Hey everyone, if you're reading this, then congratulations, you've figured out how to navigate our new homepage! We've made a pile of changes around here today to hone things up a bit and to add some important new features that we think you'll dig.
For starters, the homepage has been redesigned and we now have real Top Ten popularity lists for each page category. Take a look and see what the most visited pages are this month, or see where you can make a huge difference with your wiki editing skills by scanning our "popular pages that need help" lists. Those are pages that have people looking at them, but could use more attention.
The homepage is also bit better at showcasing the things we do around here. As we've been writing more and more stories, it's been easier for good stuff to get lost in the shuffle. Now we'll be able to show you three videos and manually point you at four different things from the top of the site, ensuring that it's harder to miss what we're doing.
That's also one of the guiding factors behind the update to our video page. Did you know that all of the How To Build A Bomb videos we did before the site launched had become completely impossible to find? Now, the list of videos on our viewer page is paginated, letting you scroll back to yesteryear, when gum was a penny and I was pathetically editing video on my own.
The thing I'm most excited about is our new Guides section. This section will let you read or write strategy guides about games, big or small. We've rolled in some good copyright management stuff for those of you who want to make sure you keep control of your own content, and I think it totally modernizes the form. Watch this handy video about guide creation for more details!
We've also released a white version of the site for those of you who prefer black text on white backgrounds. Brad is such a person, and personally, I think he's insane. Dark sites look better! But I'm willing to meet everyone in the middle on this, I guess. The A/A box up at the top of every page will let you swap back and forth at will. Try it out, but be careful--the white background might blow out your damn eyes.
Lastly, and certainly not least, some of these page redesigns also have placements for advertising. You won't see any ads just yet, but the site is now fully prepared to handle them when the time comes. Actually, that time is coming quite soon, as we recently closed our first ad deal, and it will bring in more than enough money to cover the entire expense of our upcoming Tokyo Game Show coverage. My initial gut reaction is to downplay any talk of advertising, but many of you have been writing comments and posting things saying things along the lines of "how are you people paying for all this?" Or "can I give you money?" Ads have, obviously, been a part of our plan all along.
If you're anything like me, advertising probably makes you very skittish. It may please you to know that we're spending a lot of time thinking about better ways to handle advertising that allow us to bring in the cash we need to keep the lights on without flashing a zillion noisy ads at you on every single page. We'll have more to say on this in the future, as part of our plan is to be as up-front with you as possible with this stuff. And that's a two-way street. If our ads start really rubbing you the wrong way, I want you to be able to voice your opinion on that. We'll definitely be listening.
Additionally, a lot of you wrote in and asked about the T-shirts that we showed off in our Too Human thing. We are actively discussing different types of merchandise that go well beyond a simple T-shirt with the site logo on them. Now is the time for your input, so if there's anything you want to see from us on that end, speak up and we'll take it into consideration.
Thanks for using Giant Bomb, and I hope you're just as excited about these changes as we are. The coolest part is that these changes are actually just the tip of the iceberg.