iv Website Split

[Damien 1,514]

As you may have noticed, we split the website in several sections. Find out why.

Over the course of the summer, we are going to expand Icy Veins and cover Diablo 3 and Heroes of the Storm (the upcoming MOBA from Blizzard). In preparation for this, it was decided that splitting the website in several subdomains was the way to go (and I will detail why precisely we did it). So, for now, there are 3 subdomains: www.icy-veins.com, wow.icy-veins.com, hearthstone.icy-veins.com. In the near future, diablo3.icy-veins.com and heroes.icy-veins.com will be added, and if we somehow manage to improve our Starcraft skills considerably, why not have starcraft2.icy-veins.com one day.

The split was effective yesterday, and, as expected, there were a few glitches, which we promptly fixed. That said, there are most certainly a few things that slipped under our radar, so if you noticed anything weird, make sure to notify us!

What Changed?

All the static WoW content is now on wow.icy-veins.com. Same for Hearthstone on hearthstone.icy-veins.com. The forums remain on www.icy-veins.com. 301-redirects have been set so that every article can still be accessed through the old url, for example: http://wow.icy-veins.com/arcane-mage-pve-dps-guide. So, if you have many links to our website from your guild forums, do not worry, they will all continue to work. The same cannot be said for the images though, so if you copied our content and used the spell icons, chances are that they will need to be updated.

The WoW site can easily be accessed from the Hearthstone one and vice-versa. That said, we are not 100% satisfied with the fact that it takes 2 clicks to go from a Hearthstone guide to a specific WoW guide, so we will work out something to make it only 1 click.

On the forums, I forced the login form to be sent over https (securely). For a number of reasons, this was not activated before. This means that you can connect to the forums from public networks without having to fear for your password to be intercepted.

When we split the website, we had to switch to absolute URLs everywhere. Since most of the website's content is just static HTML, this means that accessing the website through its IP address is no longer possible for those who wanted use this trick to circumvent their company's firewall of Internet-restricting software.

Why We Made That Change?

Knowing that we were going to expand the website to other games, we did the split for two reasons, mainly.

First, it makes more sense from a Search Engine Optimization point of view to use subdomains. With Hearthstone and World of Warcraft, it was not much of a problem to have everything on the same website, because the keywords for which you need to rank on search engines for these games overlap to a large extent. With Diablo 3 and Heroes of the Storm, this is no longer true, so we would have ended up diluting our keywords, which is not a good thing.

Second, from an advertising perspective, it is easier to have separate sub-domains, because you can optimize the campaigns that get sold on each sub-domain. For example, an advertiser might be interested in running a campaign on the Diablo 3 website only. Here, I am talking about campaigns with takeovers (when they change the background of the website), not the regular ads you see on the website.

There are also a couple other minor reasons. For example, we figured that not everyone who is into Hearthstone wants to read Hearthstone content on a WoW-heavy website.

Closing Words

I hope that this post will help you better understand why we split the website the way we did. As always, your feedback is invaluable and those who submitted feedback before know that we take it seriously, so do not hesitate to share your thoughts and suggest ideas for improving everything.