GameBanshee Gets a New Layout
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 2461
A Better Social Presence: We've had a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, and a YouTube channel for years, but up until now they were linked to in a small section of our footer. That changes with this design, as all of our important social links are now positioned within our header for the sake of prominent visibility. If you appreciate what we do here and have enjoyed GameBanshee at any time throughout our 11+ year history, please consider liking us on Facebook or clicking the new Google +1 links we've added. Each "like" and "+1" gets us a little extra exposure on the Internet, and that's the sort of thing that keeps us in business and helps drive our motivation.
A Cleaner, More Blog-like Format: Having a set of links over on the left navigation bar works great for the functionality of our subsites, but it was eating up a lot of real estate that we wanted to capitalize on for our homepage, newsbits, and articles. Therefore, we've employed a more blog-like layout and have moved all of the links to our primary coverage up to our header, which we feel also gives them more exposure than they had before. Hot News, Latest Viewer Comments, and Latest Forum Activity are all still present on our homepage, and these types of lists now have room to fit into our article pages as well. We're continuing to give further exposure to our in-house content on these pages, so you can expect further updates in the coming days.
A More Robust Comments System: Disqus is the most popular comment system on the Internet today. It's used by nearly one million websites at the moment - including many other gaming sites like IGN, Major Nelson, and RipTen - and sports many features that our previous comments system will likely never have. In addition to supporting social logins, online reactions, a robust spam filter, and a slew of moderating options, Disqus' embedded nature also allows us to upgrade the rest of our software without ever having to deal with compatibility issues with our comments system. Keep in mind that you don't necessarily have to use a Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, or OpenID account to post comments, either (though you can if you want to). If you register an account on Disqus.com with the same email address that you use for your GameBanshee account, their system will automatically assign the comments you've made previously back to you.
A More Advanced Spotlight Rotator: The Flash-based spotlight rotator that we used on our homepage before was certainly functional, but it was also fairly small and it meant that a portion of our website was incompatible on Apple's iDevices. For this redesign, we've increased the size of the rotator and made use of HTML5 to ensure compatibility of the rotator on every browser and web-enabled device currently available on the market. We hope you like it!
Of course, we're still ironing out some issues with the new design, so you'll likely see some tweaks being made over the next several days. We're also going to be bringing some of the new header elements over to our subsites, so this will likely be a work-in-progress for awhile. As such, we'd simply like to ask that you please bear with us while we continue to make the necessary changes around the site and fix anything we've broken in the process. Your patience is greatly appreciated, as always.
Alright, with all that out of the way, we'd love to hear from you! Is there anything you particularly like or dislike about the new design? Let us know in the comments below!
