We have listened to your feedback and it feels like we don’t communicate enough about what our engineering team are doing. We have 15 engineers working everyday to improve our site and we want to communicate that better with you. As an engineering team we work in 2 week sprints. Sprints are part of the agile methodology. It really just means we agree what the priorities are with the business and schedule that work for next two weeks, during that time we don’t allow anything else to be worked on. Our engineers then work through those issues and aim to get that work completed in those two weeks. As we work on a 2 week sprint cycle we thought it would make sense to do these letters from the engine room fortnightly to give you a more in depth summary of what we have been working on this past sprint. However for those of you who just can’t wait for our two weekly update we are going to update our change log with what changes each week. Please note that we don’t deploy every day (although we try to) and some changes we won’t be able to add to the change log until we are nearer completion of that feature but it should give you a better idea of what we are doing.
We have designed a new header that is a little more intuitive and makes it easier to navigate to different parts of the site. Firstly, we’ve created a small drop down menu to link to all things related to you, the customer. One click will now take you to your profile, games library, want list and many more. We have also added some features to the mini cart too. You will now be able to remove items from your cart while you shop, no need to visit the checkout page. The main addition, is our brand new community sub menu; automatically expanded on all community related pages for easy navigation and collapsible so that we don’t annoy you. Hope you like it!
We have also been working on something called critical CSS. To ensure the fastest page load for viewers of the website every time we do a new deploy, we run the website through Phantom JS to get the CSS that is used to render the above the fold web page that gets shown when the website is first opened. We then embed that css into the initial page load to make the site load quicker.
That’s about it for this the Letter from the Engine room. If working on our new community is interesting to you and you know c#, why not send us your cv to [email protected] as we are currently looking for more talented developers. If you would also like to BETA test out new features then please email [email protected]
