Welcome to Loot Ninja 3.0!

We would like to officially welcome to you Loot Ninja version 3.0! This morning we rolled out our latest site design and we hope you all like what’s here. Along with a totally new layout for all pages, we added a bunch of additional features. So let’s jump right in, shall we?

Featured Content Slider - on the homepage, we now have a slider area featuring six featured posts. You’ll be able to get to the biggest stories easily at any point.

Redesigned Homepage - Below the Featured Content Slider, we now have eight boxes filled with images from the newest posts on the site. Just below that, you’ll see the next four posts in chronological order followed by the six most popular posts on Loot Ninja.

Social Networking - At the top of the screen in the main navigation bar, we now have icons to our RSS feed, Subscribe by Email, as well as quick links to our Twitter and Facebook pages. We want to connect with you, so we’re making it easier to find us. We put in some fun little CSS3 animations and transforms, so those of you using WebKit browsers (Safari and Chrome, mainly) will get an extra bit of fun. Firefox users will get in on the action with Firefox 4, while Internet Explorer users will have to sit in the dark and get on the wagon of using a decent web browser.

Category Navigation and Archives - A second navigation bar below our logo has been added so you can easily get to the main categories of posts on the site. Whether you’re looking for all of our Original posts and Articles, Previews, Reviews, Twisted Gamer Radio, or just Funny Videos and News, it’s just one click away. All of our Archive pages have been tweaked to go along with the new style so you can have a more visual interaction with all of our thoughts. A Recent Archive page was also added to give you quick links to our last thirty posts.

Redesigned Sidebar - Our sidebar area has been reduced and tweaked to make things more streamlined and easy to navigate. A tabbed area lets you get to Popular Posts, Latest Posts, Recent Comments and Tags all in one spot. Below that, we’ve taken our most prominent content and rearranged it to make things work a bit better, including a more prominent box for Twisted Gamer Radio!

Expanded Footer - Some of the previous content in the sidebar has been moved to the footer, such as Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Category lists, and our Twitter stream. You can also search from down there if you scrolled all the way down.

Author Info and Related Posts - On each post page, we now have a box with the Author’s biography as well as four related posts so you can find more information that you might enjoy.

We want you to click around and let us know your thoughts, so make sure to drop some comments! The new theme was made in conjunction with our friends over at WooThemes, who do an amazing job with custom theming. We used their framework to build the site out in a way that we think you’ll all enjoy. Some of you may be asking, “But Matt, you’re a WordPress developer - why didn’t you make this from scratch?” It’s a valid question, and my answer is that WooThemes offered a framework package that fit perfectly into what we wanted to do, so why not build from that instead of reinventing the wheel? We could have built it all from scratch, but this was easier, faster, and it’s a proven platform that gives me more time to play games and write as opposed to coding out various site functionality.

We have some other new features planned based on the new framework we have in place, which gives us a lot more flexibility and scalability going forward. If you have any requests for things you’d like to see, please let us know and we’ll do what we can to incorporate all of your hopes and dreams!