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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
This is the story of a feature in the Thunderbolt Content Management System (CMS). It is so tiny, almost to the point of being insignificant, but the tale of its evolution demonstrates the value of detail.
Let me set the scene. When our articles have been through a peer review process, their author logs in to [...]
Yesterday I launched a redesigned version of Thunderbolt, the videogames website I’ve been running for a little over eight years.