I'm In Your Websites And Other Such Memes
The great spotlight of CCP development has now been turned to EVE’s web presence, which whilst great, has tended to grow a little ‘organically’ over the years. Now is the time to bring the websites up to the same levels of AWESOME as EVE itself.
Starting Soon(tm) we will be making the first changes of many to the EVE websites. These changes are designed to do two things.
- Improve the experience for you, the user. Giving you better tools and more information to work with.
- Improve life for us, the developers, by dragging the EVE websites onto a single technology platform and implementing web standards. This in turn leads to increased amounts of point 1 above, as we have an easier time developing/testing and deploying new features, it’s kind of like a big circle of win.
The road to achieving the above will be a rocky one, but we will get there and our goals will be met.
So what will these changes be?
Before I go into detail about these changes it is important to know that we will be making every effort to ensure these changes are transparent to the user base, so that your bookmarks and frequently used URLS will all still work. We are aiming for evolution here, not revolution!
Firstly we will be merging the main EVE website and the MyEVE websites together. Both of these URLS will continue to function but there will only be one physical site behind them. We are doing this to simplify development procedures internally as well as to make it easier to make improvements to things like the forums, logins, advertisement banners etc. Once this is achieved we will begin slowly moving the code base for these sites from classic ASP onto the .net platform.
At the same time as we are merging these sites, we will begin a process of cosmetic improvement as well. This will start small, with a new menu system but will eventually culminate with a full rebuild of the look and feel of the site.
The sites bugs.eve-online.com, support.eve-online.com and secure.eve-online.com will become much more focused on their individual roles and will become true sub sites as opposed to copies of the main EVE site. So for example support.eve-online.com will only contain menu options pertinent to EVE Online support. This will help to create a less cluttered user experience and means users will get the information they need faster.
The changes above are just the start and are the first steps in what will hopefully be a very exciting rejuvenation of EVE Online’s web presence.
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