Strength :
Graphics
The most captivating element of the website is the high quality graphics. The high quality graphics attracts many gaming fanatics to play this game. The website displays a lot screenshots that enable potential customers to have a preview of the game, it is also in a way promoting its game to visitors of the website.
Parental Control
Parents normally do not encourage, or for some, don’t even allow their child to sign up for such online games for fear that their schoolwork and social life will be affected, because too much time might be spend on such games if control is not implemented. This website had considered such problem and introduced the parental control feature. This feature enables parents to set up a playing schedule for their child and to restrict access to the gaming website for a particular period of time. This is a ‘parent-friendly’ feature that could have helped boosted the gaming website’s business as it now appeals to also parents who don’t mind helping their child sign up for the game but are concern about the control over their child’s gaming time.
Trial Game Period
To attract more people to sign up for the game, the website actually offers a 10 day game trial for gamers new to game. This is one good way of advertising their product, i.e. The WOW game, where potential customers get to try out the game for free for a period of time before they actually come to the decision of signing up for the game or not. As the game is quite costly, this gives customers a chance to find out more about what they are going to pay for before making the actual payment.
Blizzard Support
Managing a gaming website is indeed not easy as it involves a lot of providing and handling technical supports. WOW has a specific support website: blizzard.com, which actually provides all form of support with relations to WOW, it includes FAQs as support to various issues like billing & account services, technical supports etc. The FAQs are also provides a detailed overview of various issues and likely to be of great help to users. They also have email links for users in distress to send out’ SOS’ emails to ask the support team for help.
Organisation of website
As a gaming website has to cover a lot of area to functions well, organisation of the webpage is important. WOW had organised and differentiated various issues under different areas of heading, making it more user friendly as one can search through the various headings effortlessly to look for relevant issues.
Weakness :
Trial File download takes too Long
Since WOW had decided to give new users a free trial period to try out the game, they should also consider that some of the users will not be willing to spend too much time in downloading just a trial game. Although WOW had the intention of providing new users with the entire game throughout the trial period so that users can get maximum enjoyment from the game, I believe that if WOW had provided a smaller file with lesser download time but with reasonable features available also, they would too attain the same result of attracting people who wanted to play more of the game to sign up.
Too Wordy!
As a gaming website, one would prefer if the website could be more towards a pictorial one rather than a wordy one. Unfortunately for WOW, the website is considered quite wordy, and hence losses its attractiveness. Especially for people who are just browsing through the website, they might jus choose to leave after a while as most will not be bothered to read through the ‘massive’ amount of words. The website could have included more screenshots or animations on the front page so as to improve its attractiveness.
