LIGHTWIRE HOSTING
Website built for the Lightwire Hosting joint venture between AHMESEN and LAZERINDUSTRIES LIMITED.
WEBSITE
DESIGN
Development
OVERVIEW
ADG led the site redesign of the Lightwire Hosting website, a joint venture led by our parent AHMESEN, alongside partner company LazerIndustries Limited of the United Kingdom.
SCOPE
FULL-STACK DEVELOPMENT
BRAND DESIGN
USER EXPERIENCE
TECHNOLOGY CONSULTING
CHALLENGE
As a growing, cutting-edge Game Hosting Service, Lightwire Hosting's website remained stagnant and turned into something that no longer represented its brand values or mission. The site lost any semblance of passion or creativity and turned into yet another generic hosting site. An outdated design and clunky interface meant that the site began to drive away prospective customers, who came across what they viewed as an unprofessional brand. How will we deliver a pleasant, yet elegant experience to Lightwire's future customers, while also taking on a cutting-edge, clean look?
MOCKUP
Going to the drawing board, Lightwire needed a full paradigm shift. The full brand positioning needed a rethinking.
Working alongside an external designer we comissioned to collaborate with us on a Mockup Design, we came up with the concept that serves as the basis for what the Lightwire site was to look like. We envisioned a concept featuring a clean aesthetic.
Featuring cool, calm colours, we wanted something that would convey a feeling of stability, yet still display the gamer-centric nature of Lightwire that would help connect with our target audience.
We also re-thought how pricing information was to be displayed. We did away with the ambigious tiers, and instead opted to display pricing for each game. This provided the flexibility of not only showcasing some of the Games offered for hosting on the platform, but managed to still convey the pricing data that is a core competitive point for Lightwire.
Lastly we tweaked the footer to further match our eew page colour scheme. Providing a natural break from the gradient background of the rest of the website, it displays a more advanced form of navigating the website, some social media links, and shows the logos from the parent brands of the joint venture: AHMESEN and LazerIndustries.
Lastly we tweaked the footer to further match our eew page colour scheme. Providing a natural break from the gradient background of the rest of the website, it displays a more advanced form of navigating the website, some social media links, and shows the logos from the parent brands of the joint venture: AHMESEN and LazerIndustries.
New Splash Screen for the Lightwire Website
IMPLEMENTATION
As with any site, there were numerous tweaks going from our initial mockup, as we figured out what works best for us. Our designers worked with our developers across every step of the process, ensuring that there would be no visual challenges from the final implementation of the redesign project.
OBJECTIVES
- Streamline Site Design:
We needed to develop a new site design that would reflect Lightwire's brand in its current position.
- Increase Customer Trust:
A clean, purpose conveying design that would develop customer confidence and trust.
- Simplify Sales Process:
Develop an automated system to process orders without human input.
- Reduce Support Tickets:
Develop a system that provides customers an experience with reduced friction.
One focus of ours was further optimising the landing page for a clean look. The hero was redone from the ground up, with new colours, a new custom background with abstract line artwork alongside an animated gradient, and redoing the interactive and informational elements entirely. Instead of cramming all of our talking points into the hero, we kept it simple showing our latest offer and lowest pricing, while letting the rest of the page do all the talking.
CRM DEVELOPMENT
Another focus of the site was to develop a fully automated deployments system. Previously, servers were configured-to-order, and time-to-deploy depended on the speed of technicians manually executing commands and implementing configurations. Lightwire needed a way to better scale and optimise for customer satisfaction, by automating as much of the process as possible, from Payment to Deployment.
Rather than develop an entirely new API or System to manage customer instances, we managed to integrate the CRM as part of the site's backend. This also provided us with the ability to streamline the display of information to the user, ensuring that all of their data was available in one place.
BILLING
Further diving into the CRM System, is the new billing system we developed. This component was somewhat tricky, as the products do not use a standard check-out system, as we are setting up subscriptions. Before allowing the user to create a purchase, we require them to add a Card on file, or otherwise we provide them with Account Credit if they pay using one of the alternative methods. In order to prevent unecessary errors or chargebacks, we setup our system to deploy a user's server instance before charging their card, and if it fails, the card will not be charged. Otherwise once the server has been successfully deployed, the user's card is then charged, and will continue to be charged on a recurring basis until they cancel. We had to setup our own cancellation method integrating with the Stripe API, that deletes the server instance, and then updates the Subscription object.
