To meet these conditions, you can see now the new ESL - clearer, bigger, faster, better, completely renovated and tidy. It is above all the functionality in the foreground, the site should not be overloaded with 100 images. Due to the large number of different sections and features of the ESL, many areas of the site will be cleaned up substantially. The balancing act is between not to overwhelm new users and making it easy for experienced users to be able to reach everything instantly. After so many years the changes may seem unusual, but they are necessary to make room for new things to be created.

Overall, the core aspect of the new redesign is the change in layout of the page including the new menu, but overall it is much more. With the launch of the new site we are still far from finished. Over the next few months there are still many updates follow in which the functionality of the ESL will be increased.

The old v2004 design can continue to be selected manually, but this is now under the status of "unsupported" i.e. We do not guarantee that everything works properly.

What is new?

Main menu
The two main changes are the complete elimination of the left hand side menus which has made possible the widening of middle by up to 20%, i.e. More space for the actual content.
Instead of totally overloaded existing menus, there is a horizontal menu, which on new portal sites linked to the various platforms of the ESL.

User-Menü
The old user menu gives way to a Profile box - in addition to its own photo it includes most important links every user needs: My profile, my team, my games, plus online buddies, my news, my matches and settings.

Teams & Clubs
Your teams are now clearly displayed on their own page. Also now we make a distinction between teams and clubs. Whether team is considered as a team or club is determined automatically depending on whether or not it takes part in a competition. Clubs can also be open to the public without a password, and in the future there will be no member limit, along with other features especially for clubs.

Player Profile & Video Upload

By far the most heavily visited part of the ESL are the player profiles, the "pseudo-business card" for gamers. Reason enough for the player profile to be redesigned making room for future expansion space.
One of these innovations is immediately available, the ability to upload any number of videos. In beta-test already many hundreds of users made use of this to upload CS Movies or recordings made at LANs.
The entire traffic goes through a different provider so there is no need to worry about any performance hit to the ESL site.

Navigation bar

The old navigation bar of the ESL is an interactive menu upgraded. For each section link at the same time a drop-down menu to jump to other sections, game or leagues.

"My Bookmarks"
It is impossible for the wants and needs of all our different users to be known ahead of time. Therefore, the existing approach of automatic and manually made bookmarks to produce a fully configurable menu on the right hand side is still in place. From "my next match" to direct links to gathers and teams. The crucial difference from the past, is in addition to static bookmarks there are dynamic bookmarks that change, for example open matches.

Games collection
The game collection continues to exist but now it has several more uses. For example your games collection date is used to show in each game section the number of users who own the game. Another example is the "My Games" page, which shows you the best section each game has to offer, sorted by active participation and the latest League News. If there is a new news, the game is bumped to the top.

Search
The new quest is for both beginners as well as professionals is an important and central part of the ESL site. We do this not on a full-text search, often resulting in too many irrelevant results, but on a subject (tagging) of the individual page. Thus, for example a search for "Aequitas", "wc3 regulate," "css settings" or "ifng" no longer gives you 100 results from news, forums or FAQs, but one or very few hits, which deliver exactly what you need. In the best case, you will be taken directly to the desired page, providing a sort of quick navigation around the site using the keyboard. The search will continue to learn, as admins begin using the tagging system with new keywords in order to improve it.

Speed
By streamlining the HTML code, the page in any browser is much faster than before, regardless of the time is required for the server side to generate. This is reflected not only in the subjective feeling of having "crisp response", but also shown in objective tests, which measure precisely how long it really takes up a page is fully displayed. These figures show improvements in the display speed by up to 80%!



Bugs, suggestions for improvement?
Please post all bugs or suggestions in the ESL v2007 Redesign forum.

We wish you much fun with the new look ESL and look forward to a lot of feedback. Big thanks goes out to all the beta testers involved, both in the closed and open betas!