New Site Design Underway

Just a short note to our fans - we've begun work on a complete redesign of our web site (which would be the fifth major version of our website). What you see here will go away totally, and will be replaced with a new streamlined look and feel. We've given some thought as to how to present all the information on our web site in a way that makes it easier to navigate than the current way of doing things, and we believe that we've come up with a design that does this.. The final stages of pre-design are currently underway (laying out things, designing the graphics, etc), and then the actual work of converting over all our old content will begin. We're excited about this new look, and we're sure you will be, too. Here's some web site history for 3D Realms:

* Our first site design was using the (now defunct) WebBBS package by Dan Linton's Software Creations (which required you to log in in order to see anything). Our first web site went online back in November of 1995, and we used that format from then to October 20, 1996.

* Our second design had two variants, and had no internal codename. The first version was a plain text site, as opposed to the "brown button" version that came after it. The brown button shot is a black and white image, because we have no screen dump of that version of the site, and had to scan that image from a game manual that happened to have that version in it. These versions ran from October 21, 1996 to July of 1997.

* Our third design was referred to internally as the "Green TV" site. It was the first of our site designs that had major art in it, as opposed to the earlier ones which were all text based, or had minimal art. This site ran from July of 1997 to February 7, 1998.

* Our current design (referred to by our webmaster as the Apogee98 site) has been online since February 6, 1998. This version of the site is our biggest in terms of using graphics as part of the site design. For awhile, we used Java on the front page, which did slow things down when loading. This version ran from February 8, 1998 till...

* The fifth design, currently underway (codenamed y2ksite by our webmaster) is going to be our sleekest design ever, with graphics being used minimally to get a sleek and well organized design across. It's currently slated to go online late in November of 1999. Look for it!

Posted by Joe Siegler on November 1, 1999 at 1:00 PM | Permalink
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