It’s been just over a month since the site went online and a great deal happened since the start. We’ve currently got 15 games online which may not seem all that much but please consider that three quarters of the effort has gone towards making everything work, testing, changing things around, finding suitable plugins, going back and redoing all the existing entries (multiple times), etc.
We didn’t want to throw hundreds of games on here and then spend weeks redoing it all when we discover it’s not working quite as well as we wished for. The good news however is that we’ve finally decided the current layout for Game Info is the ONE. It’s flexible, it’s good looking, it’s easy to navigate and it offers tremendous ease of use which no abandonware site can match, something we’re very proud of. We may be a site for old software (and hardware) but it doesn’t mean the site itself has to be outdated!
Here’s a list of all the features:
- TAB windows that easily let us add more and new content on a game-by-game basis. Some games have manuals, some don’t. Some have cheats, some have walkthroughs. Tabs make this very simple & easy to expand where needed.
- Planned tab content: cheats, tips, guides, walkthroughs, music/audio, remakes, remasters, documents, downloads, links, credits, reviews (Our Views), trivia and much more.
- Lightboxes for EVERYTHING. A lightbox is basically a box that pops up if you click on a link which allows you to watch something within the same webpage instead of opening a new page. Lightboxes have been deployed for:
- Screenshots
- Box art
- Youtube videos
- Manuals & other documents: we got a wonderful plugin that makes reading manuals a pleasure.
- Play in Browser: PIB is no longer a separate page but now a lightbox. You can even chose the size!
- Ratings: give the game a rating (maybe after having played using Play In Browser)
- Search by downloadable games or games that have PIB
While all this may not seem impressive, a great deal of work has gone into finding plugins and modifying them to make them work the way we wanted. All this needs to work for 15 games as well as 1.500 games so it’s important it’s tweaked to a T.
If you have suggestions or remarks, feel free to mention them in the comments below.
