How Long Might We Wait?

So I admit. I was looking forward to walking in, going to Pottermore.com and seeing the new site on 4 days ago. Even though I'm pretty sure my thoughts are known about Pottermore and how they've run the site so far.  I was honestly looking forward to seeing exactly what crawled out of the ashes.

But well... it's been three days. We know Pottermore's initial last day seemed to be the 16th, and would conclude at 1PM in London. So, why? Why are we stuck in this "limbo"? Well the short answer appears to be "Pottermore doesn't have it's **** together." Though they are claiming it's a good move to allow more access to their certificates.

However, to anyone during the beta period, this rings a sort of alarm, as we know from then how Pottermore can make a habit out of pushing dates off. Again. And again. And again. (Fun fact: Pottermore was originally supposed to open some time in October 2011. It opened April 14, 2012.)

So the thing is, it is probably difficult to guess what Pottermore will be doing. Very, very difficult. This is, after all, a site that had a limited beta period of about 9 months. And this isn't even counting when they may have started alpha testing the initial site, which may have been for a good bit longer. So if this is anything like the initial release, it may just be that much like the old guard, this group is very slow to move, and was unable to meet it's own deadlines.

So the question is effectively "how long has this been in the works?" We can't really be sure of this, but if I had to make my own effort in guessing, I would say it's been the case since the new Terms were added, or roughly around the time that comments were removed. Perhaps this may have been even sooner, with the release of Order of the Phoenix as the release was all in one go and rather short.   And that was out around October, and the art came out well before then... so let's say that the plan has been in place for well over a year.  This suddenly makes things seem a lot more likely, and pushes things closer to a "sane" development line to some extent, as they would have over a year to design and code the new site format, which itself may have been influenced by early demands for an app thath may have been "crystalized" in what we are getting now. Though I'm not certain that they had made the decision to axe games at that point. Certainly, it would explain the scant updates we received, but given there were still updates, it may not have been set by that time.

Further supporting this is the new "editorial" group to be added on the new site churning out content as well as Rowling. Now, unless they had just hired ramdom muggles off the street that showed signs of a pulse and thought, or perhaps hired a chimp army, we have to assume that Pottermore chose and went through a full hiring process for an editorial board of at least three people, if not more, and that these people are probably churning out content, even now, to go with the new features.

Giving even more creedence to this educated bet is the partnership between Pottermore and Warner Bros, that perhaps solves one of Pottermore's biggest problems: limited merchandise.  More likely than not, merchandise requests go through and are passed by Warner Brothers. With this in mind, Pottermore gets to sell more merchandise, and Warner Brothers gets another storefront (which is debatable if they needed or not, but given that Pottermore may now be able to sell exclusive merchandise with the blessing of Warner Brothers, I doubt they are upset).