Case Studies
Creating a fun & witty experience for an audience of tabletop RPG fans
An independent game design studio, founded in 2017, crafting exciting and innovative tabletop roleplaying games that are easy to learn and feature memorable settings and experiences.
Client:
Rowan, Rook & Decard
Website:
Scope of Work
Discovery & Strategy
Technical SEO audit
UX Wireframes, full mobile & site design
Fully bespoke WordPress theme
Custom plugin to integrate with Vector 3PL system
Custom Events booking system
Project Summary
Rowan, Rook and Decard have been growing a loyal customer base over the past few years and had grown beyond their own in-house DIY abilities. They reached out to us to come in and stabilise their website, as it had become a bit of a Jenga tower of plugins – keeping the team up at night with worry about when it might topple.
On top of this, the current store used the default WooCommerce Storefront theme, so was very bland and didn’t do anything to delight the fan base, doing a poor job of converting visitors into customers.
The Challenge
RR&D sell a range of tabletop RPGs and accessories across the UK and Europe, they then have a distributor in the US and were in the process of establishing a partnership with a third distributor in Australia. They sell both digital and physical goods, offer some products for free or pay-what-you-want, have bundles, sales and pre-orders.
All of this ran out of the back-end of their single WooCommerce store. The technical debt incurred from implementing all these solutions in-house meant the team were very stressed and unable to make any further changes or improvements to the website through fear of breaking an essential system.
They also had huge plans for how they wanted to improve the website, new products they wanted to launch and needed a design and development partner who could guide them through the process.
Our Solution
Initially we did a full technical audit of the existing website, reviewed the plugins in use and came up with a plan for what would be kept and what would need to be replaced. We also looked at what functionality would be better custom built. We tested page speed and reviewed any bloated queries from badly optimised code.
Once we were satisfied that we had a strong foundation for the new website, we then set about with the client doing a full design exploration. They had many games, each of which was its own world and so we decided to theme each section to that world, so all products within it could be visually tied together.
We also built a bespoke block template override system, so they could create bespoke landing pages for each of the main shop categories, as mini-homepages and then these would be loaded in place of the typical archive page template for that category.
The final touch was to add things to delight users, the most popular of which has been the dice rolling concept that we came up with for the homepage. When a user lands on the homepage, a D20 is rolled and the company tag line that shows is based on the number you roll. You can then re-roll to see other taglines. Metrics and customer feedback from the first week of launch shows that so many users, both loyal and new, spent some time playing with this – massively boosting engagement.
The Results
Rowan, Rook and Decard are a brilliant company with a hugely talented team. We do not take full credit for the success since the website launched but it has certainly played it’s part. The combination of much more positive engagement metrics and the work we did to improve information architecture and URL structure – have combined to mean that organic traffic has consistently grown month-on-month since the new site launched. Combining this with the increased conversion rates has meant a significant increase in the bottom line for the company.
Conclusions
RR&D were such a fun client to work with, we enjoyed every aspect of the project and were really proud of the extras and overdelivery that we brought to finished website.
It’s one of our great pleasures as a company to give brilliant people the space to stretch their wings. You all are artists whose vision and ability deserves enormous respect, and it shines through in the care, attention and personality of the site you’ve created for us.
Both personally and professionally, I’m so enormously glad to have been able to work with you all.
Maz Hamilton, Founder
We’re excited to continue working with their whole team going forwards, they’ve got big plans for the store … and so do we!