18/03: Final Vote results posted.
The final vote on the Coming Soon page at BlazingGames.com is now over. The results of that vote are on that page. As I explained on that page, I am still going to be putting in 10 hours a week (at least) on Open Source projects. I will also be letting visitors to the BlazingGames site have a say in which projects will be worked on. How this will be done will be a bit different, as will the Blazing Games site after April 1st. What exactly will be happening? Obviously I am not going to spoil the surprise, but this week and next week's blog post will provide some ideas as to what will be happening.
As regular Blazing Games visitors know, the site was started on April 1st, and is actually an extended version of the Game of the Month homepage that I had created way back in 1997 (October of that year). This is why I try to hold off any changes to the site until April 1st. Why am I changing things anyway? If you seen the earlier versions of the site, you already know the answer to that. The site has grown quite a bit, and the direction of the site is slowly changing. Redesigns are an attempt at making the site work.
This year's change to the site was going to be a very minor navigation improvement. Navigating through the site is more of a burden then I would like. So I started thinking about how I could make navigation easier. This got combined with restructuring the four categories that I use to group games. These categories no longer accurately reflect the direction Blazing Games is headed, so I am going to be modifying those. Taking those changes to their logical conclusions ended up with a very minor change to the site coding wise that actually will have a fairly large impact on the site.
This is kind of a nice twist. As a programmer, I am use to having to write large chunks of code to end up with very little visual change to a program. Some clients understand this, many do not. In fact, that is probably the biggest reason that big companies re-design their user interface with major releases. While the re-design of the interface may not require much code, the user notices it. The 99% of the code that actually does the work is not seen by the user so they don't care about it.
As regular Blazing Games visitors know, the site was started on April 1st, and is actually an extended version of the Game of the Month homepage that I had created way back in 1997 (October of that year). This is why I try to hold off any changes to the site until April 1st. Why am I changing things anyway? If you seen the earlier versions of the site, you already know the answer to that. The site has grown quite a bit, and the direction of the site is slowly changing. Redesigns are an attempt at making the site work.
This year's change to the site was going to be a very minor navigation improvement. Navigating through the site is more of a burden then I would like. So I started thinking about how I could make navigation easier. This got combined with restructuring the four categories that I use to group games. These categories no longer accurately reflect the direction Blazing Games is headed, so I am going to be modifying those. Taking those changes to their logical conclusions ended up with a very minor change to the site coding wise that actually will have a fairly large impact on the site.
This is kind of a nice twist. As a programmer, I am use to having to write large chunks of code to end up with very little visual change to a program. Some clients understand this, many do not. In fact, that is probably the biggest reason that big companies re-design their user interface with major releases. While the re-design of the interface may not require much code, the user notices it. The 99% of the code that actually does the work is not seen by the user so they don't care about it.
