Twenty years! To celebrate the twentieth anniversary since Panzer Dragoon Legacy was founded we're introducing a new website redesign aimed at smartphones and tablets!
It was on June 28, 2002 when I wrote the first news entry on Panzer Dragoon Legacy (then known as The Will of the Ancients). Twenty years have now passed. Other Panzer Dragoon sites have come and gone, but we’ve kept Panzer Dragoon Legacy going all this time.
To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Panzer Dragoon Legacy I’ve created a new layout and design for the website. In actuality a redesign has been under consideration for years, but the twentieth anniversary provided a solid goalpost to aim toward. It’s been ten years since the last major site redesign. When I built the previous version, the iPhone had only been around for a few years so the priority was still to cater to desktop and laptop users with another fixed width layout. Today smartphones are ubiquitous and for many are the primary device that they use to visit websites. With this redesign the priority was to create a modern, responsive layout geared towards modern smartphones and tablets.
The biggest objection raised against the previous iteration of the site was that there was too much going on and that the relevant information was not easily discoverable. When redesigning the website, I looked at not what I could add, but how much I could take away. The result is a website that has been reduced to a minimalist baseline that we can iterate on, containing all of the core content but accessed through a more focused user interface with a single main menu. The content for each of the games and our extensive gallery of Panzer Dragoon imagery are now at the forefront. The home page now provides an overview of the latest contributions, as well as news, in one place.
Twenty years is a long time for any project to be worked on by a single person (the website itself that is; the site’s content is made up of the work of many contributors). As these site designs take a significant amount of time, I intend for this redesign to be the final overhaul of the website that I work on. However, we’re now in a much better position for smaller incremental design improvements and additional content, long into the future. The path forward for Panzer Dragoon Legacy will be one of sustainability: to continue to share and archive Panzer Dragoon news and contributions for many years to come.
Here’s to another twenty years!