half a dozen of the titles that are on special at a higher price. D’oh! I picked up two more titles from this shipment though which brings my library up to about 30 movies. So far I’ve watched two of them.

The titles are disappearing quickly but we still have lots of stock of some of the titles including 300 which is definitely a must-have.

It’s been some time since I last gave away any clues on the progress of Gameplanet Store’s New Site project… so I thought I’d write a quick summary of what’s been going on recently.

Firstly, this is taking a lot longer than we hoped! As developers we are probably fussier and more thoughtful than we need to be at times - as an example our new category and product pages have both been through at least two or three overhauls each since the originals were “almost done” a couple of months ago. I’m pleased to say however that it’s looking good and at the moment (today?) I’m really pleased with our category designs. They should prove to be more useful as we have added a few browsing options for most sections including the oft-requested “Best Sellers” section so you can see the top products from key categories.

We’ve also split up the Release Schedule into “New Releases” and “Coming Soon” which we think is a definite improvement.

Another thing that is keeping us very busy is back-end changes. I won’t go into detail here but our product database has been overhauled (for both speed and expandability reasons) and of course this has created the need to recreate many of the back-end tools that the entire team uses on a daily basis. There’s the obvious things like product management but also major site components like order processing (there’s another reason this has become more complex which I’ll explain at a later date) and certain areas of customer service. Recoding stuff that we already have isn’t the best task; but it has also allowed us to improve on some administrative pages which we haven’t touched in years so it will eventually be worth the effort.

We’re slowly getting there though and we’re still very excited and eager to get it launched and share our efforts with you. More news soon.