Nerd Mentality

New Year, New Layout

Posted January 1st 2006 by J Edison Thomas.

As a rule, I try to stray from the phrase "change is good," as it tends to suggest that "all change is good." To avoid a philosophical tangent about what is and isn't good, I certainly wouldn't appreciate the change of my tire from full to flat, or the unexpected surprise of developing an ulcer.

At the same, it's a smart idea to embrace change, or at the very least not to fear it. Things are changing around here at N-Philes, and I know that change always seems like a bad thing - at first anyway - when it interrupts a comfortable habit like checking the same friendly website every day. Well that's why I'm here to hold your hand through all this and let you know what we've done and why we've done it.

Actually, if you're only interested in our reasoning rather than specifically what has changed, then I can save you some time: if anything's changed, it's either to present our content better to readers or strictly to be different than other websites, specifically those in our field. Usually we tried to aim for both factors, sometimes not. We continue.

The first thing you'll notice is that the website is based on the Revolution's sleek design. That may sound like treading on thin ice for someone with a motivation to look different, but since not even Nintendo themselves have adopted a Revolution scheme, we'll decide how to handle it if and when others follow suit with the style. For the sake of people's different preferences we decided to allow for both a light and dark theme, just click the "L/D Style" button on the Revolution controller.

It seemed almost physically impossible to come up with a new layout that didn't fall into the same patterns as past layouts or layouts of other websites without abandoning the obvious horizontal or vertical means of presenting navigation options. The last N-Philes director to take an interest in presenting innovative navigation was Andrew, and his abandoned honeycomb-style navigation inspired a cluster of navigation buttons that would fill the upper left corner of the screen. Forum member kinopio, who we commissioned to implement the design, updated the idea and made it much more browser friendly with the square Brady Bunch style navigation you see now. It keeps all the options in one spot so your lazy eyes (eyes that are lazy, I mean, though perhaps it does help those with clinically lazy eyes as well) don't have to move around to find out everything this site offers. Other than the N-blogs and Wi-Philes subdomains, it's all there.

You know what's really ugly on news-based fansites? Bottomless news columns - especially our old one that dropped down further than any other part of the site. So what we decided to do was to make a self-contained news window that lets readers stay on the same friendly page while browsing the same amount of news as before. The Revolution controller-themed news navigation lets readers use the D-pad to scroll down and up through the news, and even back and forth through different weeks' worth of updates. The archived button will take you through it by month if that's how you want to play it.

The N-Blogs page is a little different, finally the sub-domain it was always meant to be. Soon we'll be adding new staff avatars to give it a more original look and maybe spruce up the navigation a bit, but I'm pretty happy with the look as we have it.

Reviews themselves have been updated to put most of the essential information on the left, which is a welcome change from having forty screenshots showcased above the review, pushing the review itself down to damn near off the page. Another update is to the review system itself, which is going to be simplified to make the reviews more effective to readers looking to get a cut-and-dry opinion on how worth their time a game is. It's basically a 0-3 star system, and acts like a heart monitor that determines how much life a game has in it. Three beats shown in blue are given to a game that's so full of life that it'd just be a shame to ignore. The controls, the gameplay, the graphics are all dead on. AAA material. Two beats of green are for games that fall just short of true greatness; we'd still recommend checking them out. Then there are games with a slight pulse - they're sloppy, they're not a ton of fun, they're almost all wrong, but they have some redeeming value that saves them from being total trash - those are shown with a single yellow heartbeat. If there isn't that redeeming value, we'll let you know to avoid it with a red flatline. The game's lifeless. Nothing retroactive here, though, so you won't notice the change until we post a new review. Hope you like it.

That should be all you need to know. There are a few kinks here and there that are going to be ironed out in the days to come, and that's nothing you'll need to worry about. As for now enjoy the new look, hopefully it'll usher in a new year of good times at N-Philes.

Posted in: Features

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