New Site Goes Online Today

The new site finally goes online today. It's been in development for about nine months. A lot of time has been spent just inputing old data into the new system. There are several objectives I had in mind in redesigning the site. First of all, the old site was looking a little dated, if not amateurish. Hopefully the new site looks a little better, although toward the end I was more concerned with finishing than with design. Secondly, I wanted to bring the coding up to current standards. For the most part, the entire site is coded as xhtml 1.0 strict, however the back end inserts some non-compliant code for the scroller on the demos page - doh! And I think there is an invalid attribute in the advanced search that I need to come up with a solution for. Other than that, it should all validate. I wanted to be able to preserve all our old content yet have the site be easy to update with new content by separating content from design. Now others besides just myself can add content - something that was difficult before, if not impossible, when the content was embedded in the html. I also want the design of the site to be easy to change. Graphics are minimal. It's not necessary to create new graphics just to change the layout or a menu item. It sure loads faster than the old site too.

One pretty cool addition to the site are the demos. We've posted around 500 demos of Rum and many old school clans. These were partially available before but were password protected. The password protection was removed about a year ago but there was no central listing for them all. Now there is as well as an advanced search. Sweet.

So hopefully the site looks better, is better organized and will be easier to update in the future. If we never update it again, however, at least the old content is preserved in a more attractive and organized way. So anyways, hope you find something of interest on the new site.