The New Site
The new site is split into three main parts, the main site, the gallery with the bulk of the papers and the forum. What we have done over the last few weeks is update the main part of the site. This section includes the projects, quick cards, special days, special events, site map, craft article, useful information and now the design archive.
One new aspect is the FAQ section. Although we may site rename this as the help section. We will gradually build this up to be the main help area for the site. Any questions which get asked through email or the contact Us form could end up here if we think it is an issue others may face. The other new aspect is this blog which you obviously know about as you are reading it.
Issues.
The upgrade certainly hasn’t gone without issues. We’ve knocked the entire site offline at least twice and the gallery section once. The archived sections have proved quite difficult to do although we think we are there now! There may be a few more issues to come as we continue to fine tune the site. At the moment we are working on it’s speed, trying to make the pages load faster and use as few resources as possible. We will obviously keep any downtime to a minimum.
Benefits.
The main benefit of this new site is that it can be viewed on just about any internet connected device. Computers, tables and phones. I can’t believe that many people will be wanting to download papers via their phone ( or even tablet if it comes to that). However we are gradually building up other parts of the site which people may want to visit on devices other than a computer.
The new systems we are using for the site is also easier to update, edit and add new content to. Hopefully we will be able to spend less time on the site and more on the content!
Future.
We still need to do something with the main papers area. That will be the next thing to be worked on.
Technical Bit
For those who are interested in these thing! Up till last month we individually build every page of the site except the gallery and the forum. Whilst keeping the Gallery and Forum we have just moved the rest of the site over to WordPress. Whilst this means I no longer have the level of control I had over individual pages, it does make the day to day running of the site simpler.
