VG247 relaunches: the new features and what they mean to you

Welcome to the new VG247! We're relaunching today to build on some fantastic growth last year. Head in for a run-down of the new format and what it means for our daily output.

VG247's latest design is its best yet. The culmination of six year's worth of work, it comes with the features we believe will cement our leadership of the video games news industry. Here's what it does.

Here it is. V3.00. VG247's latest design is its best yet. The culmination of six year's worth of work, it comes with the features we believe will cement our leadership of the video games news industry. Here's what it does.

The new site has CMS-side functionality which, as near as possible, allows for 'frictionless posting.' I named this version 'The Breaking Update' in the preliminary documents, the gist being that it's designed to bring the time it takes to get news from our eyes onto your desktop or mobile screen to an absolute minimum. We were fast. We wanted to be faster. The Breaking News column on the right-hand side of most of VG247's new pages is the core of our output and should significantly upgrade the way we publish and update news.

You'll see the homepage design has changed significantly. We now have three main content columns, a video promo box and 'pin' boxes in the header. The Headlines column on the left contains the things we want to notice primarily. The biggest news story or relevant feature of the day goes as lead, with lesser or older headlines rolling down to the left, as you'd expect. It's a similar concept to our last version, but we've now coupled it with the Features box. Our blogging around current issues or interviewing indies may not fit in with the day's Headlines, but we're never going to stop producing this type of 'off' content. Our last version presented us with major problems in that we often had to sacrifice the daily agenda to accommodate other content, but never more; now we have a dedicated place for it.

The video bar beneath the Features box is there for obvious reasons. We're dedicated to our video output and we want to promote it. Pretty simple.

We now have a Guides section. Yes, I know (traffic), but there really is a good (traffic) reason for incorporating this style of editorial (traffic). And it isn't just traffic. Guides are newsworthy. We all play a huge amount of games, and one of the major reasons you ever look at a games site is because you're stuck. Our business is talking about current titles, and there's little more relevant to that than telling you how to play them. And they bring in a lot of traffic.

We've promised to bring upgrades to our community suite, and that's planned for the near-future. As soon as we can share more on that, we'll take it to the forum.

VG247 achieved record traffic in November last year of 3.1 million unique users and 7.6 million page views. This relaunch is designed to help us build on recent incredible growth (we only broke 1 million UU in September 2012) as we move through 2014.

I can't stress enough how much we appreciate your support and readership in the six years we've been live. We've come a long way since 2008, and it's all thanks to you. We hope you like the new site.

Patrick Garratt
Publisher
January 23, 2014