The Pirates of the Burning Sea website has undergone a huge overhaul to give it a great new look. New information has also been added including a game guide and several 'widgets'.

In a remarkable collaboration between Community, ArtCo, Development and TestCo, I am proud to unveil the new Pirates of the Burning Sea website! This time around, we decided that we wanted to go with a site design that was brighter, more-user friendly, with a cleaner look that avoided the dark and dour design we had before.

The process began some months ago, when our PHP Guy KevinT and myself began to collude in secret, plotting and scheming about the kind of site we'd like to see representing Pirates of the Burning Sea. It was soon after that we recruited UI Designer Diana and Art Director Bruce Sharp into our cabal, and began tossing around our preferences for the new look and feel. Of course, this included a lot of discussion about what our previous site lacked- and what we could do to improve on our older site.

We mentioned words like dynamic, community-focused, feature-rich, fluid, clean, fresh and interesting. We talked about developing back-end features and toolsets that would help highlight the best things about our community, while making sure we had a site that kept everyone in the loop regarding Pirates of the Burning Sea updates and developments. We wanted to give visitors to our site a direct line to hot topics, while making sure existing information was organized in a way that made sense and was easily navigable.

It took some iteration and some very late nights, but we finally settled on the design that you are seeing now. Here's a breakdown of some of the new features on our site, including some information about the back-end tools we'll be using to keep our community informed!

Game Guide

We've added a new area of our site called the Game Guide. The Game Guide will contain helpful guides and walkthroughs detailing the functions of features in Pirates of the Burning Sea. While some of these guides will be written in-house, we will also be collaborating with members of our Boarding Party to publish even more guides into the future. Before you ask, this is information that we consider to be in the public domain, so you are welcome to borrow it for your Fansite or Society Website. All we ask is that you link back to the Pirates of the Burning Sea website with the proper credit.

Tout System

We've created a new administrative feature in our content management system that allows us to create custom advertisements touting the most important Pirates of the Burning Sea news and information. Over time the area that showcases our touts will function as a marquee, pointing people to a wealth of important Pirates of the Burning Sea articles, features, and more!

Milestone Discussion Box!

Sharing information about our upcoming features is important, but more important is making sure our community realizes that in these are issues we want your feedback on. We want these discussions to be front and center, so we've created a place to showcase these important threads, in the hopes that it would increase the flow of information between the Pirates of the Burning Sea development team and our community at large.

Right Side Widgets

I mentioned earlier that we wanted to make sure that our site was dynamic, and for us that meant showcasing new developments, like amazing User Content created by members of the Pirates of the Burning Sea community. In the future, the widgets will include a host of different kinds of information, with a focus on building a strong social network of players with tools that allow for the sharing of even more information- about your societies, your fansites and much, much more. While I'd love to go into more detail, we are in the process of developing those special tools now, so I can't say much more than: "Just wait, it's going to be good!"

Bottom Navigation

If you ask me, this is one of the most interesting places on our new site. Talk about dynamic! This is the place you go to see what's hot on our forums. This section gives us a chance to put your threads front and center, allowing us to focus on ideas and discussions that we find particularly interesting. Along with forum threads, this is the place where you will find featured User content. Finally, the bottom of the page is where you will go to find out what's up with our servers. Looking for server status? Wondering what's happening with the latest build? This area has it all!
A Work In Progress

While you are exploring the new site, you will no doubt run into some glitches along the way. This may include some erroneous information, broken links or perhaps information that is missing altogether. Like everything we do, we are looking for your feedback to help us make this site work better. Did you find a bug or a problem with the new site? Is there something particularly irksome about the design or layout? Then we want to hear from you. While you are welcome to share your thoughts and comments in the forum discussion thread, it is an absolute must that you file a support ticket with your comments.

Please include as much detail as possible. That means information on the kind of browser you are using, links to the offending page, and a copy-paste of the problem text.

Finally, with every project of this magnitude, it is important to roll things out in phases. You will no doubt notice that the Captain's Ship Guide is woefully out of date. This, and many other areas of our site are in the process of being revitalized a new look and feel, as well as new content. We'll keep you posted on our progress, but we are confident that these older resources will be refreshed in short order.

Finally: Thank You!

We hope you enjoy the effort we've put into the new website, and we would like to thank all those community members that have taken the time out of their busy lives to give us feedback throughout the process. Flying Lab Software is committed to improving our communication and interaction with the Pirates of the Burning Sea community, and this is just one step in the greater plan to do so. As always, we look forward to hearing your thoughts on what we've done thus far, and most especially, we look forward to any ideas you may have to make your web-experience with us enjoyable, educational and entertaining.

Enjoy, won't you?
Aether

Admittedly, the new look is much easier on the eyes. See what you think by heading over to the link above.