The Changing of Times
skizzo

12 Aug 2008 | No Comments

"Der Wechsel der Zeit"
Originally written by Sebastian Nisi on November 1st, 2005.

The tale of how the current website of mindFactory came about.

Since September the 15th a new and revised website has been online. Everybody who visits our website regularly knows that already. The kicker: to make the switch acceptable for everybody, I orientated myself on the colours of the old website, while designing the new website. And now we have both a more modern and at the same time a more up-to-date look. I thank you for all the magnificent feedback. It has shown me that I am on the right track!

To awaken your adventurer’s minds, I haven’t told you which changes were made content-wise. This privilege was meant first of all for the receivers of our newsletter and is now available to everybody. Maybe you’ve already discovered all the alterations. The site now contains a neatly arranged sitemap (the right menu), which is self-explanatory. On the character site there is a new image of both Nico and André. On the voice-acting page (German part of the site only) I’ve cleaned things up a bit. The awful popups are no longer there. Furthermore, Alexander Schottky’s (who does the German voice of George) info site is an interview we conducted a few years ago. Most downloads now also have the release date registered with them, so you can see more quickly how old the download is. As new downloads we have the “mindFactoy-logo test” and the “GIGA-item” (German part of the site only). The new part “Press commentaries” carries a lot of international messages about Broken Sword 2.5 in PDF-format. The renamed category “Milestones” has taken over from the old category “History”. However, there is one big difference: the detail has increased immensely! With the new chat-applet you can now also chat directly with the team and other Broken-Sword-2.5-fans in your browser window without installing any extra programs.

And now we’re getting to something that nobody knows yet! There is a website-version that’s in between the old one and this one, which never went online. The reason for that is that we decided internally that it was probably too dark. Besides, the dynamics of that site weren’t optimal, which would mean more work for me as webmaster. All in all it just wasn’t very user friendly for an up-to-date website.

For all those who are now sighing that they’d rather have a book-design, I have an enjoyable announcement: since a printed guide will not be distributed with the game, we will present to you this guide in HTML, as a gag. Also, a manual in book-design will be made available then, which you’ll be able to open in your browser.

On average, I’m working on the project for about 5-8 hours a week. That is including fan support and of course updating the site. And I must say that it is a wonderful job which I’ve never regretted doing and which I still greatly enjoy doing, I already have a few new ideas, but it is not easy do decide which information to share in which form. The new design appeared kind of sudden without any preannouncement. Just here and there I shed something about the great update. And I believe that this was the right way to do it. The framework of the new website was created with Macromedia Dreamweaver and for the image processing Photoshop was used. The programming is overtaken by a CMS (=Content Managing System), which governs all files and which builds up the site from all my added files and texts. It is because of this system that the URL’s now look that peculiar compared to the previous site.

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