Your eyes do not deceive you. HonestGamers has been redesigned. It's the first new build in a long time, and the most ambitious in the history of the site. And honestly? It was overdue.

How we got here

A few weeks ago, I decided to redesign Gameroni, which is another site in my portfolio. I'll spare you the gritty details, but basically, I wanted to see how super-spiffy I could make it. I tried my hand at features I'd never built for a site of mine before, and I finally got around to adding a CMS that streamlined article creation.

When I finished the site build and started using it, I thought to myself, "Man, I wish I had made something like this for HonestGamers."

But, as you know, I had not. The site has existed for years with roughly the same ancient forms, which require workarounds and HTML knowledge to get reviews to look good.

A rough patch

Meanwhile, over at HonestGamers, things have not been going as smoothly as I had hoped. Although the site has been hosted on pricey servers, page speeds have been terrible at times. I counted one page that took something like 20 seconds to load. Not always, but often enough to make my brow furrow. Sometimes, pages wouldn't load at all.

Additionally, the site has been hit by spam accounts, by junk messages by the dozen, and there were some features not working as originally intended, if they still worked at all. Things were breaking down, and I didn't want that future for a site that has meant so much to me and to various others over the years.

It was time for a change, and you're looking at that change.

The new design

Starting with the version of the HonestGamer site that was live as of a few weeks ago, I went to work on a new design that would add the features I'd made for Gameroni. But this isn't my first rodeo. In the past, I've built new features into the site while burying old ones. People didn't love that. So, this time around I made sure to add, add, add, while keeping the old features around. I wanted a site with the features of Gameroni AND everything people already loved about HonestGamers.

After weeks of coding, I believe that desired result has been achieved. Not a single page of code has gone untouched. From top to bottom, the site is better than ever. There are dozens of little changes and feature tweaks/additions all over the place, but here are a few of the biggest ones:

  • The article editor now lets you click to submit images, which brings up the option to add a single image or gallery without hunting for image IDs or tags or using HTML. The database has tens of thousands of images, especially for older games, so you can spruce up your review and make it more informative with a few quick clicks.

  • If you want to review a game that doesn't have a listing on the site, you can request the listing as you submit your review. If staff approves it, your game listing and the review will appear live on the site around the same time, preventing the need to post requests to a forum (though you can still do that if you want).

  • The site now has a Chat feature, something I've wanted for years. I had looked over various solutions in the past, and we tried DIscord and Steam chat. But this version is baked right into the site, and should make it easy to carry on a live conversation while it's happening, or join in after the fact. It's a bit like Slack or Discord, but without the need to log into a separate app.

  • Game collections are now easier than ever to manage. You can view a list of every game on a particular system and just go down the list, updating as you go. Every click updates your progress, making it easier than ever to keep your list accurate and attractive.

  • Game ratings are back. You can rate games from game profile features. This feature hasn't been live in about 15 years, so the newest ratings are pretty old. But it's a fun way to leave your opinion on a game when you won't have time to review it.

I encourage you to look around the site. You'll find new filters that make it easier to find what you want from most pages. You'll find new bells and whistles throughout, and site staff have convenience features that will make it easier to manage game listings, keep on top of messages from site users, and more.

What's next

Although I've tested the new features as extensively as I could on my own, there will be rough patches. The site has thousands of reviews, and some of them won't display quite as intended, despite efforts to preserve everything. In most cases, fixing a review that doesn't look right should take seconds. Nothing should be lost. In a few cases, that might not be possible, but the old version should stay live and look decent.

Some features simply may not work as testing indicates they do, once enough people use them all at once.

I'll continue to roam the site, looking for opportunities to improve it over time. As I do, I hope I'll hear from you if you encounter any bugs, so that I can fix them and keep the site looking and working the way I intended.

Thank you for your support over the years, and I hope you enjoy the new features and presentation as much as I do!