Hello readers, viewers, and Chatty members,
We have spent the past 7 months working on a strategy to revitalize Shacknews, and we officially open a new chapter in our site’s history with tonight’s relaunch!
Over the past several months, we’ve tried a bunch of different things — we have daily video news with our Shack Snacks, fun programming like 8-Bit Cuisine and Shack Reels, and great written editorial led by Steven Wong, Steve Watts, and Ozzie Mejia. We are constantly engaging the Chatty community to find out what they want to read, hear and see, including at the recent Shackcon (pictured here). We’re even on our second official episode of the Shacknews' Chattycast podcast and we have plans to introduce new shows in the near future.
It’s been a very busy year so far, but we have assembled a great team touching on everything from editorial to video production to management. Still, it is clear that we have a lot more to do. I look forward to working with our team and the community to bring the Shack back to its rightful place in the vast realm of video game journalism.
We want to thank all of our partners for supporting us during the transition, and I personally want to thank the team at Shacknews for working harder than most people realize to get us to this point today.
Lastly, we want to thank our Shacknews community. I am very happy that we won't have to live in a world without the Chatty. I will do everything in my power to give the team at Shack the resources required to maintain its rightful place as a premier video game news site, but we all want to hear your thoughts on what we could do better. We can’t do this without you.
As I said before, we have much more to do. This is merely the beginning.
Thanks for sticking with us,
Asif A. Khan (the man with the briefcase)
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Shacknews
replyAsif Khan posted a new article, Letter from Shacknews.
Welcome to the brand new Shacknews! Read more about what we have planned in the near future...-
Testing testing
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Still works!
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Hooray for good shack overlords.
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I posted an article?
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I am gonna name it sCary McGnuGnuPants
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You guys are doing good work! Keep it up! And let us know what we can keep on doing to support you!
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thanks!!!
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Well, I think you're doing a bang-up job so far. I've been loving the new articles and editorials.
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I definitely love what you'll have been doing so far.
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Woohoo! Party in this chatty!
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PC LOAD LETTER
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What does that even mean?!
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I knew we should have just brought back Quakeholio's format...
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It's a bit of a mixed bag for me. I appreciate the simplicity of the design, but the elements don't mesh well. I almost missed the 8-bit graphic reference for feeling like things were sloppy. Took the mix between bit graphics and smooth web text isn't quite their yet. Needs to be a bit more pixelated and boarders defined a little more between sections. Might be as simple as that.
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Hate to diss peoples hard work, but I really REALLY don't like it.
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Fuck it, I am gonna set the building on fire.
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i welcome my new leaders
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this is actually something we had mocked up and intend to keep in this iteration. Adding this to the list of things to take care of today. Not sure why it isn't showing up!
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Great start, congrats!
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Unique New York. Unique New York
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Unique New York.
New Nique U dork...... dammit
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Nice!! I like the new design...and there's now actually content and news on this site horray!
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Yup, and it sure does suck now...
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Site looks really good!
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Wish you guys luck with the relaunch. Not a fan of the new design but hope it will grow on me as Shacknews is where I come for gaming.
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It's a bit of a mess fortunately the new crew is pretty good at taking criticism. The shack snack videos have changed a ton since the first one in terms of look due in part to feedback.
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Yerp I am looking at all the feedback now to make some tweaks. Trying to focus on anything that is broken first, but then taking a long hard look at some readability and color issues.
My first order of biz though is fixing the responsiveness for the site so our smaller screened friends are good-
Responsive stuff was the biggest issue I saw, yeah.
Other than that I'd try making the body BG lighter or just white to do away with the black bars, I think it looks a lot cleaner:
http://chattypics.com/files/Screenshot20140710095313_s650yed6dt.png
Other than that maybe some padding stuff, and readability for the text over images.-
Oh and make the article images links that go to the article :)
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This, please.
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Dunno if you saw this thread, but just wanted to call it to attention because I thought it was well received while not changing the feel of the design:
http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=32149493#item_32149493
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iPad looks ok but those borders on side really kill things. Especially in portrait mode on iPad you get no content. Landscape mode is a bit better but feels like what you are able to see is greatly limited. I understand for advertising wraps and the likes (and I believe the old Shack had sidebars as well). All I know is especially when I look on an iPad, I feel like I am looking at one of those 'first time I made a webpage sites' or a quick $10 template purchased from some template site, not something professional.
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Looking not bad. Definitely better than the all tile design of few years back.
Couple criticisms.
First and foremost the color scheme. While the colors themselves aren't a bad choice, they are laid out a bit off. I would definitely try to eventually toss out all of the black. The black really does detract the visual impact. This is especially true with your navigation bar.
This leads me to the second. Your navigation is an important element that seems to fail to grab enough attention to itself. It doesn't have to stand out like a sore thumb but it definitely needs more visual language signifying that it exists. It is really obscured by the choice of color and size. Play around with some different colors first. The small sub nav white box is also really weak.
Third. The "zoom in " transition effect you have going on the top stories is too slow. It sort of detracts from the desired effect.
FInally, speaking of top stories, the story that is literally on the top of the page is a complete waste of valuable layout space and even makes the page look worse. Serves no purpose, hard to read, and is ugly. This can be used for something far more valuable like your header or top story section. You already have enough story alerts around the page as it is. You don't need one that doesn't even do a good job drawing attention to itself. -
Reading this on a WP7 Mobile I can see that the picture didn't reformat for mobile and you have forgotten to add the links to other articles about the same subject which always resides at the bottom of the page.
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You might also want to avoid using the same colour on the side bar as the background.
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I posted this in another thread by accident.
I've been posting here since 1999. I haven't posted since 2002 on this account though I just realized.
The font size is just a TINY bit too large for the article headers. It distracts from a lot of the page since my eyes just jump to the massive font and I feel like I'm looking at an iphone and not a desktop. Was the site designed for mobile? If so lower the font for the full site for us desktop users :)-
Really I don't mind the font size so much as I mind the highest width media query. Surely you can make one level more for people with 1080+ monitor resolutions
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new layout looks good. For me the video and podcasts etc dont do anything for me, as I tend to look at shacknews when at work, and just scroll down the articles and read those that interest me. I like that the articles are short and can easily be consumed in minutes. Keep up the great work guys/gals
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