After a month of hard work, the FFXIV Info item database is now online and available for all. If you were around at the time of the 1.23 patch you probably got a sneak peak at the design as we rushed a listing of all the patch items online. This was the perfect opportunity for us to iron out any remaining bugs while serving as a great resource for people waiting for the servers to come back up. We will continue to do that providing patches launch on a day where someone is available to update the database in time.
As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve spent the past month or two revamping the site in massive ways. The dated recipes have been replaced with current recipes, the materia section has been added, the guides have been updated, the service pages have been updated and today sees the launch of the item database. This has been by far the biggest challenge for us as the game has over 8400 items and we wanted to display these in a functional, easy to use and informative way. I think we have succeeded, however only time will tell and we will make adjustments based on user feedback. We also updated the recipes pages today with our own tooltips and added links from the recipe items to the item pages.
We aren’t done with site improvements yet however. The content section is in need of additions. We would like to list strategies and tips for end-game and mid-game content here. However we will not focus too much on this until the launch of FFXIV V2 because that could invalidate everything there. As a result we will focus on the content that is most relevant to current players in patch 1.22 and 1.23.
User interaction and the members section will also be revamped starting with the introduction of forum signatures in the near future. If you use the official forums then you may have seen mine, however it will require changes to work with a public interface. There will also be new designs added at the time we implement this. The members section will see the introduction of achievement related pages and become more functional. We find players prefer features that interact with the game rather than generic social networking.
Even the design of the website will be changed somewhat. We don’t like how much space the top section of pages take up and we feel refreshing the background colours of the site could help make it look better too. The headings on pages will all be changed to something with a better font as well. FFXIV V2 is coming and so is FFXIV Info V2!
Our goal is to make FFXIV Info the #1 source for FFXIV information.
