While we were gone, StarWars.com got a bit of a facelift. The front of the site is now driven by Flash, no doubt with an eye towards a that less news-driven site that Pablo has been mentioning lately. And from a designer’s standpoint, it sure is shiny… Like last time, the redesign process will be gradual, and for now most everything beyond the front is pretty familiar.
The biggest change, however, is the brand-new video section, which gathers all the site’s video content together in a slick Youtube-inspired interface. Or is that two brand-new video sections? Mashups features actual clips you can edit, remix, and upload right on the site, a huge step for any official site to make.
Overall I feel pretty positive towards the changes, and while I’ll miss the news-focus, I look forward to seeing what upgrades the rest of the site will get. It can’t all be Flash…
There are still news updates, btw… just not on the homepage, apparently:
http://www.starwars.com/whatsnew/
Not hugely impressed with the new refreshed site – always liked the existing layout and while change is always good, this is a bit too clever for it’s own good me thinks.
Hopefully I’ll be proven wrong, but moving focus from news to this is a dodgy move – why not expand the site to cover all aspects of the Force, not just the narrow, dogmatic view of the…sorry, went off on a tangent there.
I know, Stooge. That’s what I’ve have bookmarked for years. But it doesn’t have as much as a presence on the new homepage, and stuff that’s on the homepage doesn’t always make it there now, like the C4 stuff and the Clone Wars video.
Actually we’ll be moving a lot of our starwars.com news to the actual blog like we did for our ongoing Celebration IV coverage, so we can update it throughout the day and not just once like we did before.
So you might as well bookmark it:
http://starwarsblog.wordpress.com
and i do believe both the Clone Wars stuff and CIV news are in fact on the new home page. In fact, I’m looking at it right now.
On the homepage, but not /whatsnew/