BXB 360

I wrote the following blog entry about an hour and a half before I wrote this opening paragraph. Below you'll find me doing something I find very hard. Admitting failure. I feel I've failed. I feel like I let down BXB's community to the extent that I'm struggling to admit it. But I will, because it's the right thing to do.

If It Isn't Broke..

So, I'm pretty sure that if you're a BXB regular you've wondered where our much hyped sister site BXB360 has vanished to? Well, I think it's time I was honest and told the story.

We trumpeted the launch of BXB360 a hell of a lot. A sustained campaign of advertising the launch was taken on BXB including the logo competition, an interview with myself and Ash which received some heavy criticism from my peers and, of course, that promotion video that never really saw the light of day.

As I'm sure you're aware, both myself and Ashley run full time jobs as well as working on BXB and hence we often have more important "real life" things to sort out and hence we can't spend the time we'd like on BXB. And it was a "real life" event that ultimately put every single nail in the coffin of BXB360.

It was a dramatic and unexpected event that saw us make the gut ripping decision to take down a site, we'd launched only a few day earlier. After months of hard work, our vision for a next generation Xbox website was crushed.

But what a vision. Since the launch of the 360 we've witnessed loads of wannabe fansites popping up all across the internet and they're all so painfully similar looking it's a little boring. As always, BXB wanted to try and buck the trend; bring something unique and different to the field; and this is what we consider to be one of our greatest assets.

Just in case you forgot what it looked like, or never saw it, check out the screengrab below:





I was very pleased with the design. I remember having a lengthy discussion with Ash about getting the site to be full of curves like a 360 and him saying how very difficult it would be to achieve. Still, he did it. However, it had a massive flaw. It wasn't very flexible.

BXB is a very flexible system allowing the writer to publish an article with freedom to place pictures, page breaks and headlines wherever he chooses. With BXB360 we had to fit the article around the design and I just didn't like that. However, it was something I was willing to work around because I loved the design of the site so much.

So, on with the show, LAN 2006 was the launch party and this is where it all started to go wrong. We couldn't show the Promotional Video because we'd not got the right hardware and shortly after the disaster struck.

Ashley had been working on a very big contract in his "real life" job and that promptly fell through just after launch meaning that Ashley had to pull out of launching the final features of BXB360 and find new work. With this news I knew we'd be looking at an unfinished BX360 for sometime.

BXB has already made a number of promises to its users we've failed to keep like the launching of the Shop and I didn't want to have to have that problem again except on an entire website.
So, we pulled it down. Either way we'd have let down the people that we cared about the most - our community. It was a tough decision and I was very upset but since then I've come to realise it's for the best.

Ash and I sat down and discussed how we were going to handle it all and we came to the decision that we'd keep many of the features that were intended for BXB360 and bring them into BXB.

You can find these features on our newly updated Online Portfolio and include a few nice ideas that will help make sure that BXB will grow and get stronger.

So, in a sense, BXB360 will live on in what we're doing at the minute, which is probably what we should have done from the outset. If it isn't broken, don't fix it. Isn't hindsight the most frustrating thing ever?!