Site Navigation Update: Featuring Hot Sidebar, Guide Tab

Sometimes reality has to be faced and things must happen to respond to it. Our navigation, while clever, wasn’t exactly… practical. In scouring through all the statistics in the last year some noticeable things appear. First and foremost, actual game index’s are viewed far and few between. Secondly, outside of walkthroughs, no one really uses any of the other guides. This is a harsh reality to face, as I have spent a decade in this community building out content pages for game sections that very few people are using.

Of course, this should be expected. This is the internet and information moves fast. It’s much easier to post in a forum thread, text someone on the phone, make a call, or use instant messenger to get quick hit information about a heart piece then it is to type in google, go to a site, sift through a guide, and find exactly what your looking for. Not only that, there is never a guarantee said site is right, and you may not understand the way the guide is laid out. Okay, so it’s heart piece # 3 in the ice temple… but to you, what does that mean? How do you know what heart pieces there are and in what order your supposed to get them?

I’m not saying guides don’t have a place, I am saying that anything relevant is pretty much included in a walkthrough and the stats show this. So, that being the case, I completely reworked our navigation a bit to bring more relevant information to the top. You can see this instantly by looking at our tabbed menu on the right. The first tab that is automatically opened is “What’s Hot”. It list the 10 most popular things at the site in the last 48 hours. Be this news posts, articles, walkthroughs, forums, podcasts… or any number of items we present at this site. We want to make it much easier to get to what people are finding relevant right now, and we feel a constantly updated “What’s Hot” tab does the trick. In addition, we added a guides tab. This features the walkthroughs the site is currently working on or has completed.

One thing you will notice gone entirely is the game index pages, and their associated content. While the pages still physically exist, we saw no real reason to even have them easily findable. People just weren’t using them, so it wasn’t worth the effort of keeping them up to date, let alone fixing the broken links. We are contemplating removing the featured bar at the top of the site as well, but before we do any such move… what do you think? Do you like the new set up? Would you prefer the featured bar to stay? Do you just want the bar to change entirely? Is there something else you want to see? Let us know in the comments!