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.

We’ve known for a long time with Gameplanet Store that our content needs to be the driving force behind people visiting on a regular basis, so we put a lot of work in to keep the site fresh with daily news, rotating features, frequently-updating top-sellers lists and so on. The content that really matters though is the product pages; because obviously it’s pretty hard to sell something if the potential buyer doesn’t quite know what it is.

We think we already invest more (wo)man hours into this area than any other online store in the country, and with our New Site coming soon we are renewing our focus on content and plan to take it to another level again.

The first step is our Music category. We’ve spent the last few days updating hundreds of music CDs so that they have more complete descriptions, images and, in many cases, track samples that you can listen to. At present we think that about half of our music catalog has great data, so although there’s a lot done there’s also a long way to go - but, if you watch carefully over the next couple of weeks, you will notice everything improving almost before your very eyes.

On a related note, we have been amused numerous times in the past to see employees in bricks-and-mortar gaming stores looking up GP Store whenever a customer makes an enquiry about the release date of an upcoming game. We’ve also noticed recently that our images - now that we’ve started watermarking them - appear to be quite popular with another major gaming store’s Web site. Apparently they haven’t noticed the watermark. I wouldn’t want to be the guy that has to redo all of those images once they realise.

We’re not quite sure whether it’s flattering or disappointing that other businesses - and even the customers of other businesses - find us to be such a useful resource. We guess we’re doing something right.

Why is it that some days it feels like 90% of your time is taken up doing 5% of the work? An issue in the form of Apache not doing what I wanted it to do arose over the weekend while I worked on New Site - few hours lost there - and now a glitch with the workaround implemented today has so far amounted to an hour or so of extra work in the form of troubleshooting and repair.

The fortunate thing about working on a new project is that you can make mistakes; the unfortunate thing about working on a new project is that you can make mistakes.

Sigh.

/me gets back to work.

One of the new front-end features I’m most excited about with our new site is the ability to browse categories by “brand”. What this basically means is that you will be able to filter a category down by some of its most prominent franchises or characters. As an example, if you were looking at the PlayStation 2 home page you might see the following brands:

• Buzz!
• SingStar
• Final Fantasy
• Need for Speed

I’ve named our top four PS2 brands by product count in this example, but there are loads more and I’m really quite excited about the potential that this feature has for our existing product ranges as well as the new ones that we plan to introduce when New Site goes live. In all honesty, gaming isn’t the best example, but hopefully you’ll share my enthusiasm once everything is done and you can see the results.

On the technical side of things, the brands concept is a shift from the way we’ve done this sort of thing previously. I won’t go into great detail, but with Gameplanet Store we have an enormous category tree which contains top level categories like DVDs, Games and Music and, below each of those, things like DVDs > TV Series or Games > PlayStation > Action. Then, if we wanted to make a special page for, say, “Final Fantasy Games”, we would add a new invisible category, add each item to the new category, and pull the results based on that criteria.

With New Site, we plan on consolidating the category tree so that it’s reserved for real categories (genres, if you prefer), and then building tricky pages by the use of branding as well as a couple of other new backend categorizing tools we’re developing. A comparison:

Gameplanet Store:

Category = DVDs > TV Series > Comedy > The Simpsons

New Site:

Category = DVDs > TV Series > Comedy
Brand = The Simpsons

Because the branding is not tied to the category, we will also be able to show you category-unspecific pages so that you can see The Simpsons Game, The Simpsons Movie and The Simpsons Sing the Blues all from the one section.

This may seem like a subtle change on the surface but it will give us back-end flexibility with our content management and, most importantly, it will give you more browsing options so that you can better find what you’re looking for.