User blog:Rupert Giles/Introducing Updated Global Navigation

Greetings Wikians. My name is Chris, aka Rupert Giles, and I’m a Product Manager at Wikia. Over the past several months the team I’m working on has been experimenting with a lot of new and updated features. One of those features, global navigation, is nearly ready for a site-wide rollout, and I wanted to give you a sneak preview.

There were a few goals we tried to accomplish with the new navigation - get more users to search, expose users to our new content hubs, and lastly to provide a consistent experience across screens and devices.

Search is one of the most important features on Wikia today. Due to the passion and dedication of our fans we have over 300,000 communities and 32,000,000 pages of content. Many of these communities are so large that it is effectively impossible to find what you are looking for without search. Today there are over 2200 communities with more than 1000 articles. The Lyrics Wikia has over 2,000,000 articles! That’s astounding.

The new navigation puts search front and center by fixing the global navigation to the top as you scroll down, allowing you to search for content no matter where you are on the page. In addition we’ve provided users with the ability to search for other communities by toggling the input field.



Secondly, we relaunched and expanded the number our content hubs to better reflect the diversity of our communities on Wikia - growing from three vertical Hubs (Gaming, Entertainment and Lifestyle) to seven (Games, TV, Movies, Comics, Music, Books, and Lifestyle). To make it easier and encourage you to participate - get your community promoted and involved - each new hub exists as a wikia, connecting you directly with the marketing and community development teams that program the Hubs.

Starting today, you can see all seven new hubs appear in our new navigation across English and Spanish in beta communities that we have listed below. The expanded hubs, with Entertainment broken out into TV, Movies, Comics, Music, and Books, have also launched in French, Polish, and Japanese. With the new navigation, you'll easily be able to find amazing communities, programs, and articles across all of Wikia. Check it out.

Finally, as part of a broader initiative to upgrade the user experience around Wikia, we updated the look and feel of the navigation to be more consistent across all communities, screens, and devices. Our audience is increasingly moving to mobile devices and we wanted to make sure to provide high quality support no matter how you view Wikia. This new navigation will better adapt to your screen size by adjusting the widths of things like the search box or the “Start a wikia” button.

The new global navigation is currently live on a handful of beta communities. You can try it out here:


 * Avatar Wiki
 * Call of Duty Wiki
 * Pokemon Wiki
 * Teen Wolf Wiki
 * Once Upon a Time Wiki
 * The Shadowhunters’ Wiki
 * American Horror Story Wiki
 * Two Best Friends Play
 * Ben 10 (ES)
 * Destiny (ES)

We will keep the beta live for 1-2 weeks. After that, we will make a few minor adjustments and fix any bugs that might pop up before rolling it out Wikia-wide. You will then see the new global navigation across all languages.

We’ve got much more in the works including updating local navigation and a new search results page. I can’t wait to share our progress with you so be on the lookout for more posts in the future.

Feel free to share any feedback you have in the comments or on the respective communities. Bugs can be reported to Special:Contact.