You will have noticed a few changes around here today. We've completely redesigned our online presence, bringing in a host of new features and functions.
At the centre of this new design is you, our readership. We know that you're a diverse bunch, from dedicated gamers and aspiring game-makers to seasoned development specialists and industry leaders. Everyone wants different things from Edge, so the site is all about serving you exactly what you're interested in.
The three tabs above - Games, Design, Business - are the simplest way of getting this. In Games, you'll find articles on specific titles, including reviews and previews. Design is where you'll find content dedicated to the art and craft of making games. Finally, Business is about the economics and politics that govern the industry.
MyEdge gives you even more power to get what you want. Using MyEdge, you can follow individual topics to make your own news feed, whether it's to keep tabs on what Bungie does next, our thoughts on Battlefield 3, or advances in mobile game development. Find out more on the MyEdge page.
MyEdge is just one part of what you get from signing up for a free Edge account. Once signed up, you can become part of the Edge community, giving you the ability to post comments against articles and within our forums. And you can also choose to receive our daily Edge email newsletter in your profile. If you have Twitter or Facebook accounts, consider liking or following us, too.
You'll find we've taken a new approach to what we publish, too. We'll be reporting news much faster and more extensively with short newsflash stories, keeping up with events as they unfold, while still examining issues in-depth in longer news stories and features.
The site will also lead with Edge's game reviews, looking at more games than we did on our old site, in a more timely fashion. Look to the magazine, meanwhile, for extra insight, discussion and interviews with key figures behind the leading games we review.
We've taken on some new columnists, too. Interface, by Vertical Slice director Graham McAllister, focuses on the world of usability; expect wide-ranging views on every aspect of game creation from the point of view of player experience. We'll also be following the fascinating development of Frozenbyte's crowdsourcing project, Jack Claw, in a column by Frozenbyte’s Mikael Haveri.
Finally, expect a lot more articles that span this site and our magazine, with the in-depth magazine features for which we're famous frequently supported by additional interviews and other material here.
To get a sense of what we hope to achieve with this site, explore our launch features, including 150 game reviews from Edge's first 15 years, and Get Into Games, our annual guide to getting into the game industry, with advice from the game industry itself.
The new Edge website has been designed to be better at covering videogames. Better at serving you the news and insight in which you're interested. Better to read and to navigate. Ultimately, better at serving a community of readers who are as passionate about games as we are.
Comments
43This is NOT an improvement.
It's a mass of multi-coloured intrusive ads all over the page with articles crammed into a sliver of space down the left side.
All coloured in with my 5 year olds' crayons.
^
Hmmm... not sure if want!
Reminds me of Ikea.
Maybe use some of the more subtle colours in that Edge logo up there, and make it a bit wider. However, I like the ability to read and comment on articles all under the one username, and the ability to follow topics is good!
A bit wider please? Or is that for some specific reason?
For people on their iPhones and such, and Android phones and such, I imagine.
Why not just have a mobile site for that?
What happened to the avatars? I can't seem to add one to my profile.
Apart from that it looks like a lot more is going on but it's running pretty jerky on my PC.
The promise of more varied and updated content is welcome, though it is taking some getting used to. Also miss the quick-reference links which indicated which topics were drawing the most comment, though I may have merely overlooked it.
You can find a list of the latest comments in the blue bar that pops up.
I quite like that touch, all the social stuff in one easy to access pop-up. Now if it would default to showing the Comments tab, instead of the Forum tab, when I move to a new page, and show more than the five most recent entries, it would be even better.
Still have to scroll too much to get to the content (removing the article image would do wonders), but otherwise it's much improved.
I'm no art history student, but in deference to Edge's traditional clean yet contemporary style, I'd describe this as "an LSD trip suffering from claustrophobia, then throwing up."
I think the main column is a bit thin, certainly compared to CVG, which also got its redesign today.
Although I do like the Games/Design/Business tabs, dividing content by meaninfgul topics rather than only its function (news, reviews, etc) or by platform, which is becoming increasingly meaningless as a primary method of sorting games content.
That said, so long as the content remains Edge and not just CVG with fewer jokes, I'm good with it.
I like how the Duke Nukem advert is so large and across the entire page. (I requested that).
Have you heard of User Interface Designers - maybe you should get one.
I'll get my coat.
I have to say I'm in full support of the new Edge, I even signed up to the website because I liked the new, and much improved, design. Looking forward to seeing more from each category, I think the adaptation of these categories 'Game', 'Design' and 'Business' will help people differentiate what they want to get out of Edge, as was intended. Overall I love it, keep up the good work.
I like it.
My first impression is that of ambivalence, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. For the moment, there are a few hijinks with some of the design, but I'm sure these will be smoothed out by you guys in the coming days.
Also, is this colorful redesign representative of the new design of the magazine?
EDIT: Noticed the pink-ish navicon. I really don't know what to say...
Is it not possible to give these comments more than half the screen? On my laptop they only get a third because of the black borders down each side. Could the "more articles" etc. links go Top Right. Or even Middle Right? I'm sure the ad men pay a lot for them but does there really need to be two seperate job advert sections on every page? Ads by Google half-heatedly tossed in the bottom here is a bit of a final insult.
Here are a few of my observations.
The whole site rss feed (http://www.edge-online.com/rss.xml) isn't very useful anymore since it's without any teaser text. Also, it's not linked to from the homepage. I'd rather not have to subscribe to specific sections of the site (http://www.edge-online.com/news/rss.xml).
The homepage latest news section heading should link to the news section.
I agree with the comments that the content column should be wider.
Page right is the abyss. I could saw my monitor in half and miss nothing. Thread width - too narrow. Tabs for gaming/design/business are fine but why no All tag?
And why remove users comment history? It was invaluable for relocating previous threads and following ongoing discussions.
Its a bit of a confusing splat. Bare minimum, you need to make it wider. Also the massive clickable add's which i keep clicking by accident are a nightmare.
Avatars would be nice to have back as well.
As stated by many others the column is just too small for the content, when you get down to the comments section it is literally using up only a quarter of the screen and the rest is just waste.
Other than that the redesign is ok
Was this custom built? It comes across more and more like a blog template. I appreciate the effort and all, but really, EDGE deserves a better site than this. In regards to the printed magazines layout/design it's impeccable, why it's online presence looks like it's been knocked up by people with no spatial intelligence whatsoever is depressing.
There's lots to like, don't get me wrong, but unless these kinks get hammered out initially, they probably never will. I'm still baffled as to why the entire right hand side of the site contains sweet f.a. Why not slap all the ads in a banner (horizontal) page top and free the RHS up? How hard can that be?
And why can't this site recognise when I've hit RETURN? Do I need to start writing line breaks in HTML now? Ffs.
If you hop over to the forum, there's a thread for this sort of stuff mate. If your issues haven't already been posted, add them and MK will add them to the OP.
I agree with you on the comment history front. It appears that you don't even have a profile at all. Blogs are also dead it seems, which I find slightly gutting.
Cheers DD. Hopefully MK's thread will bear fruit. EDGE have already earned massive kudos by listening to the readership and keeping the old forum up and running. Hopefully the main sites flaws will be addressed in a similar manner.
There's a lot to like here, but at the moment its far from what was promised (an easily navigable/user friendly/functional website).
I assumed that the entire RHS was blank because I'm running Adblock? It does look like a blog template though, and one where the user decided to select "Psychadelic Freakout" under the colour-scheme options.
it's just a drupal skin, same as the last site. i can tell you that they had to throw out the old site / users because drupal is such a nightmare to update from version to version. probably went from version 5 to 7 (would be my guess), and will have to throw it all out in a year or two because drupal 9 will be out and completely incompatible with prior versions.
whoever made the decision to use drupal AGAIN for the site after having to literally throw out everything about the old site should have their head examined. learn from your mistakes ;}
Just realised that with every Reply the box gets smaller and smaller.
Does it?
Only this small so you can't see I replied to you. Then replied to myself. The time stamps now make no sense for those below me.
The new site is drupal 6 and the old one was drupal 5. It's very doable to upgrade a drupal installation and maintain users/comments/nodes/etc. You absolutely don't have to "throw out everything." BTW, the roadmap for drupal 8 has it coming out in a year and a half or so.
Have to agree. The online presence is in stark contrast to the magazine. Some kind of coherence would make sense. The only resemblance I see here is that half of the page is void of ANYTHING, which is fine in a tactile touchy feely publication, as it's all part of the physical presentation and overall design, but somehow it doesn't feel right as a website. I want my web pages full ta much. PLEASE don't get me started on the colour scheme. I fear I may blow chunks.
So CVG got a redesign but their forum is left unmolested, with all of it's averagely sized avatars, ability to quote, images and general forum functionality. Hardly seems fair.
Congrats on the new look.
How about linking the subscription to the physical magazine with the iPad version? I have enjoyed your mag for many years, but buying it twice each month is asking a bit too much :)
A more easily implemented change: PLEASE state at start of your reviews whether they have been published in the physical mag (by issue number), so international readers like myself don't spoil the surprise for ourselves, when we receive it a few weeks later ;)
And fix the missing carriage returns in the comments, when editing from an iPad, please :)
Thinking about the purpose of the redesign, there's two particular things it seems to be driving at: the content (making it easier to find, use, and more diverse), and the community, including forums and the like.
But based on those criteria, I'm not sure it works. The content that's got the most priority is (as everyone's saying) advertising, while the content people actually want to read has been shaved into a never-ending sliver of scrolling. And the community has lost profile histories, blogging, and all the things that make comments more than a box with an icon - continuity and depth.
Don't get me wrong - the old site wasn't exactly easy on the eye or the user, and it's needed to change for years. But the question is why, if Edge really wanted its community and content to shine, have both been compromised in presentation and depth?
And apparently if you want to organise your comment into paragraphs, that's not supported. Nice.
Can you make the comments/forum/my edge boxout bigger? Maybe 10 posts as oppossed to 5? And please highlight unread comments like the old site used to. I'm having to re-read the entire threads again and again to locate new posts (linking directly from the feed window to the comment I click ala old site would also be helpful).
Yeh its so hard to navigate to your previous comments etc I know I posted something around here somewhere the other day but I cant remember where because theres already been so many news posts. Many of the news posts are about 1 sentence long too. Cant there be a box with a news feed for these very short posts? So annoying when I click something that looks interesting and it consists of 1 sentence.
The main substance of the site is set out far too thin and involves about an hour of scrolling to get anywhere and read through anything. Its thinner than the list I wrote for our chinese order last night.
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Ok that thin comment is a bit exaggerated but its still too thin.