In a bid to stay away from over the top food analogies that only make me hungry, this week we’re going to stick to the facts sans chicken.
Testing New Home Page Layout
We’ll start with the most obvious change – our home page! While the only section that is actually gone is the “Choose Your News” widget (more on that soon), all the other content you’ve come to know and love browsing is arranged a bit differently. It’s still there, we have just made a few tweaks to it.
We’re testing a few things because more readers than ever are checking out the home page each day (awesome!) and we want to make it easier for them to see what’s new and interesting every time they visit. The last layout, while visually stimulating, made it hard to tell when things were published. This one is aimed entirely at the opposite effect, and we’re watching to see how it goes.
Note that this is a stop on the ride to our final design destination, not where we all disembark the train.
New & Improved Article Sidebar
It looks the same, but we’re focusing on new content instead of popular content. Theory goes that by putting the most popular content there we are just reinforcing its popularity instead of giving new stuff a chance to shine.
Don’t worry though, popular writers! Your stuff will still be featured right on the homepage in the right hand sidebar.
Housekeeping in Events
We removed the deluge of game tournaments from Events because it was overwhelming things like Game Releases, Conventions, and Kickstarters. You can absolutely still add tournaments to our Events, we just require that a living, breathing keyboard-operating being is the one to add it.
Other Changes (Ones You Probably Won’t Notice)
We cleaned up some duplicate page titles and deleted some blank pages in the Lobby. Nothing major!
Questions, comments, suggestions?
As always, share them!
