After lurking in the SMITE esports community for about two years, there was one piece of community feedback that I'd seen more than any other: the SPL website desperately needed an overhaul. Every year, someone would attempt a redesign. And every year, the redesign would somehow fall short. These were the pain points:

• Several leagues to keep track of, creating a nightmarish navigational menu

• Too much data that required manual entry, making information unwieldy to manage and often inaccurate

• Not properly optimized for mobile users

• Not properly optimized for search engines, to the point that fan-made websites or esports wiki pages would outrank our official web pages

A complete overhaul was long overdue. It needed to be functional on any device, informative for all users, and dynamic enough to support large amounts of live data with as little manual maintenance as possible. I knew this wouldn't be easy, so I put together a very talented strike team that included designers, programmers, data specialists, and marketing strategists. Based on their input, I created a pitch deck & accompanying site map to help guide the design process. Then I oversaw the project from start to finish.

Instead of taking inspiration from other esports websites, we looked at traditional sports websites and other data-heavy web hubs to get fresh ideas about how we could design this project. After a long concepting stage, several design passes, and an intense programming phase, our vision finally came to fruition. Here's what we ended up with:

• Two fully functional websites for both our pro and semi-pro leagues -- smiteproleague.com and scc.smiteproleague.com

• Modular design that allowed for dynamic reflow to fit any device

• Live data functionality that allowed instantaneous changes so information was always up-to-date

• Full SEO overhaul, with special focus on URL and on-page optimization

• A clean, easy to navigate design that offered light mode, dark mode, & spoiler free mode

When we rolled this design out to the public, we saw overwhelmingly positive feedback about the new environment. In addition to this sentiment boost, we also saw:

• An 81% increase in web traffic, with a 68% increase in pages per session and 44% increase in new users

• Time spent on web maintenance reduced from 20 hours per month to 2 hours per month

• Significant in search ranking visibility and domain authority, which over time helped us reclaim the #1 spot in Google for most SPL-related searches

All metrics considered, this project was quite successful. We completed it in less than 6 months, and we haven't seen a single Reddit thread about redesigning our website since.