Phoenix's Blogs

Some minor updates to NZGamer.com

Published Wednesday 28 Jul 2010 12:56pm |

21
Tags: nzgamer, nzgamer update, development blog

As awesome regular visitors to NZGamer.com, you may notice our many updates we're continually rolling out to improve your experience on the site!

More than likely however, most of these fly under the radar until they've become things that "have always been there".

Just over a month ago we rolled out one of the larger updates to the site in a long while - we made the website, and forums, wider, to give content a bit more breathing room, we added comments on reader reviews, gave you the ability to vote comments up and down (more on that later), added our 'Events' functionality - allowing us to easily roll out things like our E3 2010 Hub. Plus we also did a huge re-write to a lot of our code to cache pages to speed them up and allow more people at once viewing our content.

That was NZGamer.com "5.2". On Monday we rolled out "5.2.1" and I'd love to detail a couple of the tweaks we've put in place - for the unabashed adoration and for your feedback on how we can continue to make NZGamer.com a better place.

iPad Hub

Monday's update, most notably put the iPad hub in place. It's the place for all our (upcoming) iPad reviews, including features on iPhone games and a few other things we have up our sleeves.

We also updated our search results page. We've grouped content into tabs so instead of a sometimes massive list of 'stuff' to scroll-through, hopefully you'll be able to find what you're looking for a lot quicker. Reviews/Previews and Features now look a bit spiffier, as well as the other content, which should hopefully be a lot more readable.

One minor tweak we also made was our thresholds for comment ratings. Get 5 down-votes? Your comment will now reflect the apparent dullness of your comment. For every five up-votes you get, you'll get a star. These show how cool you are.

If this sort of insight is interesting to you at all - let us know, we're more than happy to continue and provide some details on what's going on at NZGamer.com HQ where we can.

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NZGamer.com - Some minor updates to NZGamer.com

COMMENTS (21)

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On Wednesday 28 Jul 2010 1:09 PM Posted by bahamut_zero

I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of comment will 'reflect the dullness' of those -5 votes :)

-16

Reply This comment has been down-voted by the community.

On Wednesday 28 Jul 2010 2:32 PM Posted by Donutta

I'll be interested to see if the iPad section proves a success. It seems very niche at the moment and the content for it almost seems to be driven by personal interest and/or publisher request. But then again, I've been wrong about these things before. :P

On Wednesday 28 Jul 2010 3:56 PM Posted by nimrod76

Like the new search feature. Ipad I couldn't careless about

Poor BZ XD

Reply This comment has been promoted by the community.

On Wednesday 28 Jul 2010 8:20 PM Posted by Soyerz

iPad has a lot of potential so the reviews will definitely be interesting!

On Thursday 29 Jul 2010 8:50 AM Posted by bahamut_zero

28 July 2010, 03:56 PM Reply to nimrod76
Like the new search feature. Ipad I couldn't careless about

Poor BZ XD

yeah poor me indeed :(
I guess I was kinda asking for it LOL

Reply This comment has been promoted by the community.

On Thursday 29 Jul 2010 12:58 PM Posted by Kegz

28 July 2010, 03:56 PM Reply to nimrod76
Like the new search feature. Ipad I couldn't careless about

Poor BZ XD

Consider yourself promoted, who said I never did anything for you.

I think that search result thing could be helpful now that there seems to be a lot more news and blog articles around.

On Thursday 29 Jul 2010 8:24 PM Posted by chinaman71

I hope the ipad addition fails (sorry) but a platform rife with more piracy than the PSP, with below average games which are at best competitive with flash or social networking games is no doubt going to fail. Also id be hard pressed to find someone with any computer knowledge or under 25 whom is not a women trying to be 'hip' because they are 'simple' person whom actually has one even further anyone whom thinks its good value. Unless of course they were like me whom own one for a fraction of the child labor RRP (outrageous IMO) got their hands on one and hacked it straight away and desire never to feed the pockets of Steve jobs, freaking druggie (QFT BTW)/rant

On Friday 30 Jul 2010 3:14 PM Posted by NetPirate68

I think the whole site is looking pretty darn good at the moment, plenty of colour and the content is very easy to navigate and find what your looking for and that was before the search engine update, as for the iPad hub, well I suppose it is a legit platform nowadays that many people are taking onboard so it has a place here also.

On Friday 30 Jul 2010 3:39 PM Posted by djkicks

Yay, I like the search update, and it finds games with even half words put into the search. Used to be harder searching for games I could not remember the name of, and bad spelling would bring up no results. Nice work ^_^

On Saturday 31 Jul 2010 3:35 PM Posted by djkicks

Oh I just thought of a site suggestion. For PSN and XBLA games where it says "Rating", "Difficulty", and "Learning Curve" it would be helpful if you also had a price category. Sometimes the reviewer mentions the price. But not always, and the price of an arcade game can be an important factor when deciding to buy it or not.

Reply This comment has been promoted by the community.

On Monday 2 Aug 2010 4:36 PM Posted by nimrod76

31 July 2010, 03:35 PM Reply to djkicks
Oh I just thought of a site suggestion. For PSN and XBLA games where it says "Rating", "Difficulty", and "Learning Curve" it would be helpful if you also had a price category. Sometimes the reviewer mentions the price. But not always, and the price of an arcade game can be an important factor when deciding to buy it or not.

Best suggestion ever.

Well maybe not ever, but it's a darn good one.

On Tuesday 3 Aug 2010 1:04 PM Posted by guido

I love all the additions made lately. The changes to search are all good. However I would love a "submit game" feature for when you do a search for a game like "Brink" and find nadda resultos. I for one would be happy to fill out a quick form with basic details of a game for submitting it to the database.

On Tuesday 3 Aug 2010 7:18 PM Posted by Koopa18

Lol at the guy with 11 thumbs down

On Friday 6 Aug 2010 11:52 AM Posted by Oliver

28 July 2010, 02:32 PM Reply to Donutta
I'll be interested to see if the iPad section proves a success. It seems very niche at the moment and the content for it almost seems to be driven by personal interest and/or publisher request. But then again, I've been wrong about these things before. :P

I agree with Donutta. An iPad section makes far less sense than a mobile section. I for one will never visit an iPad section, however if a mobile section contained support for a wider range of operating systems, I would be more inclined to have a read.