We posted a short update on our Google+ page and on Twitter at the beginning of last week as to what we would be doing over the course of the past 7 days but for those of you who don’t follow us on either of those social media outlets (shame on you!), you may be wondering what has been up with the site lately with the lack of posting, and when we did post, it was late at night.
Well we have been hard at work getting a new design for the site ready for launch in the upcoming week. We had to really knuckle down and work on it as we tend to work on it for a bit during the evenings and work normal hours during the day. Unfortunately that makes progress on getting it done a little slow. We have also been hard at work on some other surprises as well although we can’t talk about those too much right this minute as it would ruin the surprise.
However, in regards to the site redesign, this new layout addresses a few issues that have been brought up in the past by you, our readers. The new site design will load a lot faster than any of our previous ones including the one we use now. We’ve been slowly working on getting the site to load faster and faster over the last 8 months and this new layout will be the fastest loading one yet. We have also upgraded our servers to a much more beefier model, complete with more hamsters for better performance.
Also coming with the new design is a much cleaner look to it. Now don’t get me wrong, I love how we always have a unique style to our site which a lot of our readers have always enjoyed. We will still maintain a unique look and feel but it will be much cleaner and the site will be wider overall. This also bring me to the next feature of the new design and that is it will be a full responsive layout. What this means is that the entire site will adjust in size to whatever screen you are viewing it on. Anyone who visits the site on a mobile device, whether phone or a tablet, will be much happier with this new design as it will be completely optimized for whatever device you are viewing DroidGamers on.
Our possible new logo
We will also be switching over the forums to vBulletin instead of what we use now. It’s no secret that the forums see little activity on most days and we are aiming to change that and hopefully using vBulletin will help with that. We will also be adding a perks system to the forums which will reward consistent activity by users on the forums with the chance to win prizes, special status on of the forums and more. This also includes access to closed betas of future games.
While not part of the redesign of the site, this next feature I’m going to mention is a part of the site as a whole. As you probably know, we have been working at getting shows going on TwitchTV and we have finally figure out a general schedule of shows that we will be doing as well as spontaneous ones as well. You’ll be able to interact with us during these shows as well.
On one final note, the site’s new design will allow the writers here at DroidGamers to post on a more regular basis and much more easily than what is currently done. This means that we will finally start posting not only throughout the day but the evenings as well. There is so much gaming news every days that it is impossible to cover it all with just posting during the day so we will be moving close to a 24hour posting cycle. We now have writers in other countries including Colombia, the UK and even in Thailand that will be covering the news and doing reviews giving us around the clock coverage.
Overall I hope you will enjoy the changes that are coming very soon and we listen to all suggests that everyone sends in whether is a gripe about the site or a new feature you would like to see on the site. We just wanted to also say thank you for your patience over the past week and we are excited to be launching the new design sometime in the upcoming week as well as announcing a few other surprises that we have up our sleeve.
