SFX.co.uk Prepares For Relaunch

Because the site has become a victim of its own blockbuster success, we’re getting a make-over… with go faster stripes!

Do you feel the need, the need for speed? Then visit sfx.co.uk from Thursday next week and we can oblige. We can also offer you a whole new look for the site, with go faster stripes and everything.

Yeah, it doesn’t seem a year ago since sfx.co.uk last had a makeover (actually it was just over 14 months ago!) but the site has been has such a rollicking success since in the meantime, that we’ve been forced to upgrade it yet again to account for all the masses of new readers we’ve been atracting. That’s no PR BS, honest! We’ve actually doubled the number of unique users per month, which was pushing capacity anyway, but when someone like Simon Pegg or Neil Gaiman Tweeted about us… well, it wasn’t just crashing our site, it was taking half of Future Publishing’s network with it (we don’t think we were particularly popular with Simply Knitting for a while).

Which was kinda cool. But annoying for you lot. Things had to change.

And since we’re moving to a new server that we have all to ourselves – which’ll speed up the site significantly and give us oodles more capacity – we thought we might as well take advantage of the situation and spruce things up in other ways too.

So there’ll be a great new look, a lot of new features, and even more ways to interact with the site (you won’t believe the number of things you’ll be able to click on). You should be seeing more video content, more interviews and more regular articles… maybe not immediately but as we get into the swing.

What we can guarantee in launch week is at least two hot exclusive news stories about two very popular franchises, the results of our Top 50 Greatest Ever SF& Fantasy Movie Themes poll (we’ve had over 5,0000 votes!) and the announcement of a special campaign that we’re sure you’re going to sign up to.. Plus, of course, it’s San Diego Comic Con time, and we’ll be posting constant updates and videos from our crack team over there (that’s Dave B and Rich). And looking at the list of interviews they’ve got lined up, you’re going to be getting some great stuff.

SFX Forumites have no fear! Unlike last year, there will be no interruption to the forum service during the upgrade. It will be business as usual. Except we hope that after the upgrade we’ll have even more people rushing to sign up!

Exciting times. Make sure you’re here for the launch! Thursday. Unless everything crashes!

Dave Golder
Freelance Writer

Dave is a TV and film journalist who specializes in the science fiction and fantasy genres. He's written books about film posters and post-apocalypses, alongside writing for SFX Magazine for many years.