Another year has gone by here on Freezenet. Drew Wilson look back at the year that was and see just how far we’ve come over the last year.
Freezenet is once again celebrating another year of being online. This makes the age of this site 6 years old now. Last year, we looked back at how the site took a pretty sad turn of events and turned it into something positive.
This year, I’d say 2018 can be best characterized as an era of rapid development for the site. While development always maintained a pretty high pace even at the sites inception, last year, all of the major developments were immediately public. That is something I certainly wasn’t used to at first, but it gradually became the norm for me.
In February, Freezenet introduced HTTPS encryption. Once I got onto this phase of building major features for the site, this became one of the top priorities for the site. A basic level of security to make you, the reader, safer from man-in-the-middle attacks. While browsers were moving towards HTTPS by default, that really played no role in our decision to move forward with the feature. Now, after nearly a whole year of use, that little green lock is something we almost take for granted now.
June saw a multiple of developments for the site. First, we upgraded the video game reviews section. Gone was the long and cumbersome list that made up our index page. We split the index into much more easily navigable parts to enhance user-friendliness.
Next up was a major face-lift for our music reviews section. First, we introduced the greatest tracks of all time list to mirror our video game reviews section. This was followed up by the upgrading of the music reviews section which ultimately was the same upgrade the video game reviews section got.
In July, we introduced custom RSS feeds so you can keep better track of what we’re reporting on or reviewing.
After that, we expanded our social media presence by setting up shop on Facebook and Google Plus. At the same time, we upgraded the side-bar, cleaning up all the buttons to have one uniform set on the upper right hand corner on top of it all. Also, we gave our official Twitter account a major face-lift on top of it all.
In October, Freezenet made one of the biggest site expansions ever and introduced a built-in web forum. This allows you to hang out and chat among other fans of Freezenet. It was certainly a bit more difficult to implement, but we pushed through it, even adding a number of customized features to enhance the community experience.
Finally, December rolled around. Although most of the work was done in November, Freezenet officially launched the Freezenet Podcast. This monthly podcast offers a review of all that is happening here on Freezenet, greatly enhancing our presence.
Later on in December, Freezenet also launched our official Patreon page. The page itself helps diversify Freezenet and allows you to gain access to early access content all the while giving you the opportunity to more directly support Freezenet.
Looking back on all of these accomplishments, I can say the differences on the site is night and day. It took a lot of time and effort, but all of these expansions are certainly worth it. Being able to think of all of this from the very beginning and, more importantly, following through on this ambitious project to completion is something I’m personally very proud of.
This, of course, is not the end of building on to this great site. All this means is that the phase I was working on for more than a year is finally over. Now, I can move on to the next phase which is to enhance and improve currently existing features. What does this mean, you’ll have to wait and see. Let’s just say they will likely improve the site overall and I am excited to see how they will perform.
Here’s to another excellent year of Freezenet!
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
