You may have already noticed that over the weekend, we made a couple of tweaks and improvements to We Got Served’s layout to improve navigation, segment the site more clearly and hopefully help you enjoy our news and features in more depth than you could previously. Here’s a brief run down of what’s new!
Top “Quick Navigation” Bar
Positioned right at the top of the page, this is where you’ll find quick links to the most popular and most important content at WGS. Right now, you’ll see we’ve dropped in a link to our Vail Preview feature series as well as links to other popular areas of the site. You’ll find the links here will change over time, so make sure you have a quick scan to see any essential links here.
Main Navigation Bar
This is one of the biggest updates to the site – a brand new navigation bar from which you can dig down into specific areas of the site to browse news, features and reviews, or if you just want to look at articles on a specific topic, then you can find those categories right here. We re-coloured the navigation bar with a slight gradient to warm it up too. It’s a minor thing, but I like it anyway!
At the top level of the navigation, you can click on Add-ins and Apps (more on this in a bit), News by product category, WGS Forums, our popular How to Guides, Reviews by category, a new Small Business section (again, more below), Video clips published on the site and the WGS Wiki. Where you see a double arrow, that means there’s a drop down available – just hover over the menu option and the drop down will gracefully appear.
Menu Drop Downs
Currently, our new Add-ins section, as well as News and Reviews have drop down menus. Our add-ins section is split into Add-in News, alongside categorised listings of Windows Home Server v1 add-ins, and they’ll be joined by a Windows Home Server “Vail” add-ins section, just as soon as someone publishes an add-in for the new platform!
Add-ins are Back at We Got Served!
Whilst we’ve been hosting our add-ins section over at Home Server plus for the last year, we’ve been working hard on WGS to enable the community ratings features we know many of you rely on to understand the most popular and best Windows Home Server add-ins available. After a relatively intense period of website mangling, that system is now in place, which means we can bring the add-in list back home to WGS!
To view the entire list, simply click on WHS v1 in the Add-ins & Apps menu, and you can browse through the full list of WHS add-ins, with reader comments and ratings for each.
As you can see, an RSS feed is now available for the whole list, so any add-in updates published on the site will hit your RSS feed instantly.
If you only want to view a particular add-in category, say Media, just select it from the menu, and you’ll get a run down of that add-in category again. You can subscribe to a category level add-in list too.
Want to find out more about an add-in? Just click on the entry and you’ll get full details on the add-in, including the option to rate the add-in, post about the add-in to Twitter as well as rate the add-in. Download links to the developer’s website, community support links, WGS add-in reviews and changelogs are available for each add-in listed.
