Twitch Overlay is an ecommerce website I founded and operate, providing instant downloads of graphics to personalise and brand live streams and social media. Since its creation it’s served over 100,000 customers, and provided tens of millions of free downloads to visitors.
I launched this site in 2014 as twitch.tv was emerging as the go-to live streaming platform. I’d noticed as a user of the platformer that the term “twitch overlay” was thrown around a lot, and adopted as a catch all to describe graphics applied to a live stream. I also noticed that there was no central place for these graphics to exist, despite the demand for them growing and growing. I registered the domain twitchoverlay.com and within a year it’d become my full-time job.
I had to adapt and grow as the website did, so there’s a lot to cover here but I’ll try to be concise.
The site is built on WordPress, using the Easy Digital Downloads plugin to serve downloads. I made the theme from scratch using the Pure CSS framework as it was the most lightweight and simple option available at that time. I had to practically reverse-engineer parts of the Easy Digital Download plugin using PHP to retrieve and display product info in a way I desired.
Javascript is also used throughout, and SASS/SCSS to streamline styling.
All the content you see on the site was created by me, using a combination of Photoshop & After Effects.
I used AE tools like Trapcode & Universe to create particle and transition effects on some items, as well as Adobe Media Encoder and ffmpeg to export and optimize WEBM files.
As part of each download I include a curated and organized PSD file to work from as a template for customers to customize and export themselves.
The site’s growth gave me a crash course in bandwidth measurement and optimization, forcing a migration from standard cPanel shared hosting to managed servers using shell and PuTTY to backup and migrate files and MySQL databases. This dropped me in at the deep end of server management with WHM (Web Host Manager), learning how to install and update different versions and variants of Apache, PHP, and the like.
I’m also quite familiar with DNS and SSL implementation as a result of this.
I built a presence through Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. And use tools like Buffer & Later to schedule social media posts for specific times of the day/week. Strong familiarity with the Facebook Creator Studio.
This is separated from social media to highlight other aspects of marketing, for instance I’ve built and maintain a mailing list of tens of thousands via Sendinblue (formerly used MailChimp, but moved away). As with social media I’m comfortable creating content optimised for delivery to phones, as well as desktop, normally using ffmpeg or an online tool like ezgif.
I actively run ads on Google, Facebook, and IG. And have previously done so on Twitter, and Reddit, but cut these as they seemed less effective and more costly. As such I have experience working with, and creating/optimising content for all these platforms.
I also run an affiliate platform on the site, offering referral fees to people who convert sales. This has been particularly beneficial in incentivising and forming partnerships with blogs and content platforms that drive traffic.