By now I’m sure you have all noticed… things look a little different around here. I’ve been talking about an upcoming redesign for the last couple of months and finally pulled the trigger and hopefully you like what you’ve seen so far. However, I know change is a tough thing when you’re used to something being one place and then it’s not there. I hope I can help make that transition a little easier as well as receive some feedback that will help me further improve the site and tailor it to exactly how you would like to use it.
To begin, my goal wasn’t to do a drastic overhaul as much as a bit of streamlining, but before I go too far, let me first give you a quick rundown of some of the new things you can find on the site.
- User profiles
- New homepage story rotator, no more sticky posts
- New movie pages featuring all the information on one page
- You can now comment on movie, celebrity and DVD/Blu-ray pages all award pages
- Simplified navigation for faster access to what you’re looking for
- New quick-access awards hub
- New Movie and DVD/Blu-ray homepages featuring the newest releases that week
- New box-office articles, which will now also feature budget numbers, theater counts and per theater averages
- Studio specific pages now exist
- Twitter handles for over 365 celebrities
- Bookmark movies to your profile for later reference
- Site skins giving you the ability to customize your time on the site
- New 720p trailers for many recent trailers and the majority of trailers going forward
- Speed should be increased for all pages
Now let’s look at a few of these a little more closely…
Upon release of the last redesign I got rid of the homepage Flash rotator featuring five most recent stories. I did this because it was Flash and because it didn’t work on the iPad or iPhone and it was, quite frankly, a pain to update and keep up-to-date. A lot of you grumbled because you liked it and at the time I didn’t have an instant solution to the problem. Well, it was one of the first things I made sure came back with this redesign.
So, as you can see above and on the homepage a new featured story rotation is back and it work on all mobile devices and tablets and, best of all, it is easy for me to maintain.
The Navigation
Probably the most dramatic change is to the top of the site where you’ll see the new RopeofSilicon logo and instead of a multitude of links and drop-down menu options, which hardly anyone was using, I now have eight very specific topics to choose from. The inspiration here was Apple products. We’ve all become so used to simple and easy, point and click. My goal was to make everything as simple as possible and you’ll notice that theme throughout this post and the new design.
Of those eight links available in the navigation, “Movies” will change to “Blu-ray” on Tuesdays and instead of linking to the new movies in theaters that particular weekend it will link to the new DVD and Blu-ray titles coming out that week. Other than that, it will remain just how you see it each and every day and I urge you to browse through them all to get acquainted with what is available beyond each link.
The hardest link to leave out was the Box-Office link, which is why when you go to the homepage, directly under the Featured Story rotation, you’ll see where it says “GET MORE” and next to that are five additional links to content around the site, the first being for Box-Office, a page that has also been given a major overhaul, now offering links to all the top ten weekend box-office results since I started collecting them in November of 2003.
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