Today we're pleased to roll out significant updates to the site. In addition to a rework of the look and feel, we've also introduced a number of new features and performance improvements. While we're not done with all the updates we're working on, we did want to push live what we have to date.
Updates:
Site look and feel: First and foremost, you'll notice a massive change in the appearance of the site. This is the first fruit of bringing on board our design lead Phil Coffman.
Site performance: We massively improved the performance of part selection pages. You should notice a difference immediately. We made not just the backend server processing but also the page load and rendering times significantly.
Part sorting: Part categories are now default sorted by popularity. We aggregate a significant amount of usage data that we then use to determine this ordering. What you'll find is that the parts you most commonly want will be right at the top (or close). We've been doing this on the mobile version since its release last May and decided to roll it out to the desktop version as well.
Part price filter: You've been asking for this for a while, and we heard you! You can now filter parts, completed builds, and build guides by price.
Build guides: Up until now only staff could publish PCPartPicker build guides. We've opened it up now so that anyone can create and publish a guide. You can also view other guides, as well as vote and comment on them. Feel like you have the best idea for an Intel or AMD based build? Create your guide!
User avatars: On comments and user pages, you can now have your own avatar. Just go to your profile page and upload your own profile image.
Build tags: Initially just for build guides, we'll be rolling out tagging support for completed builds soon too.
Sortable saved builds: We've totally revamped how saved and completed builds are displayed in your profile. You can now easily sort saved builds, completed builds, and your build guides. We have a few more improvements slated for this area, so stay tuned!
Ability to reorder completed build images: Now you can reorder your completed build images however you would like. We'll pull the first three images in the set and use those for the thumbnails when viewing the list of completed builds.
We hope you like the changes, and of course, let us know if you run into any issues!
Looking to build a new system to take advantage of Black Friday deals? Check out our updated build guides! These guides take advantage of our parametric filter selections, so the specific part selections automatically adjust minute-by-minute as new Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals roll in. Take a look and let us know what you think!
If you're looking for something a little bit different, we've also included a new guide for a budget HTPC system:
At PCPartPicker we strongly believe in giving back. To do so, we take a portion of our affiliate revenue and donate it to charity. To date we've contributed to Charity:Water and Extra Life. Through Charity:Water we've funded several large water and school projects in Malawi, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh. The time between donation and seeing the results is about 18-months, so there are projects we've funded still in the pipeline. We recently posted pictures from a recent completion report.
While we believe in giving back, we know many of you do too. So if you're already purchasing hardware for your next build, Amazon Smile lets you benefit a charity of your choosing when you make purchases through smile.amazon.com. They take 0.5% of the total of eligible items and donate that - but only when shopping through **smile**.amazon.com. The 0.5% does not change the cost of the items. Currently this offer is US only.
You can find the official explanation of Amazon Smile here.
What we've done is add a user preference for the US version of this site that lets you opt-in to Amazon Smile links for any Amazon links on the site. Look for a checkbox labelled "Use Amazon Smile Links" in either the price settings on part category pages, or in your user preferences if you're logged in. If you set this option, any links to the US Amazon site will automatically get changed to smile.amazon.com links.
So, in a nutshell:
I'm pleased to announce that Phil Coffman has joined PCPartPicker as Design Lead, focusing on all things involving graphic design, user interface, and user experience. Formerly the VP of Design at Spacecraft and Creative Director / Co-founder of Element, Phil brings a wealth of design and UI/UX experience to the team. You can see an idea of his work on his site and on Dribbble.
We're extremely excited to have Phil on board, and I can't wait for everyone to see what he is capable of. Please join us in welcoming him to PCPartPicker!
We have updated two of our September build guides to take advantage of the newly released GTX 970 and GTX 980 video cards. Take a look and let us know what you think!