We know that everyone loves the Nibbler robot, but it’s time for a change! The next version of the Nibbler website will have a much simpler and smaller Nibbler robot.

We’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes on Nibbler, and we’re almost ready to bring out a new beta version to show everyone. We did this a few months ago and received a lot of great feedback from everyone we asked to test it. One thing the first beta version didn’t have though was a finished design, we were working on hidden, important, behind-the-scenes things and hadn’t got around yet to planning how it will look on the surface.

But now we have a lovely new design that we think is intuitive and will help everyone get the most out of their Nibbler experience.

So why do we need a new logo?

As much as we loved the old robot, he just didn’t fit. He’s too big and didn’t look very good when you made him small, which meant he took up too much room on the screen. I’m sure you’ll like the new one just as much.

Look at the little rascal, he just loves nibbling away at websites!

What new features does the new Nibbler have?

Things have moved on a lot since the first mockups we showed you a few months ago, although the feedback we got then helped us to create something that would be useful to everyone.

Your personal website profile

In the new Nibbler you’ll be able to claim websites as your own, which will add them to your own personal profile. You’ll be able to use this to show off your website scores to others, and proudly boast about them!

You’ll also be able to customise your profile by changing the background, adding your own personality to your page.

Earning badges

When you claim websites as your own, you’ll notice that you’ll receive badges relating to some part of that website. There’ll be badges about the technology you’ve used, and the content on your site. The more badges you have, the higher your score.

Updated tests

We’ve made many tests a lot better, and given you more information about what we’ve tested, including suggestions to make your site better, and possible repercussions of ignoring the things we’ve found when testing.

For example the “Incoming Links” test now contains a lot more detail about sites that link to yours, and the anchor phrases they use.

Also we’ve done a lot of work on updating the importance of each test so your final website score is more relevant.

We need more testers!

We’re almost ready to release a new beta version to show off the new version. We’ll be contacting the same people who helped us last time, but you still have time to sign up. You’ll get access to Nibbler before its public release.

Sign up below and we’ll send you an email soon. Don’t worry, we won’t pester, but once we launch a trial of the new Nibbler beta we’ll encourage you to try it out and ask for your feedback.