J.K. Rowling's Pottermore website has always been a great resource for digging deeper into her wizarding world. But finding your way around the site was cumbersome, the pages took forever to load, and the whole experience felt like it was tailored toward kids.
Pottermore has just been relaunched with a drastic overhaul that simplifies the design, color-codes all of the encyclopedic info, ditches all the complex programming that made it too slow, and repositions itself as a new hub for the latest news and information on all things Harry Potter. It even has the kinds of feature articles and lists that you might find at websites like the one you're reading now.
The centerpiece of the new site is still the biggest draw from the old one: new writings by J.K. Rowling herself. To celebrate the site's reopening, Rowling has posted "The Potter Family," a brief history of the Potters that traces their family name back centuries into the past. Among other things, you'll learn how Harry became the latest owner of the Invisibility Cloak, and how it came into the Potter family's possession.
No longer do you require registration or login to enter Pottermore. The new site is elegant and entertaining, and frankly, what Pottermore.com always should have been. Longtime readers may be dismayed that the old site's option for exploring and "attending" Hogwarts is gone, and the Sorting Hat Ceremony has vanished, too, though the site promises that it will return soon.
In addition to writings from Rowling and entertaining features, you'll also find news on other corners of the Potterverse, such as production updates on the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them movie, and reports on the 2016 stage play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. You'll also find loads of Jim Kay's new illustrations from the forthcoming illustrated editions of the seven Potter novels.
Stills and other images from the Warner Bros. films have been incorporated into the new Pottermore as well. This is noteworthy because the old Pottermore was completely devoid of references to or imagery from the movies.
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