Greetings Citizens,

We’ve talked a lot about the new website in recent months and now we’d like to give you the first official sneak previews of its design and architecture.

The current RSI site was initially put together quickly for the pledge campaign back in October 2012… but unfortunately, it hasn’t quite been able to keep up with such incredible interest in the game. The new back-end architecture (developed by our backend team at Turbulent) will be much more scalable and will be able to handle enormous amounts of traffic with ease. It also will provide a proper e-commerce system in which you will be able to upgrade / modify your pledges, purchase add-ons, manage your shipping / account information… and we will have a robust system for introducing new packages, ships, rewards and other upgrades.

The new site will bridge the gap and carry you into the upcoming hangar module, the dogfighting test, and eventually the finished game. It will literally be your first steps into the Star Citizen universe and we promise that it will do proper justice in its design!

STATUS UPDATE

We can’t wait to share the finished site with you, but there still remains quite a bit of work to be done. We currently plan to begin testing the new site in early June and then, with much fanfare, we will be rolling it out at the end of the month. We will announce a more specific date for launch when we’re confident that it will be fully ready in time. As previously revealed, we will be celebrating the rollout with a 24-hour live stream at CIG Austin full of major announcements and updates.

PREVIEWS

What we want to do now is to preview just some of the design-work and features of the new site:

NEW CONTENT ARCHITECTURE:

As many of you have experienced, comm-links and updates on the current site are a bit hard to navigate, especially for new visitors. What’s even worse is the searchability…
Here is how we’re going to structure content on the new site:

All posts will be categorized on 3 axes:

• Channels: Channels will serve as the broad category that each post will be filed under. Initially, we’re looking at four channels to categorize content on:
  • General: This would be a catch-all channel for things like opening of the new LA office, promotions, corporate news, etc.
  • Community: This channel is for posts that are pertinent to our community (e.g. fan spotlight, chat/forum updates, polls, etc.)
  • Engineering: This channel will contain all content pertinent to the development process and behind-the-scenes work on Star Citizen (e.g. concept art reveals, updates on in-game mechanics, WIP, etc.)
  • Spectrum Dispatch: The spectrum dispatch will be its own channel in the comm-link and will contain the lore and fiction of the Star Citizen universe.
• Series: Along with channels, each post will be considered as part of a recurring series. What this will allow you to do is easily navigate from one post to the next without having to rummage through a bunch of other unrelated posts. (e.g. you’ll be able to click “next” and “previous” articles for series such as Wingman’s Hangar, Tales of the Kid Crimson, etc. in addition to filtering posts on the series to see them all grouped together).
• Type: The post type represents what content-type the post is. Is the post a video post? A live event? A poll? A slideshow? -These are examples of post types that you will be able to filter on, in addition to the other two types described above.

Not only will you be able to filter posts on these 3 axes, but we will also feature a text-search on tags and post titles.

Here is an example of how the layout will scale and gracefully degrade to lower resolutions - Account Settings page

MOBILE SUPPORT

Mobile support is a huge consideration we are taking into account when designing the layout of the new website. We know that many of you browse the RSI site on a mobile device, whether it be a smartphone or a tablet. We want to make sure that usability remains optimal regardless of what device or screen resolution you’re viewing on. We have decided to incorporate the responsive design approach to the new site’s front-end.

E-COMMERCE EXPERIENCE

The new site will feature a full-fledged e-commerce system where you will be able to narrow down items by category, add to cart system, and much more!

There is a lot more to the new site than we can show in this post, but we hope you will enjoy these first glimpses into the new site!