Self-Initiated Projects

PLZ Enchant Me

Website to support my enchanting adventure in World of Warcraft classic, in the Burning Crusade expansion.
PLZ Enchant Me
PLZ Enchant Me

World of Warcraft

My game of choice, for many years, has been World of Warcraft. It’s been a the place where I met my husband, made some fantastic friends, and generally provided community. One of the amazing things about this community is our ability to create and collaborate, and PLZ Enchant Me is one of the results of that.

PLZ Enchant Me is a project in which I made a website and discord, to support my enchanting ventures in World of Warcraft classic the Burning Crusade expansion.

Classic Enchanter

When Blizzard announced the revamp of its World of Warcraft classic game, I knew I wanted to be a part of it. With a small group of friends we ventured onto the Mograine server. It became a very tight knit community, and together with friends was able to clear all content, and complete my tier 3 gear set.

But this was classic, and I was incredibly broke. So much so, the people I enjoyed battlegrounds with, collectively funded my epic mount, trading me 75-150 gold each. But in general I was lucky if I could scrape together enough gold each reset to fund my raid consumables and enchants.

tier 3 human female priest
tier 3 human female priest

Burning Crusade

When Burning Crusade came around, I became incredibly lucky, and that sparked this project. 

It started with the officers offering raid spots in Karazhan in the first week to the first people to level to max level. I had a group of friends set up to level in dungeons with me, and it was crazy fun, and ended up being in the first 10 at level 70 in our guild. With that  I secured my raid spot.

This raid dropped Mongoose enchant, one of the most valuable enchants. Quickly I was making 100 gold per enchant, and to be honest, the greed quickly went to my head.

As more enchanters also learned the enchant, it was time for a new tactic. 

Website

There were a few tactics used by enchanters to market themselves and get the sale.

  1. There was active promotion in trade and world chat.
  2. You could contact anyone in world and trade chat who was looking for the enchant.
  3. And one guy had build a Google Doc listing all the enchants he could do and the materials.

Seeing the doc, I knew my skills allowed me to do something similar, but make it into a website instead. I thought this would be a great opportunity to test out Google Sites, a simple drag-and-drop website building tool.

Google Sites

In general I think Google Sites is not the right tool for your business or portfolio. But when working on smaller projects, and to communicate information easily to a more selective audience, I think it does the job well.

On the plus side, the tool is easy to navigate, and that makes it very accessible to a broad variety of people with a variety of digital skills. But on the downside, because it’s  easy to navigate, it limited in its customization option.

Plz Enchant Me weapon enchants page screenshot
Plz Enchant Me weapon enchants page screenshot

Result

It turned out to be very functional. Not always the prettiest solution, in my personal opinion, there area variety of things I would do different if more options were available.

But I think that trade off is acceptable. Different projects require different solutions, after all.