Your Tour Of The New Kotaku Australia

What’s this? The house of Kotaku AU has a fresh coat of paint, and like any good renovation, there are new features too. It’s a foundation for even more improvements to come. Here’s a quick look of what’s new, and what we have planned.

First up, you’ll notice a little Kotaku Beta box at the bottom-right of the page. We hope you’ll work with us to report any random bugs or weirdness as you move throughout the site. Also don’t hesitate to hit up the right-side Contact tab to send us a news tip!

We wanted to modernise things a bit, without drastically changing the feel you’re familiar with.

One big addition is the new Top Stories block, which lets you easily slide through six stories representing the crème de la crème of recent Kotaku content. Think of it as a replacement for the old right-side Editor’s Picks box. That right-side real estate is now home to the four Most Viewed and four Most Commented Kotaku posts over a rolling seven day period. Oh, the new top section also has a vertical Regulars slider, so popular staples like Talk Amongst Yourselves and Remember This are just a click away.

We wanted to make it even easier to spot the news and discussions that you find most important.

Still with this in mind, the category of each post is now colour-coded for easier scanning as you scroll down the page. We’ve also made images larger, improved tags (for tag-based navigation), and made the content area about 10 per cent wider on both articles and the blog river.

Finally, there’s page load time: faster image servers, streamlined code, plus slightly fewer ads and improvements with how they’re displayed. Kotaku is also first to see the new design, before we roll it out to Gizmodo and Lifehacker throughout this week.

There’s bound to be a few teething issues along the way, and this is just the start. Though comments have been given a slight re-skin (and now support Gravatars), bigger improvements on the community side of things are still to come. Stay tuned for more.