See also: More Mighty Ape HQ photos.

Here’s a few photos we took just after moving to the new Mighty Ape HQ. Thanks, @MightyApe.

Mighty Ape offices

Mighty Ape warehouse

Mighty Ape warehouse, vertigo edition

More photos to come once we’re a bit more settled!

More of Mighty Ape’s master plan has fallen in to place this week, with the move into our new office building and warehouse.

The big goals of the move are to allow us to hold a lot more stock so we can provide fast service on a wider range of stuff; to (of course) increase our orders-per-day shipping capacity; and to generally make the business a more professional and integrated environment for everyone involved.

The new location has over five times the warehouse space and over three times the office space of our old building, and for the first time we’re actually rivalling our suppliers for physical presence. It definitely feels much more “officey” (board room, anyone?) and it’s going to be a great environment for Mighty Ape to continue to grow.

The warehouse is a real hive of activity with people everywhere picking and packing orders, receiving stock, tidying the resulting mess etc… so it’s really nice to have so much more space for everyone to work in. Having the vertical space (and forklift) to store rarely-used stuff up high with ease is very cool, too, as is receiving palette-loads of goods with ease (Beatles Rock Band got our forklift off to a flying start).

It hasn’t all gone smooth, though. Two days into the move and we’re still shipping orders via a combination of iPhone 3G tethering and remote order processing. TelstraClear doesn’t seem to have the same definition of “urgent” as we do.

It’s been almost four weeks since Mighty Ape launched and, at time of writing, Google has indexed over 50,000 of our pages.

Meanwhile, Cuil – despite its claim to be the biggest search engine in the world – hasn’t even indexed our home page. Furthermore, a Cuil search for “Gameplanet Store” thinks that our old “Used Games > PSP” page is the most likely page that people will want to visit.

When Cuil first launched on July 28th this year, I made an effort to try it out. After a few dozen search requests it was clear that I was wasting my time. Three months later, it doesn’t seem to have improved at all.

And it seems I’m not the only one who thinks so… in three months, Gameplanet Store received one visit per day from Cuil. We get more traffic than that from various sites that I didn’t even know existed.

How much longer can Cuil continue to pretend to be something it’s not?

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: