It's been forever since I updated this thread, but since we just finished a massive website upgrade that we've been working on non-stop for the past 2 months (yes, it may have seemed like we were gone, but we actually work on the website behind the scenes every single day!), I figured this is the right time to give it a refresh!
But before getting into that, here is a brief recap of the previous updates that were done during the past year but were never posted here, to "let the thread catch-up to speed".
A refresh on the previous website updates done in the past year:
- We changed Logo! A never-reported change but of course one that didn't go unnoticed, after many years we updated our logo to give it a more modern-look.
- We also took that opportunity to refresh the look of the favicon across all devices
- Needless to say, of course we always kept the site up-to-dated with all the latest WWE Games News, Screenshots, Roster, Videos, Guides and more.
- The SuperCard Cards Catalog grew even larger, as in addition to the Season 2 catalog, we also went back and did the whole catalog for Season 1 (Legacy Cards), as well as obviously keeping it up-to-dated with the new Season 3 tiers that came along since then.
- And speaking of growing, our Games Archive is growing every day, as we keep adding sections for legacy games. We now have all the Roster Sections up until the SmackDown Series!
- With that, we also have a cool "Roster Profiles of the Day" box in the homepage, which every day, randomly highlights 3 profiles from our immense Archive!
- Over time we made several improvements to the website design, including better dropdown menus, new headers bars, increased font-size, etc.
- As you may have noticed, the website has been now fully running on HTTPS, which improves security, performance, SEO and reputability of the site. It wasn't a "flip the switch" kind of thing, there was a whole lot of work to do across the board in order to get this set-up, but definitely worth it!
And with those out of the way, now let's get into all the new features introduced with the upgrade mentioned above!
The newest website upgrade and latest features:
After over 2 months of work, the website is now running on a updated, more secure, fast, reliable and modern platform. It was a necessary step to ensure SDH keeps thriving for years to come! Browsing the website you wouldn't notice the difference (and that was the goal, re-create the same environment without impacting user experience at all), but the infrastracture running in the background was entirely overhauled and rebuilt.
Wait, did I say with that the user experience didn't change? Well, I guess it actually did, for the better, as we also took the opportunity to create and add new features!
- We now have a new and improved News Display design for all our news sections, that includes a Preview Image for each article (with advanced infrastructure behind it). Much more appealing visually!
- We now set up a Tags system on all the Roster Sections of the website. Now, each and every superstar profile in each and every game has colored tags/labels that represent which brands (Raw, SmackDown, NXT, etc...) they belong to, or whether they are Legend, DLC, Divas, NPC, Managers, etc.
- All our Images Galleries (as well as the SuperCard Catalog) now have an even further improved mobile experience, finally with the possibility to "swipe" to browse through images!
- Minor improvement, but now all our Galleries images also have a Twitter share button along with the Facebook like button
- We have set up a brand new Author Profiles/Channels System for our Youtube Partners that submit their videos in the Video Showcase, with the name of the authors of each video now clickable and a new "Channels" page to showcase all featured channels in one place
- Speaking of authors, they are now all benefiting from using a brand new interface/editor with new features and capabilities, as well as new Profile Fields that they can fill in their Account Settings and display in their author profiles
- Believe it or not, but we went back and worked on all news content for older games (WWE '12, SVR2011, All Stars) which were previously only present as forum topics, but now are actually all present as articles on the website as well. We also created a video sections for them as well, to keep them aligned with the newest games.
- We have now tremendously improved Site Speed and Performance of the website, which now loads a lot faster across the board. Feels great!
- And finally, several additional improvements were made throughout the whole website, from layout to user experience, to behind the scenes features, including improved SEO, Social Media features, reCAPTCHA System, behind the scenes improvements, and much much more.
And now... into the future!
We still got a lot of work ahead and many more exciting things are coming! (hopefully I'll remember to also update this post more often from now on haha)
#WeBringIt
Edited by Andy Badwool, 06 April 2017 - 09:23 PM.