PixlBit

After a few weeks of hard work, the face of PixlBit has changed.

It started with a menu. I wanted to provide a better means of navigating the site and seeing all of the content we were offering at the time. I had polled the staff for their opinions on what would work and had settled on a design. It would tease a variety of content within it and have a more logical organizational structure so that everything was within reach. Before long I had a working prototype, but something still wasn’t right.

While the menu clearly would’ve accomplished my intended goal, the problems ran deeper. The site’s design wasn’t really fitting our needs any longer. Many of the features launched with the site weren’t really of practical use and much of the site wasn’t tailored to what had become our operating procedures. At this point I had gone to Chessa.

“So, I finished up that new menu,” I said in a defeated tone. “Oh, that’s cool,” she replied, clearly uninterested in the topic at hand. “Yeah, but I don’t think I’m going to use it. Kinda been rolling around the idea of rewriting the site.” Chessa’s interest was piqued.

“Does that mean we can change the colors?” “Yes,” I replied. “Seriously? Do it. The site is so ugly!” Defensively, “It’s not ugly! It’s just looking kind of… I don’t know, dated?” “No, it’s ugly. It was ugly when you made it and it’s extra ugly now.”

“So, when are we going to get started?” Chessa added in a bubbly tone. “Well, whenever you want. We need to find a new template.” “OK, chop chop! Time to find one now!”

“I see someone is eager. Have you just been waiting for me to say this or something?” I added. “Nick, you know that I’ve hated the site template from the beginning. It’s hideous. It needs to be brighter. It needs to be better organized. It needs to not look like a gaming site.”

I agreed, at least about the part of it not looking like a gaming site. I wanted something clean looking, something that I could easily augment over time without it looking like a hacked together mess – like the original iteration of the site.

Initial searches were fruitless, but eventually we found some obscure template site with something that was pretty close to what we wanted. We made a variety of modifications to the base design and settled on a bright design that appeared to be easily extensible and customizable.

From there, things just fell into place. I quickly arrived at a backend coding solution that would make it easy to produce a page on the site and greatly reduced the database load time, allowing for pages to load that much quicker. Other improvements were made to the backend structure to improve search engine interaction, producing something that will coexist better in the current internet landscape.

On a user level, the site should obviously look a lot better, but also be much easier to use and to navigate. We’ve excised everything that was unnecessary or didn’t serve a strong purpose, and we’ve redesigned every page so that they are interlinked in a logical manner.

Along with our new look, we plan to turn over a new leaf, bringing bigger, better, and more consistent content. We’ll be dabbling in all sorts of presentation types and will hopefully be running many multipart specials on topics of interest in the gaming world.

Please let us know what you think, enjoy the new design, and be sure to check in throughout the week for some special features from the entire PixlBit staff.