Hi, CCP Alice here with the latest and greatest from web.

Last year we began a strategic journey of improving our web presence by launching a brand new Account Management website and new Forums. I’m here with the first dev blog in a series to come throughout 2012 that will detail important changes and updates to our websites over the course of this year.

Currently, the EVE website is a mixed bag. It's split between trying to offer an explanation of the game without really doing so, and trying to cater for our community's needs. Further, important information is distributed across many other websites, from EVE Gate to EVElopedia. We can do better.

Changes on large scale require a large amount of in-depth planning and development effort, so rather than taking on the whole web at once, we are going to do this in stages. 

Stage 1 – EVEOnline.com

The first part of these changes is taking the aspects of the current website that explain what the game is and creating a better front facing website for EVE Online. This means we will have a website that has information about the various elements of the universe, the rich gameplay, visuals and how passionate our players are. A website we will be proud to share with our friends, fellow gamers and potential customers.

The details

Some of the cool features that will be on the site include:

• Interactive star map with different view states where you learn about features of the universe
• Interactive 3D spaceship gallery showing a selection of spaceships ranging from capsule to titan 
• Popular gameplay styles like Pirate, Explorer, Fleet Commander, etc. represented as career paths 
• A short Personality Analysis quiz to help you determine what career paths may suit you
• Screenshots showcasing all aspects of in-game visuals
• Revised versions of popular EVE Chronicles downloadable in eBook format
• Community spotlights highlighting the passion and commitment of EVE players
• A Getting Started page where you can sign-up for a trial account and download the game without leaving the site

Here are sneak peeks of a screenshots page, starmap showing ship kills, an Absolution and the pirate gameplay style below:

This is ready and should go live next week. 

Stage 2 – Building for the future

Having moved the information valuable for potential customers and for all of us to show off the game to its own home, we can now focus on information needed by our current players and how we can improve your experience on our websites. We will be making changes that will bring together all the community related pages and functionality on the other sites under the umbrella of one EVE Community website. The long term goal here is for you as a current player to be able to go to the community website and from there access all the content, information and functionality relevant and useful to you.

The details

We are going to make changes to the now obsolete eveonline.com to re-brand it as the EVE Community website, allowing us to have a foundation to build on. This coincides with the launch of the new eveonline.com discussed above. It will live at community.eveonline.com, with the following tweaks:

• Replacing the header area with a Community branded logo and menu
• Adding the Login widget currently on Account Management to the top right of the site as a central place to login, go between eve websites and change language where applicable
• Re-organizing and simplifying the menu into a more logical structure where it's easier to find content without expanding and collapsing for an eternity
• Placing pages we don’t necessarily wish to remove yet from the old site into an archive section to be dealt with later

The site will be structured around these categories to start with:

Communication	Player/Community	EVE Information	Support	Archive
News channels, Patch Notes, Dev Blogs, Newsletters, RSS Feeds,	Fansites & toolkits, CSM, Volunteers, Alliance Tournament	Past Expansions, Awards	Client downloads, Patches, Policies	Old screenshots, backstory, videos, music, forum archive, Fanfest history, etc.

Still tweaking these, so what you see above is subject to change before release.

We are finishing up these tweaks to be ready for next week as well.

What comes next for EVE Community

• Upgrade the hamster wheels behind the scenes (classic asp is not cool any more according to our hamsters) 
• Where it makes sense, we will merge content from other websites like Support, EVElopedia, EVE Gate, etc. into EVE Community in various phases
• Make site-wide UI and presentation changes so it looks and behaves like a modern, well designed website
• Add new content and features

More will be revealed in further dev blogs as we are working on the next stages.

We are really excited about these updates and looking forward to getting them live, teams Bitmap, Charlie Sheen and GForce have done a fantastic job over the past months (go team!). We will keep you posted with exact release dates and where you can give feedback as soon as we can.

Fly safe!

CCP Alice / Anne Walsh
Web Architect

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