Our new murder mystery games website

We’ve redecorated!

We’ve recently redecorated our murder mystery games website, hopefully making it more attractive, user-friendly and easier for us to maintain.

Why make the change?

Our old site had grown organically over the last fifteen years or so, and had become a bit convoluted. Along with a number of hand-coded php pages, we had two instances of WordPress (our blog and our store), which wasn’t ideal.

More importantly, it was getting more difficult for us to keep up with the various legal changes that have been coming in.

So what have we done?

Basically, we’ve simplified everything.

We’ve moved everything into a single WordPress site that we both have access to. That way, we can both make updates, use the various WordPress plugins to ensure we keep up to date with the various legal and technical changes, and have a consistent look and feel across the site.

In practice, this meant setting up the new site (in a secret folder on our server), moving the blog and shop to it, and recreating the old PHP pages.

At the same time, we wrote a couple of new pages, rejigged others and deleted some that were obsolete.

(At the same time as doing all this, we’ve been developing and playtesting our new game, Backstage Business. It’s been a busy few months. More on Backstage Business soon.)

Once we’d tested everything, we went live.
Going live immediately broke a few links, so we spent a day fixing those. We thought we’d caught them all (using a handy WordPress plugin), but then a different check revealed more broken links, so we fixed those as well. I think we now have them all.

Key changes

The key changes to the site are:

• We restructured choosing a game to make it more narrative – and (hopefully) clearer.
• We restructured our party tips, grouping them into subjects and topics.
• We’ve restructured the stories. Some are now in the game reviews (which you can see on each game page in the “reviews” tab), and some we’ve set up as separate pages. (We haven’t transferred them all yet – there are so many!)
• Old newsletters are now archived as blog pages.

How you can help

We hope you like the changes! If you have any feedback, you can contact us here.

If you’ve enjoyed our games, you can help us by:

• Writing a review – either on our game pages or on Trustpilot. (If you have a lot of photos you’d like to share, get in touch with us here.)
• Link to us on your blog or website or social feed.
• Mention us on your socials: Facebook, Instagram, X, Pinterest – tell everyone you’ve played our games!