We've just celebrated 10 years since Scirra Ltd was officially established as a company - and since the start we've been serving all our visitors through Scirra.com.
When we first started developing Construct 3, we took a long term plan to move all content over from Scirra.com to our new home, Construct.net. The Scirra website was run on a single server, was hard to scale and had a large amount of code on it which wasn't going to be suitable for our growth going forwards.
I've never had to shut down and move a website before, and it's been quite a challenge. Lots of features needed re-writing (the asset store being perhaps the most challenging) and lots of content and features re-written to run on our new more reliable cloud based servers. The new site is measurably better performing, cheaper to run and more reliable than Scirra.com ever was. There are endless small tasks that need taking care of. It's been a little bumpy along the way in parts, but we've made it.
Looking back from where we were 10 years ago - me and Ashley both working from our bedrooms and me building the first Scirra.com website in the evenings after work brings back good memories (although I don't miss the hours I was doing initially!). I remember telling Ashley if we can get 10,000 visitors a day to the website, we'd of made it and would have a sustainable business. Those 10,000 visitors a day seemed far out of reach and at the time I felt perhaps a little guilty about being so ambitious - I would of never of dreamt that we would be receiving close to 50,000 unique visitors a day 10 years later! If I'd told the 10 year younger me and Ashley that back then, they would of both been amazed and extremely excited.
10 Years of Stats
10 years is a lifetime online, and it's incredible how many people the Scirra.com website reached:
- Almost 25,000,000 unique visitors
- 45,000,000 sessions
- 172,000,000 page views
- Around 407 years of time spent on Scirra.com
Over the years the Scirra.com website has gone through a few designs:
2011
Back in 2011 this looked pretty swank, trust me!
2012
A little later we went for a flatter look, and changed our colour schemes. I'm not sure, but I think this was trend back then?
2013
We settled longer term on this design going forwards which has lasted.
2015
The final design before we shut down the website.
It's just a website, but it's always been there and has helped carry us through to where we are today, so it is with a little sadness that today we say goodbye. It's natural for things to move on though, and the future is exciting.
Good bye Scirra.com, a small piece of the web we've crafted out that has run it's course and we must let go.