Story

Since May 2004, Kingdom Hearts Ultimania has been visited by over 8 Million visitors, this is the story of the website, by the director and designer, Pete Campbell..

During 2003 for months I waited forever visiting The Ansem Report once a week hoping to see the very first images of Kingdom Hearts 2. Likes many other people waiting, some of them decided to analyse Deep Dive bit by bit trying to hope for those snippets of new discoveries and if Kingdom Hearts 2 came around, what could it all mean. I wanted to make discoveries like that and when the very first trailer of Kingdom Hearts 2 came out it was my time to do so. I found a little site called KH World which always had new updates and discoveries on what Kingdom Hearts 2 featured, it was crammed with such great information that I felt I had to contribute to it, so I spent my time on there Forums posting discoveries I had made in the Kingdom Hearts 2 trailer.

After this months passed with no new Kingdom Hearts 2 information and images at all. Then 6 months later in April 2004 more images were released and I thought to myself, surely it would be better to create a site as amazing as KH World featuring my discoveries and knowledge than posting them on a forum.

So my really _nerdy_ quest began! I whipped up several pages focused on mainly Kingdom Hearts 2 and on May 3rd 2004 Kingdom Hearts Ultimania opened!

Now the problem was, I might have created a site with great images, information and news but who the hells knows it even exists? For a while I advertised the site on my already popular site Just D'oh It, so I easily obtained around 200 visitors a day but the fact was those visitors only went because of there boredom, not because they liked Kingdom Hearts. So I did the obscene thing and went around to various message boards posing as people who just discovered this site and recommended people to check it out, it was a lie, but it gave the site some attention. With this I then moved on to trying to affiliate with the other "big boys" of the Kingdom Hearts community...

First stop! KH World, the site that gave birth to this one, with Churro being a nice lil'fella he was more than willing to affiliate with me, which of course made me over the moon. Following on I had no trouble with The Kingdom Key or KH-2.NET but the Ansem Report was a little harder, due to it being pretty much "THE" kh2 site at the time.

Anyway moving on, as the months progressed KHU slowly got a fan-base on our Forums and word got around about our always up-to-date news and exclusives, it was mainly our translations that did the trick. Which me leads me to the fact that by now it was not me working alone, the whiz kid Ruby has signed on and dragged Mors along with him, Ruby did a great job on the forums and Mors did a fantastic job on the translations.

By September 2004, we were getting well in excess of 1000 visitors a day and started to get mention as sources quite often on other Kingdom Hearts sites which also added to our fan-base. Although none of this was compared to the very end of that month at the start of October, when we really defined our status in the Kingdom Hearts community. Firstly we had discovered the only source of the new KH2 trailer at the time and even bigger we came in contact that had a finished English version of the new game Chain Of Memories (2 months before its release). It threw our sites popularity into orbit and as a result we hit an all-time peak of 5000 Unique Visitors a day, a figure we are only just short of still.

With popularity now out of the way, I moved on to creating the current version of the site, to redefine once and for all that we had became the ultimate Kingdom Hearts site. In addition I wish to recreate all of the pages and make an improved layout, with cool new features and with this create a new Forum to increase its user base. I worked on the code-named V2 until December 2004 and it launched on December 7th, the release of KH: Chain Of Memories in North America.

Come Feburary 2005, with KH: CoM nearly released on every contintent and the site being more established than ever, a pattern on KHU had been now well established, this pattern would be that in the last week of every month visitors would be greeted by a "Bandwidth Exceeded" notice, to eradicate this, we tripled our bandwidth limit to ensure the pattern won't continue. With the extra bandwidth, we started doing huge content updates both on our Kingdom Hearts and KH: CoM site sections. Around the same time the gaming site, Video Game Critic closed its doors, but its owner, Grecia decided to start working on Kingdom Hearts Ultimania and bring her Kingdom Hearts content with her also. By the end of the month we nearly doubled our amount of content and as a result made us recieve some of the highest positions in search engines. At that moment we started to recieve around 5000 average per day.

Shortly afterwards (In April), KH2 content started to be released in the press every month, featuring new information on the game, with a focus on one of the worlds. In addition, the official site of the game was opened. This was the true turning point of Kingdom Hearts Ultimania coming crazily popular. Upon our first birthday, E3 2005 began shortly afterwards, with a structured system setup to handle all Kingdom Hearts 2 related E3 content, it resulted in our busiest month until September (pushing visitor numbers upto 10,000 average a day).

As the months since that date passed, a regular boost in visitors was common, due to the impending release of the game in December, in addition too the Comic-Con & Square Enix Party both bringing a lot of new content to the website. Around November time, we started to recieve new news related to Kingdom Hearts 2, practically every single day (mainly due to 3 different trailers being released onto the internet).

With the release of Kingdom Hearts 2 in Japan the site, like what seemed now tradition, had a huge visitor increase to about 80,000 unique visitors for the next few weeks. Naturally, this caused a huge strain on our server and over the next couple of months as visitors lowered to a steady 40,000 unique per day, we upgraded and changed servers multiple times to cope with the huge demand for Kingdom Heats content.

During the first few months of 2006 we focused on content related to the North American version of Kingdom Hearts 2, and recieved two more Cease & Desease notices (one for video interviews with the American voice actors and the other, scans from a gaming magazine). Naturally, we complied due to the real threat it could cause to Kingdom Hearts Ultimania's status and moved on to developing Version 3 of the website.

Version 3 was constructed so that the website now uses a three column system that breaks down into two columns on an internal content page. This way new visitors can easily get an insight into the huge variety of content spread across our KHU. This core idea was expanded by surrounding the layout with several graphics that are relevant to the Kingdom Hearts series (mainly KH2) and other special effects achieved by CSS.

In particular, one CSS element we introduced was multiple stylesheets! (or as we dub it 'Flavours'). By using the 'Flavour' bar at the top right of the layout, the colour scheme can be changed to Pink, Brown, 'Lite' or switched to the default blue (and then this selection is stored in a cookie).

Version 3 of the website was launched on March 28th, 2006, to coincide with the release of Kingdom Hearts 2 in North America, in true Kingdom Hearts Ultimania tradition.

So what now? With Kingdom Hearts 2 now released, we continue to present new content and news related to the Kingdom Hearts series as we wait for the potential Kingdom Hearts 3.

Thank You.


Stats

Opening Date: 03/05/04
Average Daily Unique Visitors: 50,000
Highest Daily Unique Visitors: 86549  /  21 Dec, Wed, 2005
URLs:
http://www.kh2.co.uk
http://www.kingdomhearts2.co.uk
http://www.kh3.co.uk
http://www.kingdomhearts3.com


Mentioned In:
IGN.com (Gaming News) - http://www.ign.com [Walkthrough Link]
Gamespot.com (Gaming News) - http://www.gamespot.com [Walkthrough Link]
GameFaqs.com (Video Game FAQ's) - http://www.gamefaqs.com [Walkthrough Link]
I-Mezzo (Gaming News) - http://www.i-mezzo.net
Intermezzo (Square-Enix News) - http://intermezzo.cool.ne.jp
Squarenet (Square-Enix News) - http://www.squarenet.de
Unknown Magazine (French Gaming Magazine) - Our Videos on there Free DVD
PSM2 (UK Gaming Magzaine) - April 2006, Page 60


Staff

Name: Pete
Position: Founder, Director & Designer
Has been called: Petey, Mako, Makster, KHU God, COM-ing Pete (!?), Mr Pete, Mr P, pete_, petha_
Age: 18
Location: Leicester, UK
Who is Pete?
He sayz: "I'm a very experienced Web Designer, Graphic Artist with good skills in developing content that uses Graphics, HTML, XHTML, CSS, PHP and MySql. In addition I have great knowledge in Adobe Photoshop and using SHH. "


Name: Damien
Position: Maintainer
Has been called: Newb, Secret Staff Member, Vivi
Age: 18
Location: United Kingdom
Who is Damien?
Pete sayz: "Damien plays a vital role around KHU with the day-to-day running of the websites, forums and gallery. He's a great person and has a wide range of skills in using PHP, MySQL, Plesk and even Adobe Photoshop "



Name: Ruby
Position: Forum Administrator & Content Contributer
Has been called: Loic (real name), Zeroblath, a Girl :P
Age: 14
Location: Luxembourg
Who is Ruby?
Pete sayz: "Loic was the first person to work alongside myself on KHU, although he did recently get abducted for about 6 months (rumor), but he is back now contributing to the website. He also rivals my skills in photoshop.. dammit"


Name: Mors
Position: Forum Administrator & Content/Translation Contributer
Has been called: Tom (real name), Morsie, Moody B******
Age: 17
Location: Leicester, UK
Who is Mors?
Pete sayz: "He was orignally hired due to Ruby's suggestion of building a french version of KHU, to cater to that niche fanbase we have. That of course, went tits up as Mors is the most french-thing on KHU, still. I recently met him in person, as he is studying in Leicester University and rest asurred, he is a lot sexier in real life"


Name: Cow
Position: News & Content Contributer
Age: 15
Who is Cow?
Pete sayz: "I asked Cow could he help contribute news back in May 2005, due to our similar dedication for finding news asap, today he is the biggest news contributer on KHU, and his hard work has played a huge role in maintaining the immense popularity of the website, which I really apperciate"


Name: Deep
Position: KHU Gallery Administrator
Has been called: Deepsies, Deepy, Depp, a boy (please don't mistake my Gender. xD).
Age: Undisclosed
Location: United Kingdom
Who is Deep?
Pete sayz: "She was recently hired to help out in our popular Gallery section of KHU, Deep is already well experienced in Photoshop and helps out in KHU Forums, in addition she actually maintains her own KH2 website which you can see by clicking here"

Forum Team

- Pete
- Ruby
- Mors
- Damien
- Cow
- ffx2_rpgmaster
- FullMetalShadow
- Gaia
- Jiminy Cricket
- Kupo Mog
- Tidy
- Yasihiko
- DDR1
- Destined Dreamer
- Dingbat
- Jesusfreak777
- Paopu Fruit
- Sephiroth-Sama
- Skinwalker
- Ursula102
- †


Thanks...

The Visitors
You can't understand how much I apperciate you all loving the site so much, I never expected it to become so popular because of other sites like KH World or the Ansem Report. Thanks for supporting the site and I hope you continue to like it.

Ruby
I never expected such a young guy to be firstly awesome at Photoshop and at helping around the site. Maybe because you've traveled so much, I don't know...

Mors
Your a moody bastard but your a secretly good guy, if you were not here providing translations we'd probably be half the site we are now.

Churro
If you never created KH World, we'd probably never exist! thanks for the inspiration and now your domain name :p

Grecia
Although I mistaked you for a different girl at first, we became pretty good friends and you watched KHU grow from nothing to all this thanks a lot for the support (especially with V2) and deciding to now work on this site!

Damien
You've helped a ton with providing us space to host the much-demanded videos and you spent countless hours working on the new Forums, thanks a lot.

Chris
For being a constant spammer on our Forums, haha nah you were the first real fan of KHU and one of the oldest member on the Forums, thanks a lot for helping on that side of things.