Providing everything goes smoothly, you should now be reading this post on our brand new website.
Nearly 2 years in the making and we’re pleased to say we have officially entered the next chapter of our exciting journey. For us, this isn’t just about releasing a new website – but entering our next era. This is the future for us as our new platform allows us to do so much more for the community and expand our ability to be an ever greater resource of content for you all.
We started as a blog site in 2016 and saw great success. After that, we released an updated look which took us to the next level and people started taking us much more seriously. The community enjoyed our detailed and honest reviews, whilst developers appreciated our ability to pick up news promptly and share the details. This new website goes one step further by introducing a number of new features and functions that will only get better as time goes on.
New Features
There’s plenty to talk about, so much so, we’ve created a number of related articles breaking information down for you. In summary:
Fresh Design
Designed around accessibility, better design practices and clear and concise information. We hope you enjoy the fresh look.
Modular Home Page
The whole home page can be changed at a moments notice (on our end) in order to give you access to the content we think is of interest to the community.
Product Pages
Our new product database has over 1,500 products. Not every product is there, but we are working to add more and more. You can see related products at the base of each article. You can also search our database for the recent releases.
Product Pages will be hugely expanded on in the future.
FSElite Accounts
You can now create a FSElite account in order to do the following:
- Join conversations
- Bookmark content
- ‘Like’ content
- View recently viewed content
Making an account is easy and free.
Dark Mode
Those who make an FSElite account will be able to use Dark Mode.
Much More
- Advanced search features
- Filter system on news/sim pages
- Interactive Polls
- Newsletter
- Improved Push Notification System
- 2FA on user accounts
- Developer has own pages
We hope you enjoy using the site as much as we did building it.
“I’ve found an issue / this is broken”
We’re under no illusion that the transition from old to new is seamless. We’re fully aware of some issues (the dark mode bug cropped up last night at 2am), but we are going to work to ensure the platform is as stable as possible. This is as new to us as it is to you, so we’re asking for patient whilst we work out the kinks. Trust me, we want this to be a great website and we will work at it to make sure that it is.
Building a brand new website on this scale is a HUGE task. It would take teams of people a lot of time and money – this was built by only a handful of passionate people, mostly in spare time. So things aren’t going to perfect, but we’ll work at it as best as we can.
Up and Down We Go
As the servers stabilise and our caching system takes control, things may be a bit wonky. We have tested and stress-tested, but only it’s ‘out there’, it’s hard to know exactly how things will go. We’ve invested in technology, servers and support systems to help us identify issues and fix them. Again, please just wait for a bit for us to smooth the edges.
Feedback
Finally, if you have feedback, please let us know. We would appreciate it if you didn’t inundate us with every little minor mistake here and there (not yet anyway), but if there’s major issues or concerns, we want to know. You can see the known-issues below so you can help avoid duplicating our workload.
Known-Issues
- Some recent product pages are missing some text
- Some product pages have incorrect release status/simulators/tags
- Dark mode has a few minor visual issues
- Missing information on some developers
- Missing information on most ‘product quality’ tags
Finally…
My last request: please website lords, please let this launch go somewhat smoothly.
