Welcome to the new GarageGames.com!

Notice anything different around here? The GarageGames web team presents to you the first new look of GarageGames.com. Of course, there are a lot more changes around here than just getting a face-lift.

Who are you again?

The web team was allowed out of jail to take this picture. Smiling bright and sunny are Derek and Jason on the left, in the shadows with hands in pockets are me and Ken on the right.

It's pretty established over here in Eugene that the GG.com website team is a quiet and reserved bunch, as opposed to the more extroverted Torque devs who are always eager to talk about new tech. However, it's probably good for you to get a quick overview of who made the site possible. I'm Jacob Fike (probably obvious given the blog header), and I've been working with GarageGames for two years now. I got my start by creating Overlord Management System system. I then went on to help create the Great Games Experiment and worked on the backend of InstantAction for a while before devoting myself full time to this site. Working beside me is an even more quiet guy, Jason Hetu, who did most of the design work for the site and likes bran muffins (ask him about that later). Also heavily involved in the content and design of the new site were Derek Bronson (for better marketing of our 3rd party products), Eric Fritz (for marketing and usability), Davey Jackson and Michael Blenden (for the needs of educators who visit the site), and Ken Holst and Jeff Hojnacke (for testing).

And HUGE THANKS to the Operations team. First lead by Jay Arrera, and then Jeff Cassar, we wouldn't have been able to post the site up so quickly. Eli Janssen (who doesn't have a profile page since he's too busy making this all work) in particular put in a ridiculous amount of overtime to get this live. We salute you and your beard, Eli.

Hey, I liked the yellow banners. Why bother with the change?

For anyone who has been here any length of time, you know the old site was beginning to show its age. Although it was still functional, it looked and acted like a site that had been built in the early 1990s. A myriad of web devs had added some cool things to the site over time like community web blogging, snapshots, etc., but maintaining the site was becoming something of a task from a backend perspective since it had ballooned so much. It was due for a much needed overhaul to take advantage of new technologies that made coding and maintenance much easier over the course of the last few years. And, of course, from a usability perspective, there were just too many pages (many of them hard to find if you didn't know the site well), so it was also time to make it easier for new users to navigate through our site.

(And just between you and me, we were kind of sick of the yellow. While it gave the site some personality bonus points, it also made it really hard to design nice art assets for the site. So we chose an easier-on-the-eyes color that would make your blog screenshots pop out of the page.)


Here are 11 links in one drop down and according to Google Analytics, they were rarely clicked on. Sad Panda.

What should I know about the new site?

Most of it is pretty self-explanatory. For example, we've simplified the navigation bar so that the entire site is linked through the pages on the top bar. The product pages have been condensed so everything you need to know is contained on one page. And a lot of functionality is staying the same for now, such as Markup Lite for blogs and forum posts. But there are few things that you should know as you familiarize yourself with the site:

Search has been revamped for the entire site. We knew a lot of you would be pleased with this one. The main search box will do a search on all sections of the site. However, each section has its own search box that will search only that type of content (blogs, for instance). The simple search box is smart enough to recognize most standard search queries like phrase matching (put multiple words in quotes to find that exact phase), specific field matches (i.e. author:Bob), and negative term matches (i.e. -dave would show results that do not contain the term dave). Pretty much anything you use on Google, you can use here. The Advanced Search even has the ability to search based on dates, and allows you to limit your searches all the way down to specific forums.

We have a support tab that contains links to all documentation, a form to submit bugs, and how to get paid support. For now, documentation links to the work Michael Perry started with the old site, but will slowly get revamped as he improves the doc system this year. The submit bugs form is similar to our old one, but much easier to find, so we get quicker feedback on our products. And finally, we will be processing requests for paid support, although that is likely geared toward the professional end of our users.

The What's New Page has been simplified to the most clicked on links. The old What's New Page had way too much content, and after some Google Analytic research, we decided to boil it down to the basics. We put GG blogs and other blogs we flag as "featured" right at the top. (Our old "Snapshots" feature has been replaced with these "Featured" blogs.) All other recent blogs also have screen real estate on the bottom of the page. We also have separate tabs for blogs, resources, and forums so you can keep track of those. We'll keep a close eye on how this new navigation is used and make improvements throughout the year.

All information on a single product is now contained within...the product's page. Remember the old days where you had to click on several pages to find information about a product? Even feature lists were on separate pages? Yeah, that sucked. And yeah, we fixed that, by having all information about a product put in tabs on one easily-found page. And now all products are under the "Products" drop-down. Hooray, consistency!

Logins are based on e-mail addresses, not handles. We decided to use e-mail addresses for our unique login because, well, they're unique by design, and people tend to remember them better than handles, which can change over time. Your e-mail address on the new site was the private e-mail you listed when you first registered on GG.com. However, for those of you that can't remember what that was, you'll notice on the login page that we have a place where you can still login under your old handle. Just know that we will eventually rely solely on e-mail addresses for all logins in a future build.

You no longer have pictures and other files uploaded to your profile. Due to the way we set up our initial backend, we decided not to support user uploaded files. Since profile pictures were the only real functionality must people took advantage off, we thought this was okay for initial launch.

Please do not use origin-www or the direct IP address to get to the new site. For the past year, we've been dealing with a rare, but frustrating issue through our CDN (Akamai) where users would get a screen that said "Service Unavailable" when trying to connect. To bypass Akamai and go around this error, some users have been entering the IP address for GG directly, or using origin-www.garage..... as an alternative. We're confident that the "Service Unavailable" issue will be disappearing entirely when the new site is up. It's being hosted in a different location, so connection issues to Akamai should be resolved. However, for each user that bypasses Akamai and connects to our hosted hardware directly, it plugs an available socket. If too many of these are plugged, Akamai can't process requests and neither can the hosted site. Please use www.garagegames.com exclusively from the time the new site is up and discontinue using origin-www or the direct IP. This should save us a lot of hassle and make the site operate faster for everyone who uses it.

For someone who hasn't blogged since 2006, you sure talk a lot.

Yeah, this is a massive post. I'm sure I've missed a couple things...my mind's kind of mush right now after all the work it's taken to get this far. Do know that we are nowhere near feature completeness of what we want the site to be able to do. More features will be rolled on a steady basis as we collect feedback and monitor site usage.

Welcome again to the new site, and post away with any issues you encounter or things you'd like to see. I'll address them as best as I can in follow-up site releases over the following weeks.