Neopets 2.0

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Neopets 2.0 was a major site overhaul rolled out on 27 April 2007. It was primarily an update to allow greater customisation: for the first time, players were able to dress up their Neopets. The site layout was also updated, having stayed mostly unchanged (aside from the addition of banner adverts in 2004) for eight years. Structural changes to the coding of user lookups were intend to add greater flexibility for user customising, and the site menu was altered to make navigation easier.

Neopet customisation

Main article: Neopet Customisation

... to be added...

Layout

The original site layout was designed to fit an 800 x 600 screen resolution. By 2007, however, 800 x 600 had been surpassed as the most common resolution of internet users by 1024 x 768. Redesigning the layout for the higher resolution allowed more horizontal screen space to be used. As well as altering the site visually, the revamp permitted the coding to be updated to comply with newer standards.

The Neopets Team explained that their main goal was to make navigating the site less confusing. The vertical menu side bar of the old design was replaced with a horizontal menu, and hovering over each menu item opens a list of shortcuts. Ten menu items in the former design became seven in the new: the "Neomail" and the "Create-a-Pet" items were incorporated into a new "my account" item, the "stuff" (formerly "world") item was discontinued, and the help item was moved to a second set of links at the bottom of the page. Later, two menu items were added for the NC Mall and Neopet customisation.

A box displaying information about the player's active Neopet was added and is displayed alongside most pages of the site (excepting game pages, the NC Mall, the Pound, and preferences pages). Another box listing the player's online Neofriends was also added.

The coding and layout update 'broke' customised user lookup, Neopet lookup, and guild homepages - TNT explained that it was "not something [they]'re able to prevent when the whole site gets a rewrite like this". However, the new pages were meant to make it easier to build customised layouts: the information on user lookups is now divided across several divs, each with their own IDs which allows them to be restyled independently.

Criticism

The change caused much criticism. On the day of the release, the topic was unavoidable on the NeoBoards, the main point being the inability to change pets to their old poses, as well as the fact that the new coding caused all layouts for petpages, user lookups and similar to be broken. The latter happened not only due to significant changes to the Neopets layout, but also due to TNT implementing transitional standards on all their pages.

Trivia

• The release of Neopets 2.0 was kept secret until the release, and was only hinted upon by a giant Meepit which replaced all of the news from the previous day.

External links

• Neopets FAQ: Neopets 2.0
• Editorial: 289