Eight years ago, on 2 May, 2006, TVSA was born. Aside from a few minor style tweaks in the earlier years, the site has remained largely the same for a number of years.
After a long rebuilding of the site, we are proud to introduce you to the first major overhaul of TVSA, which has gone through an architectural, stylistic and programmatic redesign.
The idea behind the site was always to be a TV companion to lovers of the small screen, while providing a solid, reliable database of South African and international shows and actors.
Along with a strong community of bloggers and other contributors, the aim has always been to marry opinion and light-hearted banter with serious and factual information.
None of that has changed - we've simply made it easier to understand, navigate and interact with. The
shows,
actors and
blogs all remain (with significant changes to their ease of use and functionality), but there are also a number of new additions.
The new site utilises cutting-edge web design philosophies and techniques, including:
HTML5
CSS3
Responsive web design
These new approaches provide a fluid, optimal browsing experience across a wide range of devices including PCs, mobile devices and tablets. There is no mobi site, for example - the site automatically resizes to the device you are viewing it on.
The site is custom-built on our own proprietary CMS platform and as such is completely unique.
We will gradually introduce all of the ways to use the site in our new Tip of the Day blog. For now though, these are some of the new site features we think will be of immediate interest to most:
Message Boards
The old site had forums, but they were in a different programming language and required you to have two separate logins - one for the forums and one for the site. As a result, they were never properly integrated into TVSA.
Our new
Message Boards work in a very similar way to the blogs. The main difference is they don't require a blogger to write an article in order for you to chat about something - anyone can start a new discussion on a Message Board, and you can talk about any topic you like.
In addition, every show and every actor now has their own Message Board. To chat about them visit their page or profile and click their Message Boards tab.
Show Reviews
We always wanted members to be able to review the shows they are watching and in the early days of TVSA we had basic show review functionality, but we ditched it in 2007 as it was never properly developed.
Our new
Show Review system offers the opportunity to submit your own review. The more times your reviews get "liked" by the community, the more influential your reviews become. Once enough review data is collected we will introduce a "Top Reviewers" list.
Shows/Actor Rankings
Although TVSA members have always been able to rate shows and actors, the ratings system was clumsy and outdated and was never configured to make sense of the ratings information and present it in a meaningful way.
We've completely overhauled the ratings system, introduced a new weighted rankings system (for
shows and
actors) based on the Bayesian average system used by IMDB and split it into Top 10 lists for shows and actors.
Galleries
All shows, actors and TVSA members now have their own picture galleries. Shows and actors also have video galleries.
TVSA Central
This is a brand new "homepage" for TVSA members, where you can see what other members are up to - whose birthday it is, who posted what and where, who reviewed or rated something and where all the latest site action is happening.
This page is only viewable by TVSA members as we felt it only fair that whatever happens on
TVSA Central - stays on TVSA Central. More will be added to TVSA Central over time, but for now it's ticking over as we speak.
Additionally, registered members of TVSA now have a User Menu (at the far right of the main site menu), from where you can access all of your information eg. blogs, profile, galleries and more.
Favourites
You can now "favourite" all sorts of things if you are a TVSA member, including shows, actors, blogs, message board discussions and articles. Some of these appear in your user menu, but all of them are available in your Favourites.
If you "favourite" a discussion or article, you will get notifications when new activity is posted on them. If you enjoy chatting about a show, you can favourite it so it appears in your menu as an easy link.
Conclusion
Obviously we would like to show you everything there is on the new TVSA, but please feel free to browse around, poke about in a few of the far-flung corners of the site and let us know what you think about it all.
Also - a big thank you to all of you who helped test the new site. We greatly value the contributions you made.
Thank you to everyone reading this for being a part of TVSA so far - we look forward to the pleasure of your company for a long time to come.