Every so often, we redesign. We tweak. We explore.
Less than a week after the PlayStation 4 was welcomed to the world, and on the eve of the Xbox One launch, we invite you to the next evolution of Eggplante.
You’ve likely already seen our new design, but this upgrade is far more than skin deep. All of the enhancements have been thought out to bring you better content, in a clearer manner, connecting you to more of what you love, and letting you share it all with your friends.
Here’s what you can expect from the new Eggplante:
This one might be obvious considering you’re already looking at it, but there are a lot of goodies here. You’ll find a new, faster toolbar that floats atop the page no matter how deep you dive, a breaking news toolbar that will showcase the latest and greatest posts, and a set of related posts beneath each article that are actually related to what you’re looking at, not ones that just happen to be written by the same author.
The new layout also promises much more fluid reading, including pagination for Brent’s awesome but quite in-depth articles, as well as tag clouds so you can find all the stuff you care about that much quicker.
And as you’ve no doubt noticed above, some snazzy parallax animations allow us to use ultra high-resolution images that are also compatible with those snazzy Retina displays Apple has been using lately, so feast your eyes on that!
Our new layout also comes alongside our new logo we debuted back in May of this year. Cleaner, more modern, and a lot more refreshing than the one based on a font that has been shipping on computers since 1993.
When we have a better way to show off what we love, we’re inspired to show off more. Our new content management system is so easy to use and beautiful on the eyes that we want to share more of it with you, which means we’re going to be bringing even more content to you on a daily basis than you could ever expect.
In 2013, we more than doubled the number of posts we have ever done, and in 2014, we’re looking to blow that number out of the water, too. We’ll be covering more events, doing more video reviews, and hosting a lot more contests in the next year and beyond on Eggplante, so look forward to it!
We love amazing photography and imagery. With our new layout and design schema, we’ll be able to bring you larger and clearer images, screenshots that are actually full 1080p, and headers that jump out of your browser. Unless you’re using Internet Explorer. Eww.
Images on the new Eggplante will be used as dividers within articles and storytelling tools in reviews, not to mention a way to make anyone who can appreciate beautiful imagery’s heart flutter. Those are all just really fancy ways to say: “we love beautiful images.” Just look at what we can do:
In our future reviews, we’ll be able to deliver a section (or sections, if there are a lot of spoilers) that will be collapsed by default so that anyone who wants to read a spoiler-free review is more than welcome to do so. Here’s an example of a spoiler:
Now, if that was actually a spoiler, shame on you. We’ll be going by official (unofficial) spoiler rules for what we consider a spoiler to be.
Finally, we’ve implemented a new ranking system that will let us eliminate the somewhat vague text-based reviews of the games and movies we play and watch in favour of a numerical system that will give you at a glance information about the game or film we’re talking about. Of course, this isn’t an excuse to skip our review, but since we’re going to be using a percentage scale, we can give you full, specific reviews, detailing our favourite bits of each and every game and movie we play, so that you’re more informed than ever when you come to Eggplante!
Even better, you can add your own rating to the schema and have your say!
Don’t forget we’ve got a wicked comment system in place, powered by Disqus, as well as full Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube functionality built into Eggplante. To reiterate from our announcement of Eggplante 2.0, way back when:
The Chief was right. We are just getting started.