Exclusive: William Hill launches revamped Vegas online casino site to UK players

William Hill has unveiled a new in-house redeveloped version of its William Hill Vegas online casino site to UK players, EGR Intel has learned.

The site has been revamped on Hills’ new proprietary technology platform, which has been under construction for the last six months.

It focuses on delivering improved customer experience and navigation-based enhancements designed to improve UX through consolidation after the operator listened to extensive customer feedback.

The new William Hill Vegas homepage focuses on ease of navigation by consolidating all the different gaming verticals into a single gaming proposition.

EGR understands the project involved large scale collaboration involving dozens of employees from Hills’ marketing, operations, product, development and safer gambling teams.

Speaking exclusively to EGR about the enhancements, William Hill gaming director Nir Hakarmeli said: “Our improvements focus mainly on two areas, one is content accessibility, and the other is what we call discoverability. In plain English we wanted to make our site the simplest version possible.

“We’ve structured the site navigation in a more convenient and logical way, by game categories.

“The second one is really about the content relevancy and discoverability, because we know that on mobile it’s very hard to find your favourite game when you have to scan thousands of games, which is something we wanted to address.

“We’ve also ensured our safer gambling tools are easily accessible to players,” Hakarmeli added.

The upgrades include an enhanced search tool which allows players to find any game that is on the site, even if it is not directly visible on the Vegas homepage. The search tool uses machine learning capabilities to provide automated search functionality when probing for games.

Other recommendation capabilities are due to be rolled out on the site later this year.

The new-look site will be tested initially in the UK market, with a view to expanding this to Hills’ operational markets internationally over the rest of the year.

At present, Hills’ development teams are focused on building generic platform functionality that can be rolled out both in the UK and internationally.

Meanwhile, a TV advertising campaign has been launched to highlight the new William Hill Vegas offering, as well as digital and social media advertising across channels run by the operator’s affiliate partners and on Google.

Discussing the timing of the relaunch, Hakarmeli explained: “The reasons are twofold. One, since the beginning of the year our product teams have worked very hard to build a new proprietary front-end.

“This all came together within the last couple of weeks into something that we felt is really leading the market. We wanted to complement it with a brand refresh.

“We didn’t want to replace Vegas as this has been our main gaming brand for a good few years now, so we felt that the right thing to do would be to refresh our existing Vegas branding.

“The second reason is that it fits well with our master rebrand and alongside our new sports branding together very nicely,” he added.

William Hill Vegas revised interface for mobile

The upgraded William Hill Vegas site will host the launch of a new exclusive dedicated live casino sports lounge in partnership with Evolution.

The lounge will feature integrated live sports streaming of big matches, as well as commentary both before and after games, seeking to create a sports venue-style environment for casino players.

“We felt that in order to enhance the live casino experience, we wanted to create something that will resonate with the William Hill sports betting audience which is obviously what William Hill is first and foremost known for,” Hakarmeli explained.

“While there are other live casino tables that have sports titles, what we tried to do is take it in a different direction. Further down the road, later this year, we will be looking to offer a range of different promotions that will incorporate both sports and live casino.

“This is something that could serve as a unique differentiator versus all our competitors. who basically offer the same games but each dress it up a little differently. However, we have much bigger plans than that,” he added.

A separate TV advert illustrating the new sports-themed live casino lounge has also been launched.