Soon? Well, I won't give a precise date, because it always has been a bad omen. So just: soon we will launch our community feature module.

Yesterday we made our internal launch, meaning that all our community managers and web developers can now actively use and test the system to find last bugs and check everything.

We hope that you will enjoy the possibility to communicate with your friends on PokerStrategy.com through chat and personal messages. We also hope that you tell a little more about yourself: your interests, your favourite gametype, maybe a picture.

Why? Because in the end, PokerStrategy.com is just you: without every single member, our community and poker school would be none.

Through this new feature package we hope to give our users the relevance they ought to have! 

By the way: after finishing that first release, we will immediately switch to re-designing the home page, the navigation and the video section - followed by relaunches of all important sections of our site.

We've got a busy winter ahead of us - but in the end, spring 2009 will bear a by then complete rebirth of our website! 

As our social networking module nears its completion, navigational & usability issues pop up. To integrate the new features without making your user experience more complicated we thought about many different ways and finally came up with two new navigational elements.

1. The Top Bar
At the top of the browser screen, there will be a Top Bar. With that top bar, you can not only search quickly for people, groups and other things going on in the social network (and of course, we will also integrate a content search there in the future!), but also have quick access to the key features.
The icons for chat and personal messages will change the moment you get a new message or one of your buddies wants to chat with you.

2. The Second Level Navigation
You all know that our main horizontal navigation is full of interesting stuff, but a little cramped. It could not carry much more, and a consistent navigational structure is sometimes missed within the main sections of PokerStrategy.com.
In the future, every main section (the ones having their own menu item in the primary navigation bar) will have a second level navigation in a consistent style. The most important things inside the section will be easily accessible from there. An example: in the coaching section, you will be able to switch between the coaching calendar, a coaching guide and informations about our coaches & private coaching in the second level navigation.

To illustrate the changes a little, here's a sample:

Hey, how is everybody doing? 

I am fine since I have completed a mission: Creating and establishing the german blogs. I think all of them, including this one thanks to Mr. Xantos, are running good, many posts, many comments, good feedback. I really like to thank all those who spend time blogging on our german blogs. But instead of slowing down my next goal is to get some new blogs in other communities and I can tell you that many Community Manager allready contacted me to get all the info they need. The english blog should be done soon, our russian community manager also has done good work and I think his blogs will be out soon as well. For the hispanic community we are still searching names because we will create some new blogs and I think the french-speaking board might get a blog in the future...

I think we won't reach the quantity of news in the near future but if all those blogs are as successful as the german ones we will at least have 100 blog posts every month! So keep on supporting all the bloggers, here on Confidential, on the DevBlog, on our community blog and make sure comments boost the activity in every way possible!

Good luck!

Benido 

Got you – bet you thought I will write some news about PokerStrategy. No, I planned to talk about our news section.

I know, they are not perfect: still not too up-to-date, not covering every aspects, not illustrated in the best possible way. But we are working on it!

Because in the fast world of poker, good news can really mean a difference. Not only new things at PokerStrategy, but also at our partner sites are of course always worth a look.

While the quality of our news should only be measured by you (and we always like feedback!) or maybe the amount of comments (and we really like comments! ;]), the sheer quantity is also an interesting thing - especially if you look at the development over time.

This graph shows the number of news per month on PokerStrategy. As it is the sum of the news in all of our 14 languages, this number of course profited from our diversification to different languages. But even if you count that out, there is still a nice increase.

What do you think? Did this increased quantity also come with some quality? Where can our news improve? 

By the way: thank you for the suggestions to my last blog post! I really appreciate that - and some of your suggestions already find their way into the statistics interface as well as the information pages that are currently developed!