The Why Of The Update

27-08-2009

Right, finally, back to normal blogging and ranting about things. This will be the last rant about the recent site work that was going on.

Why? Why go and update the site yet again after only having the old style for about a year. Well there are a few reasons for this one.

First and foremost was because I wanted to give it a little face lift.

I have also been browsing a lot of blogs lately by webcomic artists and graphic artists and liked how their sites looked a little...more mature is probably the best way to describe them. Since I have started to get back into drawing I wouldn't mind uploading more and more images as I get time, so I liked the idea of making the site look a little more like those artist sites.

Enter the new logo at the top, the more square design to things and the graphic in the background. The Bauble now (should) look a little more mature.

Now, I know some might like the background and some might not, but as usual the site is something I make and have it my way so I don't care. I like it.

I also like how the site has ended up overall now. I think I would be quite happy to keep this look and feel to it for a few years now. Maybe the odd tweak here and there but overall it is what I wanted the site to look like many moons ago.

Despite the complaining and amount of work it took to get the new site up and running it wasn't all wasted effort on just making things look pretty. I did a major overhaul of how some of the internal stuff on the site works. Stuff that a user would never even see. This will make things (in theory) run better and also make adding in a few new features much easier.

For the moment the "Random" page is still missing from the menu. This is not a permanent thing. I have not forgotten about that little section and will get a "Random" page back up when I make it.

Interestingly enough, I thought the modifications would effect my pagerank on Google (go on, do a search for "bluejester"). But as it happens it didn't effect it at all.

I told some people one time that my pagerank was as high as it was because of how the site was coded, but since ther new code is now in place, which removes an old method for storing rants, it appears I was mistaken before.

I guess being on the interwebs for nearly three years helped get me that top spot.

What I will be working on in the future is the RSS feed, the subscription feature, the Random page, some new drawings and t-shirt work and that t-shirt store.

Although that final one is going to be a separate site entirely and only linked off from here. In fact I won't be maintaining it even, that will be the task of my younger brother once I get the code finished for him.

Some time I might even not have a dozen projects on the go at the same time.

Wonder what that would be like.

Blue_jester