The first web site to be revamped was
Blizzard Careers (archive link), launching in December 2016. Previously, this was a
subsection of the main blizzard.com web site.
The new site is standalone and features links to articles about working at Blizzard, in-depth descriptions
of our offices
and disciplines, and a section dedicated to new graduates and interns. Blizzard Careers was also the first
site to use
our updated styleguide for all Blizzard-branded properties.
The new global navigation component was the most challenging of all the projects. Essentially every web site
team across
Blizzard acted as a stakeholder and customer on this project. This created a lot of conflicts between
different teams
whose requirements came into odds with each other, and I had to negotiate how the final product would work.
Also, we
had to support two different tech stacks: Node.js and Java/Spring.
The major opportunity here, though, was to formally productize this component. Previously it had been treated
as a shared
asset, meaning engineers from all over the company would commit changes to it without any sort of change
management,
continually destabilizing the codebase. Now it is controlled by one team who fields both new feature
requests as well
as ongoing product support. We even have a formal SLA for supporting past versions.
We launched this product in March 2017, and I still get compliments a year later from around the company for
how I handled
this project and how easy it is to integrate with the new navigation component.
Before
Blizzard News launched in June 2017, the only place
to read all of the news across Blizzard was in the desktop launcher.
Now there is an optimized experience for both desktop and mobile web.
Blizzard News was also my team's first experience with deploying a web experience
in Chinese infrastructure. This had a lot of
technical and legal hurdles we had to learn and overcome together.
The centerpiece of the rebrand project was the relaunch of
Blizzard.com. Debuting in October of 2017, it was
ready just in time for BlizzCon and represented the first major
update to that site since it was last updated in 2009. This new version is more player-focused, showing
Blizzard’s games
and news, instead of just showing a list of press releases.
Building on our experience Blizzard News, we also launched
this site in China, representing Blizzard's first
corporate web site presence in that country.
Wrapping up in December 2017, we launched the final product needed to build out our new Blizzard brand
platform,
Blizzard Esports (archive link)
. This site was created specifically to solve a discoverability problem with Blizzard’s myriad of
esports programs
across all of our franchises. Later on, we plan to expand the site with much more content and useful
information for
Blizzard esports fans.
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