Seamless and high-performing website for Evnia – a new gaming brand by Philips

Evnia is a new brand powered by Philips that’s supposed to bring gaming products to a new demographic – people who like gaming as a hobby and rather than caring about the technical specs of a product are looking for a nice experience. A lot of the gaming brands are very performance-focused and strongly accentuate being “pro” and competing against others. Evnia’s goal is to enable everyone to enjoy gaming – at their own pace, however they want.

The Evnia team came to us with this project from referral and because they knew we had hands-on experience with their PIM system, meaning we could take on the challenges of this project. Here’s the key objectives and goals we wanted to achieve for Evnia:

Objective #1: Fast Delivery

First things first, the website needed to be created very quickly. The Evnia team contacted us about this project at the beginning of September and the site needed to be live by the end of October. This meant we had around 2 months to complete the project, which is a rather narrow window.

However, because the launch of the new brand was tied to a live event happening in Paris, there was no way it could be pushed back.

Objective #2: PIM & CMS Integration

The next key objective for this project was to create a website with a user-friendly CMS that integrates seamlessly with Evnia’s PIM system. It was crucial to create a system that would take data from the PIM, automatically import it to the CMS and automate the process of creating new product pages to save time of the administrators and let them focus on more important tasks.

Objective #3: Enable Complex Translations

The website was supposed to be available in almost 70 languages. This presents challenges not only when it comes to UX and performance of the technical solutions but also when it comes to the translations themselves. The Evnia team needed us to make the translation mechanism simple and straightforward.

We’re proud to say that we managed to deliver the website on time, despite most people on Evnia’s team thinking it was nearly impossible. The launch went seamlessly and smoothly, which you can see in the message we got from the client.

Not only did the launch go as planned but we also managed to deliver on all of the client’s objectives. Of course, there’s further plans on how to improve and enhance the Evnia website, but for now let’s talk about what we implemented for the official launch:

PIM Integration

The first crucial thing was integrating InRiver (a PIM system) with the website’s CMS. Since we already had experience with this PIM, there were no major issues here. What’s important is how the integration works – the website and CMS use data from the PIM to create new product pages that the website admins can add additional content to and review before authorising the publication. This significantly cuts down on the time needed to push a new product page out and minimises the time admins need to spend inputting data like product specifications into the CMS.

In the future, we plan on expanding this integration to be even more autonomous and require even less work from the admins.

Frontkom is not only a team of experts on CMS platforms, we actually have our own, proprietary CMS. Hako was created as a very easy-to-use alternative to other content management systems that our team can fully control and anyone with no technical knowledge can use very easily. Because it’s our own system, we can customise it to a much higher degree than any other CMS. We implemented Hako for Evnia to enable the website’s admins to edit the page directly on the page interface, as seen by the end user. This makes it easier and more intuitive for the editors who can see how the changes impact the final version. Hako also enables them to edit SEO for each page without having to find anything in the admin panel.

Hako, of course, has an admin panel as well which contains more in-depth settings. But the ability to make changes to the end-user view instantly makes the process much faster and easier. It’s also very beneficial to the user experience – admins can see exactly what the users will see and adjust the website content to better suit their needs.

As it stands now, the website has been translated to almost 70 different languages. However, for the launch the website was supposed to be available in 30 languages, which is still a lot. Before the launch, we were struggling to get all the translations completed, so we stepped in and created an Excel-based system that would help the translators understand which elements of the site they were translating and enable Evnia to collaborate with external translators without granting them access to the website or other resources.

The last very important thing for the client was the website’s performance. Even during the launch the website was accessed by thousands of users via both mobile and desktop devices across multiple time zones. To make sure everything’s running smoothly, the entire website is cached on Akamai servers. This not only helps to optimise hosting costs but also ensures that the website’s performance is superior. The Evnia website loads almost instantly thanks to Akamai’s network of over 200 000 servers across over 110 countries worldwide.

Evnia is just one of the many projects where our Frontkom team managed to deliver not only on the business objectives but also create a digital experience that users love and appreciate. In the case of Evnia this was especially important – the brand aims to make gaming more accessible and less-pressure by focusing on the users’ needs. The website had to emulate that and be in-line with Evnia’s values and tone of voice. Our goal is always to create beautiful experiences that help the businesses achieve their goals and grow.