Lets not overstate the resources too much. There was me, one guy part time on the server side & part time on the game integration side, plus **** all support from marketing, and even less support from a small team of uninterested graphic designers who would rather have outsourced it to create a Flash animated billboard of a site.Originally Posted by lunar
It was done on a total shoe-string budget and the back-end is based on a baseball game - the table system here at WipEoutZone is so much more sophisticated it's not funny. We couldn't do anything of any worth with the records system - 90% of the functionality you'd expect from a database driven site was "too expensive" in terms of demand on the server, which is why the thing is so static.
When I asked for feedback or some direction from the marketing people over the course of summer 2007, what I was after was creative ideas for how to give the site some pop. What I got was months of "it's not possible to do this internally, we don't think you can do it," followed by too little, too late, in the form of "we don't like the way the tabbed navigation works. You don't have enough legal disclaimers in the footer."
Making a website like that from within the company was like teaching a diplodocus on mogadon to play fetch, when what the diplodocus wanted to do was outsource the game of fetch to an agency and then bask in the glory of a 100k budget well spent on a Flash based game of fetch. (See the first version of killzone.com for an example of how that turns out - lovely site, zero use to the community it's aimed at.)
Creating that site was thankless torture, no bones about it, but I think it's turned out reasonably functional considering the resources behind it. Thankfully, a quick check of the QA server has revealed that the aforementioned updated version is winging its way towards the production server.
So a pat on the back for whoever prompted somebody to do something.
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