Blizzard Watch site progress update

I’d like to take a moment to provide all of you with another quick update. Not about our funding status this time, but our progress as a site. First, I’d like to apologize if our front page has been slow/light so far this week; we’re knee-deep in pulling our team together. It’s a situation where we have work to do both on the front-end and the administrative/back-end. Doing both simultaneously slows both down, but both need to be done. We’re making constant forward progress and you’ll see evidence of that soon.

To provide some early insight into that progress, at least six of our class columnists have agreed to come on board. We’re currently discussing a content schedule and slowly bringing them into the fold internally. In addition, we’re bringing back old favorites Officers’ Quarters and WoW Archivist. For those of you unfamiliar, Officers’ Quarters is a column all about guild leadership and guild dynamics, and WoW Archivist is a column exploring the 10+ year history of World of Warcraft, both in-game and out. We’ve made progress on other points regarding content as well, but we aren’t quite prepared to announce specifics. We’re pretty excited about them, though. Once we’ve pulled these items together, I’m going to begin looking for a Hearthstone columnist. Not now, but soon. In the technical realm, we’ll be making some usability changes on our front-end over the weekend and we’ve already made significant improvements on the back-end to handle our traffic load.

While I’m here, many have asked us both on Twitter and here in the comments whether or not we’ll be selling merch. Our answer: maybe. If a number of you have a genuine interest in it, I see no reason why we shouldn’t do it. We’ll be putting out a call for portfolios for our logo and site design in the very near future. It would be easy enough to ask for general artist portfolios at the same time. That being said, we aren’t accepting portfolios at all at the moment, but we may begin doing so as soon as later today. Keep an eye on our site and, if you’re a Twitter user, be sure to follow me and Adam Holisky for further updates.