You know, if you’re really good at Ultra Street Fighter 4, you can now play it and win enough prize money to buy a house.
That is… well… something I really like.
I’ve played video games since the seventies. My lead designer, Brian, is into them as well. Now, games are more than our entertainment. they fill our work days, too. Here’s a cool story about that.
Last week, we launched the latest version of the Capcom Pro Tour website. Capcom’s announcements for Street Fighter fans were nothing short of incredible. The final tournament includes a $120,000 first prize. To use their words about that amount… “Yes, you read that correctly”.
Along with that exciting news came some cool improvements to their website. Some are visible to the user, the rest are visible to the Capcom Pro Tour staff.
One of the improvements for 2015 is a bad-ass, sortable Schedule page. It’s a huge upgrade from last year. Back then, when the Pro Tour was first announced, there were fewer than twenty events on the Schedule page. By the end of the year, the count swelled past eighty. Viewers had to scroll through the whole list to find the next tournament. It was a lot of work.
Now, all tournaments scheduled for 2015 and prior come up chronologically and categorized as upcoming or past events. The next one is always at the top of the list. Site visitors can easily sort events by year, type, and region with the press of a button. To make things better for fans, the latest events also show up on the homepage.
We made things better behind-the-scenes as well. To explain the biggest improvement, let’s go back in time a bit.
At the launch of the 2014 season, the Schedule section was hand-coded and never meant for client update. After a few weeks, though, new events were being announced regularly. So, since we believe that our clients should be able to add website content according to their schedule, we wrote concise instructions with easy-to-follow steps for the Capcom Pro Tour staff. That document was seven pages long.
Ugh.
For 2015, we made things a lot easier. Now, Capcom Pro Tour staff members can add events by clicking New Page, using two drop-downs, uploading an image, and filling out a form. Each event added automatically goes where it belongs in the list and, as a bonus, pasting a video link in the last form field puts an entry in the new Videos section.
Seven pages of exacting instructions covering tasks that could easily break a website with one mistake were replaced with four simple steps.
We’ve done more work up-front so Capcom can do less work all year long.
We figure that “less work” is a great feature of any website. You’re working hard enough on your business. Adding pictures and information to your site should be easy. And if it is not, please call us. We’ll make you a new one.
(Then we’ll go play some Street Fighter).
P.S. If you want to see the old way to update the Schedule, here’s the seven-page document…
