Well, it's been a few weeks since our last major site update. Over the last week, we've been testing and rolling out another set of new features. Perhaps you've noticed them some of them, perhaps you haven't. Obviously, one of the big ones is slideshows - these are currently in alpha testing still. This is a major new feature that we'll be testing internally and with a few contributors to iron out the kinks before we roll it out to everyone.
If you have an idea for a slideshow and are willing to spend some time giving us feedback, leave a comment or email me and we can set you up with access.
Newsletters have been sent out periodically over the last few weeks. We hope you're enjoying them. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment.
We're pretty excited about the beautiful new game pages. For a taste, check out Bioshock Infinite, Minecraft, or World of Warcraft. We added more detailed information about the games, including:
- Platforms
- Box art
- Screenshots or fan art
- Developer and publisher information
- Publish date
- And a brief overview
We're polling the information automatically from TheGamesDB.net, but there will definitely be times where we need to make manual changes. If you notice problems on specific pages, be sure to send an email to [email protected].
Another big change on the game pages is our new aggregate review box. For games that have multiple reviews, you can see an aggregate score along with how many people reviewed the game and a chart of the scores.
That brings us to GameSkinny TV. We’ve added a TV section to games and platforms as well as an overall TV section to highlight video content throughout the site.
The biggest new feature that's still in alpha testing are slideshows. We will be rolling this out slowly to make sure it's right before we let everyone begin using it. If you have content you think would fit great in a slideshow format, feel free to leave a comment or email [email protected] to get access. (Be warned, we may pester you for feedback or to actually observe you using the feature so we can make improvements to it.)
With slideshows, you will be able to add a mix of images and video (from YouTube or Twitch) along with text descriptions. You can change the order of your slides by dragging and dropping them.
Slideshow Inception - This is what happens when you show a picture of the slideshow within a slideshow. Slideshows are a huge feature, and we will definitely continue to work on them over the next few weeks.
We've cleaned up posts as well. We're trying to find more ways to guide people to the great content that's being generated so we've:
- added more links on the sidebar (based on the length of the post)
- started linking games within the post to their game pages
- moved the sharing block from the bottom of the page to the side (for larger windows)
- cleaned up the author bio block a little bit
- added a comment count within the tag block
We've added The Lead Feed just for Lounge authors. This is a good starting point for breaking news to cover from our contacts at GamerHub.tv. Want to cover a story? Leave a comment to claim it (or add context for other authors who may be covering something).
As usual with new features in our beta phase, there may be bugs. We appreciate your patience and thank you in advance for reporting any issues you discover. If you're interested in running through some of the new changes on the site with us, feel free to leave a comment or email me directly - [email protected].
As a reward for reading this post, I leave you with a cute video of Whack-A-Kitty.
Published: May 14, 2013 09:31 pm