New official Red Dwarf website
The new-look Red Dwarf homepage
The official Red Dwarf website changed today (25th February) to a new, slick web 2.0 site. They claim it's easier to navigate and much easier to find the information. I've used their site a few times for it's comprehensive record of gadgets, technology, characters, races and spaceships. It's easy to get carried away when writing a science fiction story and forget your base material, and sometimes it's good to go back and have a look at good ol' Red Dwarfy things.
The current website has been around for a good number of years. You can use the wayback machine (www.archive.org) to see what it looked like at various stages of it's life. I like to go all the way back to 1998 and look how terrible it was! But remember back then it was probably one of the better websites on the internet.
The site itself released this article:
All the great content is still here, but hopefully you'll find it all much easier to find. The sections are all named in ways that, hopefully, will put a stop to all those emails asking how many episodes there are of the show. (I know for certain I saw series 9, but it seems like aaaages ago.)
And by the sound of it, they're having some problems with the new site. On the Red Dwarf forums I regularly check, including Ganymede & Titan (www.ganymede.tv) members have posted a long list of problems with the site, from javascript errors being thrown up around the place, to simple spelling mistakes on headers. I guess the development wasn't done by a professional web development company, more someone in-house (unlike this website which is perfect!).
They mention the problems in the article:
We're still working on a few of the secondary areas - certainly if you arrived here on Monday afternoon you'll have found certain sections a little more... unfinished than we'd intended - but with those complete we hope you'll find your regular visits to reddwarf.co.uk a much more enjoyable and easy experience from now on.
Will there be other exciting developments for the 20th anniversary of Red Dwarf? Let's just say that this is our anniversary year, and anything is possible - especially as the show attracts its third generation of fans...
The last section does make me wonder what they are planning. The fan in me definately hopes it is something big, but my hopes of a film or even a final series have long since been washed away by the sheer amount of time we've been waiting for it. But they have gone to the trouble of creating a website for something... I'm still hoping for some more audio books, podcasts or even some original cartoons.