I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while now, but for whatever reason haven’t got around to it until now. Basically put, I wanted to outline my plan for the site and its content. There are a lot of ideas I have to improve the experience here a bit, and hopefully to provide a better service overall to folks who visit both regularly and intermittently. This may even be of interest to folks who might be interested in seeing what analytic tools can tell about site visitors. Lets get into it.
New Theme
Overall I’ve liked the layout of the site myself, but I recognize it has certain shortcomings. For some it might not be the easiest to read or navigate, so in the coming weeks I hope to roll out something better. Something that’s not only beneficial for you as a visitor, but also me as the site’s manager and content creator.
I’ll touch on some more specifics as we go through the post since some topics are related to this.
Content, Content, Content
Expect more regular editorials on things that go on with EVE, its community, dev blogs, etc. This is more of a challenge than folks think, since not every bit of news is worth dwelling on. For instance, there’s no real reason to soapbox about a patch to the game that doesn’t do a whole hell of a lot. So it’s going to be a balance of providing something of interest to read, while doing so about topics that people give a shit about.
Comics have been the reason this site exists in the first place, and I’ve been getting back into the swing of that lately. Expect that to continue. What some may or may not know is that I’ve been doing comics for EON since issue #1, but so far they’ve not appeared on this site at all. Soon they will be, with the latest appearing after a modest delay out of respect for folks who pay for the magazine.
Podcasts have been a LONG time coming, and for that I apologize. Rest assured I’ve not abandoned them, and I have a few tweaks to the hotdrop formula that I think folks will enjoy a lot. The only thing I can’t speak to right now is a timeline for when regular podcasty goodness will return.
Gallery Support
The way blogs handle multiple image posts leaves a lot to be desired. For example, there’s no one-stop-shop to view all the comics at a glance in some sort of awesome gallery and pick the one you want to eyeball. Adding some sort of proper gallery for these would make life easier for a lot of folks who want to check out older comics at a glance.
Mobile Support
If there’s one thing that’s changed over the last couple of years it’s the types of visitors who frequent websites. Gone are the days when you only needed to support the desktop. With tools like Google Analytics, we can see the stats for visitors coming in from mobile browsers continuing to grow.
Instead doing some weird theme swap when a mobile browser’s detected, I figure the best thing to do is to keep this in mind when picking a new theme for the site. That means something that reconfigures content dynamically depending on the size of the browser. Lets face it, things shouldn’t look like this when you come here:
This has benefits for desktop users as well, since the site will still work just fine if you do something weird like tile your browser windows, or just prefer a smaller window size.
Summary
All of this, along with general improvements to the art assets used throughout the site, should make things a lot more livable and interesting around here for both myself and those of you who frequent the site.
As this is a site which is for the EVE community, I have always welcomed feedback from people who wish to suggest improvements to things. As the site’s consumers, please feel free to do so in the comments below.
