As the next generation approaches, hurtling us into a new era of high performance 4K graphical fidelity and impressive, immersive audio delights, our initial venture out into the world via our website here started to feel a little stale.
So we thought we’d get with the times and update things around here.
Gotta Go Fast
We’ve built the site around the colour scheme and iconography you’re already familiar with, but with some slick modern features.
Our new site focuses on speed and visuals, and we think (or at least, we hope!) we’ve found a nice balance between the two that should serve us, and our community for a good while into the future.
Our old site design could chug at times, and wasn’t the nicest to navigate or read. We’re hopeful that should be a thing of the past.
Mobile Optimised
Animated sliders on mobile can often feel a little busy, but our site detects what device you may be viewing on, and will adjust the content displayed automatically. Desktop users get more real estate, so that made sense to us, but predominantly most people browse on mobile.
Indeed, mobile users are not left in the cold. XboxEra 2.0 has some subtle features like horizontal progress bars to let you know how long you have left to read, share buttons if you find something you’d like to share across the web, and above all a very fast response time, meaning it should be a delight for you to use.
Not only that, but it’s also incredibly lightweight, which is a godsend for those watching their mobile data.
Oh, and if you hate dark mode for some strange, unfathomable reason, then good news! We’ve got an instant toggle between the two, found at the top of the page.
Making Movies
Did you know we had a YouTube Channel? Well, we’d obviously like you to visit, and discover our content – from weekly news updates, opinion pieces, deep-dives into Xbox Game Studios and more.
We’ve brought a lot of our video content more to the forefront, allowing for embedding of our channel content (where we deem it worthwhile) right on an article or homepage, including allowing you to watch and read simultaneously.
Community Support
As we go live today with XboxEra 2.0, it also please me to say that following our extended beta period, the XboxEra Forums are now fully feature ready alongside this site upgrade.
Not much has changed for the nearly 1500 users we currently have in terms of features, but we’ve made a number of updates to our backend that should result in a nice smooth, and most importantly – stable! – experience.
If you’re new to our forums, we realise it might feel a little different than some of the other places you’ve visited, but we think we’ve made the right, mobile optimised choice for our forum software, and if you haven’t joined up yet, we certainly hope you pop in to visit.
You might find some familiar faces to talk to.
Patreon
It goes without saying that our ambitions are stupidly high, but all of this, the new site, the forums, our content – all of it is made possible by the support of our patrons.
We don’t run any ads on our site or forum yet, and that’s only possible because of their continued support and our wider teams generosity of time and spirit. If you’d like to consider becoming an XboxEra Patron, you’ll find the link right here on our site.
The whole team at XboxEra are stupidly grateful to all of you. Thank you for making this possible.
<3
XboxEra
