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Guild Wars European Websites

January 2006

I made the European sites for the online role-playing game, Guild Wars in 2006. Available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, they support marketing and community activity for the game across Europe, and are integrated into print and merchandising campaigns.

I designed the site to follow the creative direction set by the game developers, ArenaNet, but allowing for a great deal of flexibility due to the need for the site content to be localised. Some languages, such as German, have very long words, and others, such as French, have very long phrases, all of which need to be carefully considered in any layout. The graphics used throughout the site were developed from 3D renders and in-game artwork supplied by ArenaNet.

The need to produce a very large site in a very short time to synchronise with the game launch, in five languages and with much of the content format unknown, provided some interesting challenges I met all of them. The site has been running for nearly three years with very little need for technical involvement. In addition, much of the content is synchronised with the hub site of the game developer, ArenaNet, and the site allows content writers and community managers to schedule articles to appear at any time.