Red Arcade, a gaming channel, was in need of a website that represented their brand and allowed for efficient and flexible clip submission. They had a high volume of video clips and their old website was not up to the standards. I partnered with Olaf Uhre (founder of RedArcade) to build a custom WordPress theme that brought their creative design to life.

To make the clip submission process efficient and flexible for RedArcade’s community of contributers, a Vue-based multi-step submission form was implemented. Drag-and-drop functionality for file uploads was added, along with helpful validation along the way, making the process very mobile friendly.

On the back-end, all the data was connected and a system was set up for the automatic transfer of clip submissions to both an AirTable account and a MySQL database, for the team to review and incorporate into future videos.

To help visualize the scale of the channel, a Google Cloud application was used to pull in read-only YouTube analytics data and aggregate playlist statistics across all videos. Custom code was written to parse the YouTube API and collect statistics on viewership, such as age groups, gender, country, and device type.

Playlists had their metrics aggregated to get broader viewership counts such as total views, and how many minutes have been watched within the last calendar year. Lastly, we pull in the latest videos from the channel daily to feature on both the homepage and the about page.

The process of creating this website was complex but the end result was worth it. It required a lot of attention to detail to make sure the website was secure, performant, flexible, and visually impressive. From choosing the right frameworks and libraries, to making sure the website was mobile friendly and to integrating the necessary data - every detail had to be considered and implemented correctly.

The outcome of this project was a website that captures Red Arcade's brand and highlights their gaming channel in the best possible way. Now, Red Arcade has a secure, efficient, and visually impressive platform to showcase their gaming content. Since the launch in 2019, very little maintenance has been needed on the website, as it uses minimal plugins in favor of building functionality into the theme. Even aggregated statistics roll over from year-to-year, and featured content is entirely configurable from within the CMS without a need to touch any code.