J.K. Rowling Relaunches Pottermore!

This morning Pottermore announced that the Pottermore site has been relaunched. With this exciting news, the released a video/audio message from J.K. Rowling introducing the new site. She calls Pottermore her “little writing corner” and the right place to come if “you need a little more magic in your life.” This message can be seen below.

Pottermore updated their twitter header this morning.

If you do not have time to take a trip to Pottermore.com right now, here are a few screen shots of the site, with a little explanation:

The Pottermore homepage is simply designed, with sparse wording and only three other groups of linked pages to access: Explore (top left corner), Read (middle homepage), and Menu (top right corner).

Hitting “Explore” in the top left corner of the homepage simply opens up a search engine. The engine works much like Google, it starts guessing what you are looking for as you start typing.

Opening the “Menu” in the top right corner leads to a sparse, self- explanatory menu. “Writings by J.K. Rowling” takes one to a page where they can read additional information not found in character profiles, or in writings of events from the books, found in “Explore the Story.”

Both of these sections highlight “Special Feature” articles. Today Pottermore is featuring “The Potter Family” in “Writings by J.K. Rowling,” which can be read here. Dolores Umbridge has been chosen as today’s feature in “Explore the Story,” which can be read here.

On the menu, “Feature” is a page dedicated to “Everything you never knew you wanted to know about the wizarding world, by the Pottermore team;” it includes articles such as “Romance in the Classrooms of Hogwarts,” “Designing Hogwarts Castle,” and “15 Times Harry Ruined the Dursleys’ Day.” The mashup of lists and articles makes this page like the Harry Potter Buzzfeed.

The newest page of the site, on the menu,  is the “News” link. This page contains articles on the latest news in the Harry Potter world–much like what we at The Leaky Cauldron and our friends at MuggleNet have been doing for years. Whatever official news is posted on the Pottermore page, we will be sure to share it with you. Today’s articles are mostly about the new Pottermore pages. However, there is one called “Fantastic Beasts Movie Roundup,” which can be read here, dedicated to “everything we know so far” (and believe me, we already know it–we’ll be on the look out for breaking news).

Overall the sites design is fairly simplistic. Exploring Hogwarts has been completely removed, and the Sorting Hat quiz is no where to be found. The site features new additions to the Harry Potter universe already, namely images created by Jim Kay for the illustrated editions of the Harry Potter books (the first one to hit shelves October 6).

This breaking news is as exciting as it is disappointing. Some of us never had the chance to complete exploring Hogwarts along the time line of books, and wish that option was still available to us from a different corner of the site. Perhaps the quizzes will one day return–with a promise of a Patronus Test from J.K. Rowling, and the only real Sorting Hat quiz ever created (Pottermore says they will…but when?).

Please visit the site and share your reactions with us. Happy exploring.