Man, things sure look different around here! Yet still familiar.
Believe it or not — as of today, April 1st — Kanzenshuu has been chugging along for 10 solid years. In internet time, that’s like… a century! And a lot can change in a century, especially on the internet. So what better way is there to celebrate our 10th anniversary than to give the site a much needed facelift?! The last design has served us well — even though remaining virtually unchanged for nearly five years — but with its core functionality lagging behind the times, it was time to move on and rebuild it from the ground up!
While the site’s content has remained essentially unchanged, the supporting infrastructure around it has been drastically altered, with all old stylings scrapped and everything completely recoded from scratch. We did this in large part to provide a more consistent viewing experience across devices, to standardized our stylings that through the years had become quite variable, and frankly to just freshen things up a bit. Obviously we didn’t stray too far from our previous overall layout design, but you’ll notice some changes to the font families in use, a little more color, and of course a new banner image! This is actually the first layout we’ve had that features original banner artwork designed exclusively for Kanzenshuu, which comes to us from our good friend @saber_breaker.
Another significant change you may notice is the site’s main navigation. It has always been a challenge to neatly organize all the links to our various sections, but I think we’ve finally gotten it right (after many late nights)! The main navigation now scrolls with you and is accessible from every page of the site, without having to jump back to the top of the page. In addition, the news archive has been tucked away under its own menu in the upper left, allowing easy access to it from anywhere on the site. And if you want to quickly jump straight to information on a specific series, that’s quickly accessible via the “Jump To Series” dropdown in the righthand sidebar, along with quick access to current event items (manga, movies, the podcast, etc.). Logging in with your user account is also easier now, with the user panel incorporated directly into the main navigation in the upper right.
Lastly, both the Press Archive and Lyric Database sections have been completely overhauled to match the previous facelift given to the Translations Archive in 2018. There are still plenty of other changes I unfortunately don’t have time to touch on in this post, so feel free to go exploring!
Be sure to stay tuned for some additional posts coming throughout the day featuring some new content and details on other changes coming to the site. And as always…