Beginning the transition to a new website design

It’s still hard to believe this website has been online for more than five years. I started the website as a way to teach myself some new coding skills, but it’s become a resource more than 1,000 people visit every month. Thank you so much for your continued support!

For the last few months, I have been thinking about the future of the website. There’s still a lot of work to do to finish the maps and stat charts, and I have dreams of building a sortable and searchable item database. But I have decided the next big updates will be some design changes.

The current design was never really meant to be permanent. It is a slightly modified version of a design I made for another website I manage (which I gave a dramatic quirky redesign earlier this year).. Many of you already know that the design elements are taken from the Ogre Battle 64 instruction manual. You all seem to like it, so I have not prioritized changes until now, but it’s time for a bigger change to set the stage for the next five years of updates.

Tonight, you might have noticed a few differences. I decided not to make the updates in one large dramatic shift. Instead, I am going to update the design in pieces. The first stage is mostly updating colors, but I did not change the overall color pallet (it’s still gray, blue, and gold), so the changes do not feel dramatic. I also removed some of the stranger instruction manual styling from the data tables. They are no longer colored and should be easier to read.

There will be larger changes, but my goal is not a complete overhaul of how the website works. I want the website to have an original design (not taken from the instruction manual) and to have a design system in place that makes it easier for me to publish updates.

Finally, I plan to change the content updates a bit. I doubt that most updates will be as long as this one, but I am changing to updates to be more friendly and not just a bulleted list with a changelog (though you will still get that; see below). There is rarely any real Ogre Battle Saga news to cover, but I may try to share things from our community from time to time.

I am excited to share more of the new website design with you all in the coming weeks.

Changelog

• News and Updates: Past updates are fully available to view for the first time! There is a new link to this page in the main navigation and at the bottom of the home page.
• Data Privacy Statement: No update on the potential advertisement I mentioned before (I have not had any time to look at it further), but I have installed Google Analytics to help inform some design decisions (primarily for checking browser support).