Intro
After 2.5 years of tinkering the same design it was time to start fresh. Today I proudly present GamplayInside 2.0.
The cause
GameplayInside has greatly improved over the past 2 years. However in order to get there more plugins and even more customization were added to the website. As time progressed more content appeared, creating new challenges in terms of navigation. At the same sister websites PcInside and WordPressInside used a completely different framework. This meant a lot of time was spend on development leaving little time and resources for actual content. So something had to change.
The goals
- Economies of scale: The most important factor is the compatibility between PcInside and GamplayInside. Meaning that functionality developed for either websites should be applicable to both websites when necessary. This saves time and costs which can go to actual content.
- Improved user experience: The trend of using larger font sizes and more white space was appreciated by our visitors.
- Improved navigation: The category overview pages were underused and hard to navigate.
- Retainment of functionality: Custom features such as the page navigation with individual titles have to be retained.
Result
Combining the goals mentioned earlier it became clear that there was only one way going forward: GameplayInside’s 2.5 year old framework had to go and it had to be upgraded to the one used by PcInside and WordPressinside.
So that is exactly what happened. All the good stuff that was introduced between 1.0 and 1.7, such as the page breaks and review system, were added to the framework as used by PcInside since December 2015.
The new framework provides new technology such as AJAX that allows you to filter posts on the frontpage to help you find the article that you are looking for. Among other improvements the layout of the overview pages have been greatly improved and allow for even more customization in the future.
Old design
New design
Biggest improvements
- New frontpage that demonstrates featured posts, featured videos, category filters in addition the the most recent posts
- Sticky sidebar
- Improved navigation between pages
- Improved tag support
- Improved overview pages
- Improved support for video based posts
- Support for per category color coding
