VG247 - Welcome to our second year and your new site!

Happy birthday to us. VG247, "Britain's leading videogaming news site," according to the press release we just put out, is one year old. We launched on February 1, 2008, and had a fantastic first year.

To celebrate, we’ve done some stuff.

First things first. Our biggest anniversary news is that we've hired a full-time American journalist. Stephany Nunneley joins us today as our Associate Editor. We’re very excited by Steph coming on board, and believe her joining the staff will make a big difference to both the depth and daily time-span of our content. She was previously a news editor on Ziff Davis’s Gaming Today and a contributor to 1UP.

Secondly, we've redesigned the whole site and rebranded it as VG247, as you've probably noticed. We’re known web-wide as VG247 and the new URL’s more succinct. Immediacy ‘r’ us. The videogaming247.com address now forwards to the new domain.

As part of the relaunch, we've added a bunch of new stuff to make the VG247 "experience" more rounded. Here's what's changed:

• New design - Martin's done himself proud with the site's new look. He also designed the original VG247, but decided to drop his famed rounded box corners for year two. We don't question. He gets really angry.
• We've added a forum - See. We listened. The "board" experiment didn't really work, so we've added a "proper" forum for you. It’s what Shatner would have wanted. Go and use it. Remember, as with the comments threads, there's no moderation and no one gets banned. We will remove spam - if you want to advertise on the site, look at this - and we'll delete posts if we receive specific legal threats. But that's it. We want you to live the hippy internet dream.
• There's a forum box on the homepage - This worked well for the comments threads, so we've added a recent activity box for the forum on the main editorial page. Keeps you nice and updated, isn't it.
• New "hot" features - Any stories we tag as hot will now get a "hot" headline in the news feed. We know it can be difficult keeping up with the news, so hopefully this'll make skimming a little easier.
• Digest - The Digest button on the top left gives you every headline from the last day. Again, this should make keeping up with things easier for you.
• Social bookmarking stuff - Mart's added a new share box at the bottom of every article that should include every social bookmarking link you'll ever need. We hope.
• We've dropped the "tag cloud" - No one liked it. No one used it. It's been eliminated. We've added some links at the bottom of the page templates, but that should be it for "links" in boxes for now.
• Staff page - As Christina Aguilera once said, we are beautiful in every single way. Here's the proof.

That's it for now. We sincerely hope you like the new look, and please bear in mind this is all work in progress; expect plenty more refinement as we go along. Thanks for reading, and here's to year two!