Our new design that we've been working on has continued it's implementation across the 'site in leaps and bounds recently, and today, the 17th of September, we can finally reveal to you our brand new home page. This design improves upon our previous design in several ways.  Our old home page design, moments before we switched the "on" switch to "off"... First of all: everything's easier to see. The featured articles are displayed prominently at the top of the page, and the new window cycles around more of our best articles for you to check out, ensuring you never miss the cream of the crop! In addition to this, it's easier to find what you want. All the latest reviews, news and features (including blog posts and podcasts) are now listed in their own columns, meaning that you don't have to filter through the articles you don't care about to quickly find what you want. Not only does this design mean that everything's easier to see, but it also means that we can organise everything more efficiently and make room for more content. In comparison to the previous design which showed three featured articles and five of the best recent articles, we now show and detail nine of the latest articles and also display fifteen further pages in small print towards the bottom of each column. We still show three featured articles, but they are now shown in more detail, and in addition to this we can also show as many as we want as part of our gadget that displays more featured articles on a cycle. It doesn't stop there, either. This design is also much more efficient than the previous one, and allows more consistency over the articles displayed. Plus, on the occasion that a less-important blog post goes online, rather than display it as the latest feature, we can just slap it in the brief list of recent articles without a big flashy image - ensuring that you don't miss the article since it still appears on the front page, but also ensuring that the best non-featured articles still get the limelight they deserve over less-relevant posts. Finally, the new page also has space for displaying articles that wouldn't fit into the other sections, and gives the chance to highlight certain other pages, such as the contact form, the podcast page and feed and the latest announcements page that you're reading right now, alongside links to our YouTube and Twitter accounts. We've not completely finished with the home page just yet, and there are still a few minor things we'd like to tweak, but the main design is set in stone and at the stage where we're happy to show it off to our readers and let them give it a try for themselves. The home page isn't the only new design aspect we've recently unveiled though. Here's a complete list of all the changes that we've implemented recently:
And here's a short list of new features we should be implementing very soon:
If you have any more suggestions, don't hesitate to contact us via e-mail (billy at wiiloveit dot com) or our contact form, but for now, we hope you like the new features - after around 240 revisions and countless hours and hours working on our home page design over the past few weeks, it'd better be worth it. Also, special thanks go to Kevin (AKA @Froguinx on Twitter), NintenDaan (AKA NintenDaan1 on YouTube, and @NintenDaan on Twitter), Michael Ferguson of our new sponsor GamesBasement.co.uk and Nathan Whincup (AKA, ahem, @NathanWhincup on Twitter), as well as the rest of the Wiiloveit team for all your help and assistance at making this new design what it is today... it would've been a LOT worse without you! Billy White King o' the Site Wiiloveit.com PS: If you are a developer, reader or other company of sorts that has contacted us recently, don't worry, we've read your messages, but we've been so busy that there's a slight possibility we haven't been able to reply straight away. Either send us a reminder if you think there's something we missed, or just play the "waiting game" until we remember you. Now that we've got this out of the way, hopefully we can get things done a lot quicker now - apologies again if our busy-ness has affected you in any way |
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New Design: Phase Two - The Home Pageposted 17 Sep 2009 13:14 by Billy White |
