Welcome to the future of Vooks

Well here it is, after nearly two years of work, now everyone can enjoy it. When we’ve launched sites in the past, we’ve said “this is a all new Vooks”. While this is true this time, this new site relaunch is the future of Vooks. Every single thing you see here today is new, we’re running a new platform, we have a new design (obviously right) and there’s a ton of new features that you guys and girls have been asking for that we’ve brought to the table.

But this isn’t just a new site, we’ve been working behind the scenes not only on the site but also how we do the site. We still want to bring you the latest news and reviews. We’ll still have a great community for you to hang out in. But we want to go one further, we’ll be rolling out soon new regular features on the site and returning some favourites.

You've served us well. RIP Vooks Atlantis 2007-2012

The site as you see it now isn’t finished, we’ve simply reached a point where we think its ready to go up for the world to see. We’ll be continuing to tweak and evolve it over the coming weeks and already have features on the site that we’re still testing and will enable later once we think they’re ready. We didn’t want to launch the website until it was ready, we’ve been at this for 12 years and learnt not to launch something half-assed. Or half done. We’ll be here for a while longer, the Wii U is coming up this year and this is the one site you should be locked into for not only outstanding local coverage but we’re hoping show the international crowd a thing or two.

As ever if you notice anything wrong, let us know – if it’s broken we want it fixed so you can use it! So what’s new on this site exactly then? Tell us about it you say? Well that’s what this is for;

New Platform

The Vooks site of today is entirely rewritten, there’s not one single line of code that’s the same as before. Vooks is a team effort and the system we had before just was not working for us in 2012. It was alright in 2007 when we launched it but now, the internet is different and we need something better for you. We’ll now be able to bring news and reviews faster to you, report on the go easily and bring you more media and video. For as much as you can see the front end of the site, the backend for us is entirely new and much better then before.

New Design

Well obviously right? It’s definitely the first thing you noticed when you arrived here today. Like all of our designs its never final, we’ll be tweaking and adding to the design over the next few weeks and months to make sure the site looks as good as possible for you guys. Hopefully you like it, if you have any ideas though, make sure to let us know in the comments.

Commenting, full forum integration coming soon.

It’s a brave new world for us, we’re opening commenting on Vooks for the first time. However despite testing the site for months the day before we go live the unthinkable happens, it stops working. At that point we’ve done too much to delay the site and an alternative we found didn’t work either (in fact it made it worse.

So for now we’re doing forum comments like everyone else on the the internet. The old fashioned way with a username and email address. We don’t want you to start go creating another account for the site and then have to ditch it when we get the solution to work. So for now we will have to do it the old fashioned way

Sorry guys, you have no idea how unhappy (to be polite) I was with this.

Mobile Site / App

A often requested feature that our new site can now offer, you guys asked when the Vooks iPhone App was coming back. Well if this we don’t need it.

Load up Vooks on your iPhone, Android or Windows Phone 7 and you’ll be taken to the Mobile Version of the site. You can even comment and search through all the stories and reviews through there too. iPad users, we think you don’t need a mobile site with that big screen, so you get the full site. Our Wii and 3DS users we’ll look at getting the mobile site enabled for you guys as soon as possible.

Release Date Calendar

You’ll notice that we’ve updated the release date calendar too. You can now even add our calendar to your phone or computer calendar to keep up to date when things are coming out. The old calendar we had on the site was a pain in bum to update for us, it took hours sometimes for us to do it, now it can be done in minutes.

We’ll also be able to schedule events, tournaments and conferences in the future. It’ll eventually be your one stop Nintendo related calendar.

And this next one isn’t a April Fools joke…

The Vookcast

It’s been a long time since we’ve had one of these and most of you have probably forgotten about it, but even if you don’t want it we’re bring it back and we’ll have some new fresh blood on the show for you. No promises, but we’re hoping to have them bi-weekly and even more when we need them. You know, like E3 and such. The Vookcast was a hit back in 2007 and now like the rest of the Vooks features we offer you we want to do it 100%.

And more…

There’s so many things new and improved on this site that listing them all would be boring for you and even me.

So again welcome, if you have any thoughts or suggestions please let us know in the comments below. We can say that now, didn’t you read? We have comments!

For those keeping track, this version of the site had the codename Destiny.