Announcing... New Navigation!
Today we're very happy to introduce Team Beta to a long-awaited refurb of Chess.com's site navigation! In short...
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It's more powerful - allowing you to do stuff like challenge your friends via the navigation itself, without having to "go" anywhere!
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It's engineered for MUCH better performance (including stuff like page-load times).
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It's better organized
Here's what we did...
100% commitment to left-side navigation. This surely will be the most controversial aspect of the change, at least for people who've been using menus at the top of the page till now. So why did we do it?
Maintaining two different navigation systems brings penalties that are hard to justify. The code required to support both navigation models makes pages load more slowly and affects general performance in other ways. Likewise, defects and extra work are multiplied because our developers have to do everything twice where navigation is concerned.
Left-side navigation has become more mainstream because of the proliferation of widescreen/landscape monitors - and, closer to home, allows players maximum flexibility to resize those square objects our site seems to be built around - i.e. chessboards!. (Of course, Live Chess has been side-nav-only for some time now.)
If you've been using top-menus, we hope that getting used to the new model will be smooth and quick. Fortunately, the new navigation brings some unique functionality that might help ease the transition...
"Do it from here!" Navigation is generally about getting places, right? But sometimes, you don't so much want to go somewhere as to just do something: Fire off a challenge to a friend (or to the world), see who's online, send a quick message, or find out if anyone is streaming. The new navigation lets you do all that without ever leaving Tactics Trainer!
One of the coolest new features provides the ability to start a game, with all the usual options, from anywhere, simply by clicking on a button in the navigation and setting up your challenge on a cool new pop-up panel! It's so much fun to use, you may end up with more chess than you can handle! And so convenient!
Want to message a friend? Or maybe challenge them to a game? Find out who's online and connect... again, all without having to change to a new page!
Your favorite Clubs are here too! (Ok, you can't "do" anything with them from here, but it's soooo nice to be able to get to the right Club in a single click.)
Who's watching the Watch menu? You should be - if you're in the mood to relax and catch up on some chess entertainment! All our live streamers and shows will be shown here, so you never miss a thing!
We hope the new navigation will provide a great way for new users to discover the site and for all users to enjoy frictionless access to all their favourite features. (And we hope it doesn't take too much getting used to!) Thanks for your attention - and please let us know what you think in the Comments!
