Pottermore announces public opening date, gives reason for delay and hints at some changes to come

You’ve probably been following the progress, or rather lack of progress, with JK Rowling’s Pottermore website over the last several months. Well, after a very long silence, the Pottermore team have finally spoken out. (We think our tweets and emails may have helped!)

Some of you will be very pleased to hear that there is now an official date that Pottermore will open to the public – April 2012! That’s around 6 months later than planned, but we’re glad it’s finally happening and we’re happy that they’ve offered some explanation and hinted at visible changes being made to the site. Here’s what they said over on the Insider Blog:

We’re pleased to announce that pottermore.com will be open to everyone in early April 2012.

We know that the extended wait for those wishing to be part of Pottermore has been frustrating, and we’d like to thank you all for your patience so far.

Many of you are interested to know why we extended the original opening date beyond October of last year.

We always knew Pottermore would be incredibly popular, which is why we made the decision to only open to one million Beta users to begin with. We wanted to make sure that we had a really good understanding of how people want to use the site and which bits we’d need to modify before giving more people access.

We gathered some incredibly useful feedback from our Beta users, and it became clear that our original platform wouldn’t be suitable when millions more users came on to the site. So we made a big decision: to move Pottermore to an entirely different platform set up. This ‘invisible’ change has involved a lot of work behind the scenes but it will enable our users to get the best from Pottermore as it grows and develops.

There have definitely been some challenges and the whole Pottermore team has been working really hard to incorporate all the Beta activity and feedback. This means that over the coming weeks and months we’ll be adding exclusive content and many more exciting features (such as sounds) to Pottermore for you to explore, share and discover.

So get ready to join the Pottermore journey – the wait is nearly over.

Posted by on March 8, 2012 at 3:00 pm.

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