Kingdom Hearts Ultimania

"Since May 2004, Kingdom Hearts Ultimania has been visited by over 12 Million  visitors, this is the story of the website.



During 2003 for months I waited forever visiting the now inactive 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 the now inactive 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 future Kingdom Hearts games..

Thank You."