What’s new on HardwareZone’s most comprehensive overhaul yet?

After 15 years...

If our site looks a little different, and a little fresh as of late, that’s because our main HardwareZone site has finally received a much-needed overhaul last week -- after 15 long years since our last thorough revamp. By thorough, I mean a shift to use a new CMS system, combined with a site design refresh.

Some might gawk how HardwareZone managed to pull through that long on an old CMS, but I’m sure it has something to do with an amazing team who designed it (hats off to ex-colleagues), a supportive engineering team who knows the nuts and bolts to make it work as well and as long as it has, and myself entrenched at the nexus of it all.

Joined a growing list of titles under SPH that are using a new backend and CMS platform, this allows us to better synergise with other content teams and publications under SPH, as well as bring about a more robust framework to progress new site features that can cut across more publications.

While planning for this monumental task of retaining our existing stories for availability on the new platform, we also took this opportunity to chart a new navigation format to improve wayfinding, simplify content pillars, and bring focus to our content highlights.

Our new elements in the site refresh

Here are all of our new updates in addition to the design renewal:-

• A new nav bar design – simpler and more focussed
• Snappier and easy to use on mobile devices
• Block-based segments on the homepage to drill down on further content pillars
• Trending bar to keep track of most recent stories based on popularity
• Top Tech Reviews so you can jump straight in to gear that we highly recommend
• All-new Deals of the Week section to highlight products with great discounts
• A shopping block to never lose touch of all of our deals and shopping guides
• New video and social content blocks with immediate video playback
• An all-new entry point to forums to some of the most discussed topics
• Our Digital Mag – HWM – now brought into focus on the homepage
• Infinite loading of new stories when you’ve reached the end of a current story
• An overhaul of our review stories with ratings and useful quick takeaways right at the start of the story, complete with shopping links.
• Website is now compatible with “Listen to this page” feature on Android Chrome browsers – hear our stories as you go about other tasks and even choose different voices/reading speed and more

For longtime HWZ followers, you may have noticed several changes across our 27 years in operation, but this is actually our third content management system transition and our tenth site refresh. Here’s how we’ve evolved over time:-

The HWZ Timeline

• 1998:- Site launch, and version 0 of CMS (i.e. raw HTML uploaded into a file server)
• 2000:- CMS version 1 and site refresh V2
• 2003:- Site refresh V3
• 2004:- Site refresh V4
• 2010:- Site refresh V5 and CMS version 2
• 2011:- Site refresh V6
• 2012:- Site refresh V7
• 2016:- Site refresh V8
• 2017:- Site refresh V9
• 2021:- Taking a break from our main site, we overhauled our forum completely and moved away from the VBB platform that was our mainstay for over two decades
• 2025: - Our current revamped site (refresh V10) and CMS version 3

As hinted by the purpose and focus of this major revamp in the back end, we’ve more features in the pipeline, so stay tuned to us and let HardwareZone be your definitive place to check the best gear and tech trends to keep tabs on. And if you need a second opinion from locals, well, that’s where our useful HardwareZone forum community comes into play. So either way, we hope to have you covered 😉

For a complete list of our social touchpoints (it’s a long list) that serve different needs, check them out here.