Latest Review
Dear readers, we’re very excited today to present to you the newest version of worn&wound! Since we started the site just over three years ago, we’ve always strived to make it look great and work well. Last year we introduced a feature still unique to w&w, the review grid (which has gotten a facelift for V. 3, but more on that later), and our new site, which was designed by us and a total custom build, will bring you much more.
Main Menu
First up, you’ll notice that our main navigation menu looks a little different. We’ve simplified things a bit for faster, more intuitive navigation. The menu also sticks the top of your browser as you scroll through the site so that you have quick access to site navigation. We’ve also added a brand dropdown menu, a pretty simple and standard feature that we’ve just never had on worn&wound. This should make it much easier for readers to access all of the content on their favorite brands.
Front Page Tabbed Browsing
Our feature content slider will continue to include a carousel of the most recent featured pieces on worn&wound, but we’ve added some interesting new functionality. Above the carousel you’ll see two tabs that will allow you to quickly access the feature slider (default view) or a catalog of just our in depth watch reviews. Very soon we’ll also be adding a tab that will display featured items from our shop of American made watch accessories.
Improved Browsing and Searching
One of the biggest challenges we and many other websites face is keeping older content easily accessible. Most of the articles on worn&wound don’t have expiration dates. They are long, well-researched, valuable pieces that are as relevant now as they were when first written, and will continue to be so years down the road. Unfortunately, exploring and discovering older content has been a slow and annoying task, until now. We think our new “tiled” archive system will make searching simple, fast and maybe even fun.
Now, on either the home page or the Articles page, posts are easily accessed in chronological order or via a selection of categories. The articles are presented as large image tiles with a title overlay. Hovering over the title will bring up a preview of the text to get a taste of the article within. Want to see more posts? Just keep scrolling. The infinite scroll feature plus the tiled layout will be able to bring up lots of older posts quick, and look good while doing it.
The New Watch Finder
Our Watch Finder (formerly known as the watch review grid) has gotten a major facelift and we’ve added some great new features. If you’ve ever used the Watch Finder before, you know that it makes sorting watch reviews by brand, case size, case material, movement, feature, etc. really easy. This is still the case, but we’ve added multi-select capability to the menu dropdowns, sliding scales for price and case size and better categorization for easier, more customizable searches. In the coming months, we’ll be improving the Watch Finder even more, so stay tuned.
Large Format Galleries
Photography has always been well featured on worn&wound, and with this most recent iteration of our website, our original photography is even more prominent. This can be seen clearly in the new layout of our in-post galleries. On all reviews, hands-ons and other posts with original photos, you will now find a large scrolling photo gallery that showcases watches, gear and other products better than ever. The gallery is also easily collapsible if that’s what you prefer.
And More!
There are many cool, smaller improvements throughout that should make things better and more fun. For one, we’ve added a custom instagram feed to our homepage. We love using instagram, and keep a steady stream of images going, so keep an eye on that. We’re also switching over to Disqus as our commenting system. Disqus allows you to sign in with existing profiles from facebook, twitter and others, which simplifies things greatly. It also allows for comments to be upvoted, which is pretty cool. Oh, and don’t worry about your old comments, they will be getting imported soon.
Pardon Our Dust
This is a huge project for us and our developers that is still on-going. There are little glitches and bugs here and there as well as features that are still being developed, but the core of the site is working and working well. Bear with us through this process which will last another couple of weeks. If you find any problems or have any recommendations, please let us know through our contact page or by emailing us at info(at)wornandwound(dot)com
Enjoy!
