How WebEagles Supported A Massive Transformation Project For A Major Entertainment Website

DigitallyDownloaded.net is one of the largest gaming entertainment Websites in Australia. Over the past decade, the team has reviewed over 5,000 games, and provided daily news, features, interviews and coverage of video games to an audience of tens of thousands of enthusiasts.

However, the Website had a problem: It started life as a simple blog, hosted on Google’s Blogger platform. At first, this was sufficient. Blogger is free to use, and has the basic tools for displaying text and imagery that has made it such a popular tool over the years.

Unfortunately, it was also limited in many ways. Blogger’s customisation tools were restrictive, and Google retained all control over the content. As the DigitallyDownloaded.net Website started to grow and add podcasts, a digital magazine, and more, it was unable to integrate them into the Website and still provide a great user experience.

Ultimately it also had the hanging spectre that if Google were to ever shut down the Blogger service, that decade’s work would be lost.

Finally, the template that the DigitallyDownloaded.net team was using on Blogger was old, and significant bugs were further hindering the user experience. It wasn’t even able to have an SSL security certificate attached to it, meaning that any user with an AntiVirus would get a warning not to visit the site. There was no virus on it, but the lack of a security certificate was a major, automatic red flag. Because the Website was triggering so many anti-virus applications, it was also being punished by Google’s search engine.

In short, the Blogger platform had become a liability that was inhibiting DigitallyDownloaded.net from growing as a publication and a business.

The Decision To

Migrate The Website

Ultimately, the DigitallyDownloaded.net team decided that the best solution would be to move its Website to a new, hosted platform. One that would give the team granular control over the structure and content of the site.

However, the existing Website, by that point, had grown to more than 12,000 individual pieces of content, each of which was its own page. Where most Websites only need to migrate one or two dozen pages to “lift and shift”, DigitallyDownloaded.net was far too big to manage this process manually.

This was made even more challenging because a significant percentage of DigitallyDownloaded.net’s traffic comes from a partnership with Metacritic – a major Website that aggregates game review coverage from major Websites across the Internet. While the process of directly moving from Blogger to a different host platform is straightforward, the Web links to that content are typically changed in that process. This would have meant that around 3,000 backlinks on Metacritic would have become broken, and the years of work in building traffic to DigitallyDownloaded.net would have been undone instantly.

To successfully move to a new set of hosting servers and content management platform, the team needed real web coding expertise, and a team that could develop the necessary automation to complete the transformation without manual input.

WebEagles was able to provide the necessary services to manage the entire transformation. This included:

Finally, WebEagles was able to undertake the migration quickly. As a news media organisation, downtime would mean lost reporting and unhappy readers. After a thorough testing process, the rollover of the live site happened in just a few hours.

The

Results

DigitallyDownloaded.net became a better and more usable site for both the editorial team and readers immediately. With the new hosting environment, loading times improved immediately, and the site is also more fully featured with a more elegant and easy-to-use interface.

Critically, the Website is now fully optimised for mobile, meaning that users can enjoy the content regardless of what device they are using.

Most importantly, it’s a much more pleasant site to read while also being better optimised for SEO. Since the migration, the Website has found many new readers and continues to grow in presence and prestige.