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Hi everyone!

In this article, I want to give you guys a quick update on the website transition, let you know what we’ll be testing during the coming days and weeks, and let you know what you can do right now to help us with that, if you’re so inclined.

Phase 1 of System Transition

First off, as of today, we have now completed Phase 1 of our system transition and have a new website online. Same url as always: www.gmtgames.com.

Phase 1 involved moving all existing customer information and game information to a new server and into an upgraded website operating system. The move should be transparent to you (but we’d still like you to check your information, just to be sure); you should be able to login to the site with your same user name and password, your billing and shipping info on file should all be there, and your existing P500 orders and auto-ordering information should all be just as you left them on our old site. If any of that isn’t the case when you check your information on the new site, please let us know right away.

For the remainder of this week and through the weekend, we will be stress-testing the new server environment with real-world customer traffic loads, making sure all the graphic elements of the new site are rendering correctly and quickly, and filling in a few blanks on the site (like resizing some images and updating formatting on something like 350 game pages!) that we couldn’t do until we were in a live operating environment.

While we do all this, the site order processing is LIVE, so you should be able to place orders, add and delete P500 orders, modify your auto-orders, and basically edit any of your personal information. I’d encourage you to go into your account and just take a look through everything to make sure it’s all good. This is also a good chance to update your P500 orders on file with a few new orders anyway,  especially given the recent additions of two new P500 games that Mark Herman is involved with: Peloponnesian War (an enhanced version of his classic VG design) and Versailles 1919 (his co-design with Geoff Engelstein).

New features in Phase 1.

You’re going to see a cleaner, faster, more mobile-friendly site overall. But we’ve tried to keep a lot of the functionality – especially around our P500 operations – familiar. We want you guys to be able to use our site easily, gathering the information and enjoyment you want in the process. So the additions to our site’s functionality (compared to our old site) have been mostly based on customer requests, to hopefully make it easier for you all to find key information. Here are a few examples:

Front Page Carousels for Most Recent Releases and Newest P500 Additions

We have heard from many customers who don’t have time to keep up with GMT on a regular basis who wanted to be able to go to our site and just find out what’s new. So now, in addition to the “Recent Additions” and “News” feeds at the bottom of the front page, you also have two new Carousels above them that show you what we’ve released lately (with quick links to those game pages) and which games are our newest additions to the P500 list. We hope you guys like this added front-page functionality.

Search

Oh, my goodness. As SO many of you have pointed out over the years, the Search function on our old site was badly broken. We think you will like this new functionality much better. And “Sorry!” for all those years of Search Angst on the old site.

New section on the P500 page called “At the Printer.”

Due to the popularity of our P500 program as well as the broad range of games that our customers enjoy, we’ve in the past generally had a very large number of games in the “Made the Cut” section of the P500 page that stayed there until we were ready to charge, with no way to let customers know (well, unless you read the monthly customer update) that a game was nearing completion – until it was charged and went into the “Charging” section. But with the new P500 page on the new website, when we send games off to the printer, we’ll move them into the “At the Printer” section, so you all have a sense of which games are nearing completion and getting close to charging. We added this to our “To Do” list based on customer suggestions about a year ago (and started testing it in our customer updates then). So thanks for the suggestion. We hope you guys agree that this is a useful status differentiation and definitely helps to track a game’s progress toward production.

Multi-Image Carousels on the Game Pages

These are a work in progress for us right now, as we have a TON of game pages to update. But what we’re adding, over time, are multiple images of each game’s internal components – maps, counters, cards, etc – in high-res photography (with a massive thank you to the uber-skilled Scott Mansfield, who took the lion’s share of the new photos). We only have a handful of pages updated right now, but for examples, take a look at the image carousels on the Talon, Twilight Struggle, and Silver Bayonet pages.

Mobile-friendliness

One of the driving goals of this site rework has been to make the site much more mobile-friendly. I hope that you will find that we’ve accomplished that, and that you will have a much better mobile experience with the new site.

Near-Term Outlook

Our overarching strategic goal for this Phase 1 is to have a functional site that works just like our old site did, so that daily order processing happens seamlessly now and through the coming phases while we work on further system and physical optimizations in the background. Unfortunately our office folks workload isn’t really going to get better with Phase 1; we are just replicating our existing workflow with a newer, faster server and an operating environment that allows optimizations that our old one did not (that last part is the key).

So while (hopefully) operations proceed as usual on the website and in our front office, we will be working in the background in our warehouse with a couple new pieces of integrated software to (Phase 2) completely rework (and massively improve) how the picking and shipping side of our operations works (yes, this will include real-time shipping notifications, at long last!). Phase 3 will add some final shipping optimizations, including real-time notifications and tracking for our mail shipments as well as UPS, and adding some new shipping and payment options to the site.

The Sale

I know someone’s going to ask about our sale, because we’ve always predicated the next sale on having a new, faster, more robust system in place. So here’s the deal on the sale: We’ll be able to have it once we’ve finished Phase 2 and have all the picking/shipping optimizations online. (So all our office and warehouse people don’t quit en masse!). We THINK we can have Phase 2 online by the end of June, perhaps sooner. If so, we have penciled in our sale for early to mid July. We have quite a few bridges to cross before then, but I wanted you all to know what we are planning.

I hope this information is helpful. And I hope you enjoy our new website at www.gmtgames.com.

Enjoy the games!

-Gene

Author: Gene Billingsley