For a long time, since we’ve been around in fact, our aesthetic design has been somewhat lackluster. I admit it. I mean, we definitely haven’t been the prettiest car on the lot. Today, however, all that changes…

Welcome to the new DIYgamer.com, bringing you the most comprehensive indie. independent, and student gaming community on the web. While we still have plenty of features left to expand upon in the future, allow me to go over our new design:

First, you’ll notice that I’m highlighting this new design as DIYgamer.com 2.5, as opposed to 3.0. That’s because while this new design is shiny, sparkly, and brings us into the modern web 2.0 world, the site’s overall features remain the same. We’ll be saving 3.0 for the next major feature enhancement.

Second, as you can see, we’ve got our little social buttons to the left of our shiny new flash player (we’ll get to that in a second). While the top three might be familiar to you (RSS, Twitter, Facebook) that bottom one might not. You see, in this ever expanding world of social integration we’re taking a bold new step in delivering our content to you in new ways. That button is our new home on Reddit, the incredible link-driven community website. If you are an active Redditor, feel free to add us on that so that you can stay in the loop on what we’re writing about without ever having to leave the comforts of your own little Reddit kingdom (you know, unless you want to read the actual articles).

Third, people like scrolling flash players for featured news. Well, now we’ve got one. It’s pretty standard affair and you can expect to see all our most important articles featured in that area.

Finally, we still have all our same old community features. You can still create an account (which is managed by the wonderful phpbb forum software) to use for commenting, forum posting, and private messaging within the community.

So tell us what you think! What could we do better? And for that matter, what features are you really looking forward to in the future? We aren’t just building a blog here at DIYgamer.com, we are building a community. We want to be the place to go for indie, independent, and student gaming discussion, news, chatter, etc. and you can help us get there. All we need is a little help from our friends (you).

UPDATE: As with all major redesigns, we are currently undergoing a wealth of aesthetic problems. We are working ardently on fixing these before the morning. This is, partly, why we’ve decided to upload the new design so late tonight.

Feel free to drop us a comment if you feel like something is wonky but we aren’t aware of it!