Websites

  • CountryEx testing gets underway

    CountryEx’s current dashboard

    As you may be aware, I’m creating a stock trading game called CountryEx for my final year project at university. It’s been in development for over six months and last week I opened it for a private beta test.
    Since CountryEx is a social game in which every player’s actions [...]

  • You are (not) your logo

    Whenever I redesign Thunderbolt, one of the most discussed aspects of the site is its logo. Although the site has been around for nearly ten years, we’ve never had a single logo for more than a few years. Is this something we should be concerned about or doesn’t it matter what logo your website has?
    Let’s [...]

  • Radar graphs in user interfaces

    Of the most commonly available methods for visualising data, radar graphs seem to be the least used. When I asked for examples on UXExchange, there were very few that people could think of. So what makes people avoid them and why are they so rare?
    Under the radar
    When you look at a [...]

  • Why don’t we make money from Thunderbolt?

    Whenever I tell people about Thunderbolt, one of the first questions they ask is “why don’t you make money from it?”
    It’s a reasonable question; last year, Thunderbolt had over 3 million page views from over 600,000 unique visitors. Sure, it’s not anywhere near the numbers that the big sites get, but it’s enough to make [...]

  • Every second counts: making Thunderbolt sustainable

    When I founded Thunderbolt over nine years ago, the web was a very different place. There was no Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr or even Wikipedia. Nine years is a huge amount of time on the web and most sites don’t manage to last half of that, especially smaller ones. So how [...]

  • Introducing the Association of Independent Game Websites

    When I was in Edinburgh last May, I met Philip Roberts, who handled the development for the games website SquareGo at the time. It was the first time that I’d talked to someone who does a similar job to what I do at Thunderbolt and it was incredibly interesting.
    Over a few [...]