User blog:Wotter27/Development at Emmerdale Wikia

Okay, so anyone who's visited the Wikia over the weekend may have noticed we've started to change our appearance a little bit. Some of our users may have noticed that from the outset, we've always followed the style of Corriepedia almost identically, but now following a brilliant re-design of the main page by XD1, we've hopefully set the wheels in motion for adapting our own style to the Wikia and expanding on what we already have. We've enabled a few new features that we either didn't have before or were buried away in the background and I thought I'd put together a quick blog to introduce everything to our followers...

Beginning with the main page, we now have two new main additions - the Polling Station and Live Chat. Both are experimental at the moment and dependent on the amount of use they receive, it will decide whether they're something we stick with permanently. The live chat is especially perfect for discussing the episodes as they air with other users, but can be generally used for anything, even if you're just stopping by to say hi. The polling station is a nice way of generating some simple feedback and just to enhance on the community as a whole. I'd also like to think that the results could go on to provide much debate and discussion on our newly implemented forums, which I'll come back to later.

The other new addition to the main page is the blog feed. We've had the blog feature since the Wikia was first set up, but it's always been buried somewhat in the background, now they'll take up an important place on the front page with the latest blogs appearing there.

Elsewhere, we've also added a new forum to the Wikia. This is for general chat, Emmerdale chat, episode chat, questions, debates, musings, pretty much anything you want to talk about. We'd also like to keep hearing your suggestions and thoughts on the Wikia and we hope the forum is an adequate place for you to share your improvement ideas and feedback. The link to this can be found under the 'Community' header at the top of the page.

A slight change has also been introduced to the new episodes posted over the last few days. I've now decided to start posting a short TV Times synopsis for the episode at the very top of the page and believe this will be particularly useful for searching for a specific event in an episode (see this page for an example). As Emmerdale gets closer to approaching its 7000th episode, it gets harder and harder to remember when specific events happened and for people searching for a particular episode, the synopsis sums up the episode at the very top of the page without having to scroll down and read through the more lengthy 'Plot' section, therefore it should be easier to discover whether it's the episode an individual is looking for or not. Any feedback on this new addition would be greatly welcome. Is it something that you potentially see as useful?

Any questions, suggestions or thoughts on our new look, please leave a comment here or visit our forum!