v3.0.0 Changelog
1. Face-Off front-end (UI; website appearance) :
New website design : Rewrote the website's front-end from scratch. Old UI still available at https://old.faceoff.watch/
Menu & Footer entire redesign : Recreated a new menu & footer from scratch.
Articles reading UI revamp, and new features to help readers : The article reading view (=centered text container, that you can see on website’s tutorials) has been entirely redesigned in order to be attractive for readers, there are now two parts in order to differentiate the title, the metadata information and the article content.
There are two new features; a top button while you’re scrolling, and the estimated reading time in the metadata container thanks to some calculations.
Watch Face Page improvement
Watch Face Card improvement : Redesigned/rewrote it and included a OS badge.
Improved watch faces glimpse : The watch face preview in the home page was honestly rather primitive, as it only showed the newest watch faces without any specific filter of types and availability, therefore not allowing new users to have an accurate glimpse of our content. It’s now not the case anymore, I’ve implemented a selector which allows you to select what you’re seeing between filters of type, OS, date and more! This improves the overall user experience by removing a few supplementary actions to have a complete preview.
Better loading state indicator
Mousotron page improvements : The UI has been improved, and I now use a library for the graph; as it was really necessary because my own solution broke with some “bodging” I had to try.
2. Face-Off back-end (social/server-side features) :
Forum : I’ve been working pretty hard to improve communication between website users (given that it goes up to 1.5k per month), hence the adding of the comment section, then the newsletter, and now the forum. You’ll be able to discuss watch faces, tutorials or whatever you want! I used an Open-Source one, named Flarum.
I will, in the future, code one by myself.
Watch faces publishing form : Finally ! One of the biggest moments for Face-Off – the watch faces publishing form ! You’ll be able to publish your watch faces in a few clicks, promote it on the forum (without spamming though), and you’ll be able to have insights on your watch faces impressions and feedbacks!
User profiles: Both on the forum and on the main website, there will be user profiles; on the forum it’ll be for every users/admins/staff, and on the main website it will mainly be for publishers and admins. The website remains signup free, meaning that you don’t have to create an account at all in order to browse and download the resources. It’s one of my main goals to keep the website privacy focused.
Security : Captcha on the Newsletter subscription.
3. Future features/changelog:
- Ditch Google Analytics, in order to make such thing by myself.
- Publisher’s Dashboard and forum user dashboard.