In order to serve the community better, we've given the BYOND website a facelift. Everyone likes change, right? We took suggestions from all over and made some adjustments that should benefit everyone.

As far as everyday users are concerned, we made the biggest change to the sidebar and topbar areas. The old topbar beneath the menu, where we had a couple of game banners, just wasn't using space very well. In the interest of readability, we took it out. On the sidebar, you'll also see that we don't always show an ad--sometimes there will be other content there in place of an ad. We have some nice buttons on the side now too.

Style-wise a few other little changes have been made. The old font was a little too sterile for our liking, so we replaced it with one that's a little easier reading. Hopefully it will make a little better use of space, too. In a lot of places where we were using borders around boxes and buttons, we've taken those out to open things up even more.

But one of the big reasons behind this change was that we wanted the front page of BYOND to look better than it ever has, and be really useful for people discovering the site for the first time. Right up front, new users will find out that BYOND isn't just a great platform for playing games, but they can make their own. Downloading is now available right from the very first page, but anyone who wants to find out more about BYOND can follow through the big Play and Create links to read more.

The main games page has changed too. We've taken our search page and simplified it a bit so the very first thing you see when you click Games in the menu is... well, a list of games. If you're logged in you'll get to see your recommendations, but if not you'll see the results of a garden-variety blank search. You can search right from this page if you want, or you can head over to the advanced search.

All of these big changes, and lots of little ones, should hopefully make the site a lot easier to navigate for new and seasoned visitors alike. We hope this will improve the experience for everyone.