New Look and More for GFS
It has been a whopping 2.5 years since I last refreshed the look of the GoldFire Studios website (wow!). I didn't actually realize it had been that long until I started typing this post and went back to check, so this new look should definitely be welcomed.
You may recognized the "new" logo as well. It enjoyed a brief stay as the logo for a few months until the last site refresh, and it is once again the official logo of GoldFire Studios. With the design of the new site I tried to mimic that clean, crisp look of the logo in a way that works dramatically better than the old layout (well, I hope so at least).
This isn't just a facelift either, I've reprogrammed the site from the ground up. You will notice a completely new front page that has some cool new stuff like animated panels that show off what is going on with the studio right now, and what I think is even more cool are the live updating stats at the bottom right of the front page. You can see how many verified users there are, how many users are currently online, and how many "plays" there have been (plays are hands of poker and battles on PokerRPG and BC Wars respectively).
The biggest focus was on redoing the sub-par blog. I've completely redone the blog to look much nicer, be much easier to read, and drastically improved the commenting system. The CAPTCHA has been removed, but other measures have been taken to prevent the sometimes rampant spam. There are also avatars now, which will show automatically if you have a "gravatar"--this is what the e-mail address field is for.
Oh and one last thing, there is now an RSS feed so that you can stay up to date with what is going on here at GoldFire Studios. I am also going to try and start blogging more frequently about not only news update for GoldFire Studios, but also the topic of game/web development and anything else that I think you all might see as interesting from my perspective. If you have any requests for types of things I should blog about, please leave a comment!