Guild Launch Turns 3 Years Old!

On May 6th Guild Launch turned 3 years old. I had been working on the idea and developing the concept since late 2005 and formed Guild Launch in May of 2006. I started development in earnest and hired our first Developer and Graphic Designer in August of 2006 and released our beta in November of 2006. After a successful beta we went live in January of 2007. Since that time we've seen some incredible growth. When we went live Guild Launch was comprised of 2 servers and a firewall. Over the last 3 years we have grown to 9 servers with more database hardware planned for during the summer.

That growth can be seen in our numbers. Our Forum Signature servers serve over 120 signatures a second at peak. At this time Guild Launch has more than 1.1 million registered users. We've had more than 80 thousand guild sites created and Guild Launch maintains info on more than 4 million characters in more than 100 different games. And people like to use their sites! When World of Warcraft version 3.1 was released and the extended downtime kept extending Guild Launch served more than 2.2 million pages in a single day.

During the last 3 years the Guild Launch Guild Management System has grown dramatically. In the first year we released new versions about every week to two weeks. This was a concerted effort to bring the core features online to our members. During the latter part of 2007 we focused on refining existing features and adding new features. We implemented our profiler mod in 2007, made EPGP additions to Rapid Raid, introduced Ventrilo widgets, server status widgets, and a whole lot more.

During 2008 we made a focused effort to "amp up" existing features. During this time we increased the release timing to two to three weeks to allow for more focused effort and to allow for more testing time. We made significant overhauls to PMs, the forums, widgets, customization, and our profiler mod. In 2008 not a single feature went untouched or unrefined in some way. Later in 2008 we started focusing heavily on our Rapid Raid offering adding even more reporting and making additions to our mods. Also during 2008 we made major improvements to our database hardware and reduced our daily downtime to a weekly event.

2008 also had some challenges. On July 19th, 2008 our office building burned to the ground. As a testament to the resilience of web based companies we all worked from home for two months and since our servers and support system were offsite and our development environments were all virtualized we didn't lose any data other than the print version of our logo and some easily replaceable textures we use. Insurance covered the lost hardware and furniture and we were back in real offices a while later with new computers and desks. Our mantra at this time was "Give me a chair, a flat surface, a computer and an Internet connection and I'm good to go!" Most Guild Launch members didn't realize our offices were a charred mass until later when we had relocated the office and began showing off the new space on the support site. Guild Launch is resilient, and we're here to stay.

Now, in 2009 we've switched to a release schedule of about every 3-4 weeks. We've been working on larger features and doing more refinement during development. In 2009 our multi-game support, and alliance functionality has been a major focus. We've also given a significant boost to our customization with the customization options in the admin area, custom smilies, and section specific customization options and we'll be expanding those features in the coming months. In addition we've been addressing usability site wide and refining the Admin area to be more usable. We've reduced the number of sections in admin to make the separation more clear. We've improved our documentation and we've introduced the http://glmods.guildlaunch.com/ site to give our ever growing number of mods a place to live.

We've also revamped the signature site completely to better handle growth and launched it as a new site at http://www.siglaunch.com. We've released some fun features like the Member Map functionality and as I write this we’re finishing up a release that contains major improvements to roster imports for EQ2, Lotro and WoW and the next few months will see additional Warhammer profile functionality, more Eve Online Functionality and Runes of Magic functionality (to name a few) and further refinements. We have also been expanding our blogging and Twitter use to bring Guild Launch a little closer to you all and to disseminate useful information to our members through creative means. We want you all to feel like you are a part of the community and to get a peek into the constant work we are doing to bring awesomeness to you all.

For the rest of 2009 and beyond we are going to continue to elevate existing features, to develop new features, and to constantly ask the question “Will our users say ‘I Kick Ass’ when they use this feature?” We will be expanding banking features, adding more forum options, an awards system, and more widgets as well as expanding our templates for games such as Runes of Magic, Eve Online, LoTRO, Warhammer, Everquest, Aion, Maple Story and more.

Every release has included heavy input from our members. We're blessed with an awesome member community that provides great feedback and helps us refine and deliver the features you want and that you can use. In every release we make a careful balance between our strategic desires to add features and refine existing features while delivering features specifically requested by our members. I am proud of our team's ability to do this and we'll continue to deliver the features you want and need to make your site management easier, more powerful, more fun and to deliver on our Play > Manage™ philosophy.

We look forward to the next 3 years and the next 20 years of providing you a with an absolute top notch experience at Guild Launch, and the best is yet to come!

Stephen & The Guild Launch Team
Jun, Michael & Vicki