Hey guys. It’s Monday, and not only do we have a new episode of Red vs. Blue for you later today (9PM Central), we’re also pushing out our brand new site design. Sponsors have been testing this over the weekend for us and we’ve had some great feedback. So, I suppose you want to know, what’s new? This new design isn’t just an aesthetic upgrade, there are some brilliant new features that will hopefully make the site easier to use.
1. Search
You may have used our search tool before, but it was pretty difficult to find, and it didn’t always bring up relevant results. Now, we’ve pulled a Google, and we’re placing Search prominently on the new navigation bar (more on that in a second). Not only do we have a new placement for the search form, we also autocomplete your results! Try searching for a character, and we’ll bring up results that include that character. What can you search for? Just about every damn thing. Your friends, users you’re watching, comments you’re watching, forum threads you’re watching, games you’re playing, tournaments you’re participating in, Forum Mods, Site Admins and RT Staff profiles, and video series such as
Red vs. Blue or
Captain Dynamic that you may want quick access to. You can even use your keyboard to quickly navigate these results, use the up and down arrow keys to navigate, and hit the enter key to go to that result. Simples!
2. Carousel
We’ve got a brand new module on the front page that we think you’ll like. We call it the “Carousel”. It will, every few seconds, rotate through some of our newest videos and links of interest. It looks pretty shiny and it means you can catch up on what’s new in Rooster Teeth really quickly, and really efficiently.
3. The Awesome Bar
We have a new navigation bar. It looks great, it feels great, it makes love great. It follows you down the page as you scroll, so you can easily navigate to any section of the site without having to scroll all the way back up. Say for instance, you’re in a forum thread, and you want to go back to My Homepage. You can just hover over “Members”, and click your way back home. Easy peasy.
However, we recognise that some users have really small screen real estate (like those on netbooks), so we’ve created an
optional setting to allow you to turn off the auto-scrolling. You can turn it on and off as you please, no hard feelings.
4. User Wall
We have a
massive community, and we wanted to surface our users even more. We wanted to find a way to showcase logged in users on
every single page, not just on the “Users Online” page, which at the time seemed like an insane idea. Several design iterations later, we settled on what you see now: the User Wall. It sits on the footer of every single page on our site and pops up the avatars of users signing in, and you can even click on them to go to that user’s profile. It’s a really cool design and you can find yourself watching it for minutes at a time as people pass by.
But again, the feedback from Sponsors has shown us that not everybody wants to have this distraction (it’s just
too good), so we’ve made another
optional setting to let you turn off the user wall completely.
5. New Site for Comics
RT Comics now has its own website at
roosterteethcomics.com! It also has a feature none of the other sites have, randomised styles. Every time you visit the site you’ll be given a random aesthetic based on some memorable RT Comics moments. We’ll be adding more to the rotation soon, so feel free to let us know what styles you want to see.
That concludes our brief tour on the new site design. Stay tuned, because we have even more cool stuff that has yet to be released. Catch you later!
