After over a year of planning, months of development, and a month-long sprint to launch by the end of Q3 - we're finally live on our newly redesigned site and upgraded infrastructure!
Since the Kickstarter in 2016, and the swap to our own custom theme and features, we realized that Wordpress just couldn't take what we wanted it to do. Numerous plugins bloated our database, and plugins we hadn't used in over a year still lingered, causing database slowness and a number of errors that gradually got worse and worse. In 2018, we decided that rather than spending countless hours on cleaning up and optimizing everything, that we'd dedicate time to fixing what we could while we migrated to a whole new platform, Drupal.
That was one of the best decisions we've ever made - Drupal has been a dream come true in achieving everything feature-wise we've ever wanted to do. Here's a few examples of what's on this new site that we just couldn't do before:
Brand New Homepage - We've taken elements of past designs, and added a few new ones to create a really awesome new homepage. You'll find our featured articles, the latest news, recent games we've written about, more content broken out by category, and then 4 interesting reads from the past. We've limited the ads, and made the homepage full size to present you with all the content you could want! See a preview below, or visit it yourself!
A different way to navigate - Instead of the horizontal drop-downs, we've moved to a vertical menu on the top right of the site. Clicking that menu will give you quick access too all the different sections of the site, where you can browse to your hearts' content!
FULL Game Page Integration - On our past design, we had gamepages where you could check out the latest information about each game, but they were 100% on a single page you had to click to get to. In TechRaptor 3.0, we've integrated key details about the games you're reading about right into the article! You can still click through to the game page itself if you're looking to see what we've written about that game. Plus, in Q4 2019/Q1 2020, these game pages will form a calendar of releases that you can use to track upcoming game releases and anniversaries! See below:
Custom Deals Homepage - If you're looking for the latest deals around the web, techraptor.net/deals is where you want to be. At the moment, you'll see upwards of 5-8 deals, our latest deals articles, and our latest giveaways. In the future, we'll be adding in API integrations for some of the best deals from each of our partners, giving you a feed of the best single deals from each one. Check out that page here!
Video-only pages - Video is a growing vertical across the web, as we've seen in recent years. Because of this, we've invested money into a custom video platform, and build a new layout that focuses 100% on the video. You can visit our new video hub for 50 of the best videos we've published here: Video Hub
We have much, much more planned for the future, which you can see in the roadmap below:
I'm beyond excited to be revealing this site, and getting our readers into this next iteration of TechRaptor. It's been a long time coming, and we're one giant step closer to the vision of what we want TechRaptor to be, how we want it to work, and how we interact with our readers.
TechRaptor, as it always has been, remains committed to the best quality content that we can provide to our readers. As before, you'll always see the best content we can possibly provide you, and with this new iteration we truly believe you're going to have a better experience than ever before.
We're here because of our readers, and we're here for our readers.
Welcome to TechRaptor 3.0, and thank you so much for reading this site over the years. I hope we'll see you in our Discord, where you can report any issues!