Tomorrow the beta for the new version of the webcomics toplist site Buzzcomix begins. If you have an existing account at Buzzcomix and want to get in on the beta I’m handing out beta codes to the first 100 respondents. Shoot me an email at xerexes AT gmail DOT com.
I’m working on an interview with Buzzcomix creator Andrew "mneonix08" Gomez that I hope to have up on the site later this month. Click read more to see an excerpt from our conversation:
Let’s talk about the new version. What are the biggest changes we’ll see in the next version of Buzzcomix?
This may be a strange thing to say, and if I had a PR department they probably would have spun this differently, but the new Buzzcomix will actually have fewer features than the old Buzzcomix.
Like I said, a strange thing to say and certainly a strange leading statement, but I think it will really help people understand what to expect of the relaunch. Over the last few years Buzzcomix has become overgrown with lots of features, one on top of another, that were either not executed as well as they could have been or were not very useful to the average user. When I set about redesigning Buzzcomix I knew I wanted it to be a complete redesign, that means not one piece of old code was recycled. As part of that process I took a long, hard look at what features were actually useful, what people actually used, and tried to build a better Buzzcomix experience around that.
Now those features that Buzzcomix pioneered, and which are now "industry standards" (if I may call them that), are still there (vote incentives, genre-specific toplists, user reviews). More than that, however, these core features have undergone marked renovation to improve their robustness, usability, and general user experience. I think that can be said of the whole of Buzzcomix. A lot of care and thought was given to how people use the website and to making that experience as natural and intuitive as possible. And in some cases this meant cutting those features that were just dead weight.
The new Buzzcomix will still have a handful of new features though! I don’t want to spoil the surprise entirely but the new additions have been in line with making Buzzcomix feel more like a living, breathing community. A greater emphasis has been put on staying up-to-date with your favorite comics as well as giving webcomic authors the tools necessary to keep your readers up-to-date.
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