It’s been some time since I last gave away any clues on the progress of Gameplanet Store’s New Site project… so I thought I’d write a quick summary of what’s been going on recently.

Firstly, this is taking a lot longer than we hoped! As developers we are probably fussier and more thoughtful than we need to be at times – as an example our new category and product pages have both been through at least two or three overhauls each since the originals were “almost done” a couple of months ago. I’m pleased to say however that it’s looking good and at the moment (today?) I’m really pleased with our category designs. They should prove to be more useful as we have added a few browsing options for most sections including the oft-requested “Best Sellers” section so you can see the top products from key categories.

We’ve also split up the Release Schedule into “New Releases” and “Coming Soon” which we think is a definite improvement.

Another thing that is keeping us very busy is back-end changes. I won’t go into detail here but our product database has been overhauled (for both speed and expandability reasons) and of course this has created the need to recreate many of the back-end tools that the entire team uses on a daily basis. There’s the obvious things like product management but also major site components like order processing (there’s another reason this has become more complex which I’ll explain at a later date) and certain areas of customer service. Recoding stuff that we already have isn’t the best task; but it has also allowed us to improve on some administrative pages which we haven’t touched in years so it will eventually be worth the effort.

We’re slowly getting there though and we’re still very excited and eager to get it launched and share our efforts with you. More news soon.