Two years ago, The E Club Arcade was redesigned, adding the completely black theme (the entire background was black, and the text was white, page titles were green, and links were yellow) to the site. This worked well for a while, until we decided that it should be redesigned again and modernized to match the modern designs across The E Club Family. Today, we're releasing the first, stable version of the redesign. Here's what's new.
Those are the updates that we included in the redesign. Quite a few of them are technological, not just design-based. Enjoy the new Arcade!
- A modern and clean light theme. The Arcade's styles were completely reversed in this redesign, going from all-black background and light text to white-and-gray background and dark text. This removes many distractions that existed in the old style. And, of course, Open Sans has been introduced to the Arcade.
- The latest in The E Club design technology. All of The E Club Family's CSS3 techniques were used in the redesign, along with other styles that help to make the Arcade minimalist and visually appealing.
- Even less but smarter ads. We've redesigned the ads on the Arcade to blend into the site more than they used to. Even so, the ads can still be easily distinguished from the regular content, so there won't be any accidental ad clicks because someone thought an ad was actual content - unlike on other game sites. The ads in the sidebar are now asynchronous text ads, so they won't slow down the game or page loading time. We have also removed all ads from the Google Affiliate Network since it is being retired on July 31, 2013.
- Faster games, anywhere. Before, there were quite a few games on the Arcade's two game pages (not including the Flash Trek and Featured Game pages), and this caused each game to load slower than usual. Plus, some games were removed by their host (many from Daily Free Games, the Arcade's main game provider), so those games were unavailable. Also, the games we replaced the removed ones with (all but one of the new ones are the same as the old ones but are hosted on a different server) played music as soon as the page loaded, making the page play multiple sounds at the same time. Now, the games that automatically play music are in ad-free popup windows that open when the user clicks on the links to open them. You can even play games in popup windows after closing the Arcade tab on your browser!
- Hosted by The E Club. When we saw that some games were removed from their original host (and didn't appear on the Arcade), we realized that hosts are sometimes unreliable. So, the Arcade now has two games hosted on The E Club's servers, which are more reliable than other servers, increasing the uptime of the games. We may host more games on The E Club's servers in the future.
- A new Flash Trek. Unfortunately, one of the games that didn't appear on the Arcade was Flash Trek v2.0, the Arcade's first Star Trek Flash game. We looked for it on an alternative server, but none of them could be the solution. So, the Arcade has a new, more advanced Flash Trek, hosted by The E Club - Flash Trek: The Romulan Wars. It is basically the same as Flash Trek v2.0, except that the main enemies are the Romulans instead of the Dominion, and it can be played at the same URL as v2.0.
Those are the updates that we included in the redesign. Quite a few of them are technological, not just design-based. Enjoy the new Arcade!
