You maybe wondering why when I only completed the last redesign a year ago.
Well, I have several reasons:
- We redesigned the Headscape site and I wanted boagworld.com to feel like part of the same family.
- Techniques in responsive web design have improved dramatically over the last year and I wanted to reflect that.
- I wanted the site to be built using LESS for ease of maintenance.
- The previous redesign was built on my original installation of wordpress which is over 5 years old. I wanted to ‘clean house’ in an attempt to improve performance.
- I was concerned about the fractured boagworld community and wanted to address this problem.
So what has changed?
What’s new
There are loads of minor changes beyond the obvious facelift. However, the top three differences are:
More responsive
The responsiveness on the previous site was somewhat of an after thought. This time the site has been designed from the content out. As a result the appearance and usability on mobile devices should be dramatically better.
Comments now available on mobile devices
Previously comments were disabled on mobile devices, which was an insane decision. It was pure laziness on my part and stifled the boagworld community. This has been corrected now so get posting.
The forum is replaced by a Q&A section
I have agonised about this for a long time, but eventually decided to close the forum. It was hard to maintain, poorly implemented and plagued with spam.
As I considered the alternatives I concluded that 99% of the things posted to the forum were questions. I have therefore decided to create a new Q&A section.
Driven by twitter you can post questions direct from the site or using the hashtag #helpbw.
Questions will then be displayed on the site and users can choose to either answer on Twitter or submit answers to me via email and we will post them on the site.
Myself and other community members will also be picking questions to answer in more detail. Any question posted to the site will be open to anybody to add their thoughts via the comments.
Confused? Check out the Q&A section and hopefully it will all be much clearer.
Much still to do
I should make it clear that this site is far from done. There is no print stylesheet and no doubt many bugs to iron out. However, I wanted to make it live now for one simple reason: It is better than the old design.
Knowing when to launch is always tricky. After all if you launch too soon then people may visit the site, be frustrated and never come back. However, if you are too much of a perfectionist then you will never launch.
My solution to this is to launch as soon as what you have is better than what is currently online. For me, that is now.
I need your help
That said, I know there will be problems I haven’t spotted. I am therefore keen to gather feedback from you guys.
If you see something not working, please complete the form below and Ill get on to it as soon as possible.
What next
With this rebuild out of the way you can expect me to be posting much more regularly again. With the podcast returning to a weekly format, my regular audio tips and the new Q&A section, you can expect to see posts multiple times a week.
If you haven’t subscribed then now would be a good time.
