I know. I understand. Don’t worry, though! You really did reach the correct web-site. If you’re a new visitor to the site, fine, ignore all of this. If you’re a regular or recurring visitor, then yes, you will notice there’s something a little different. I decided that since hand coding my website style and design in 2006 it was time for an overhaul (wouldn’t you agree if you see all those old websites that look like they still live in the mid 90’s?). Not just the style but the functionality too. I would like to say it was a huge effort but I found it to be a rather smooth and easy experience and I’ve always said, I’m not a web-guy or web-designer of any kind. But I suspect that having done “rocket science stuff” for so long makes everything feel like it’s a lesser complexity! 🙂
I’ve integrated better navigation, a fresh sidebar, new page-head styles (tip: refresh blog posts to see random header images) and a whole lot more. It should make the site easier to navigate through, sort, and explore at your convenience. On the back-end of the site a lot of stuff has changed as well which should make it a little easier for me to do more regular blogging (yep, I can hear you go “uh oh”).
The new style and back-end are not a stand-alone development, though. Everything you see here, albeit in a different layout, is based on work that is progressing for the Ignyter and Ignytion web-sites. Those are going to take a while longer before they see the light of day and become open to the public. There’s all these pesky details to take care of business-wise before I could possibly launch the sites. Once they go live I’ll certainly mention it here but it won’t be for a few months yet, I can say that much.
If you like the new style, let me know in the comments. If you hate the new style, well… let me know as well. However, if you are one of those folks out there who likes to claim I have too much hardware that I don’t need and can’t possibly justify to get my work done I’m sure you’ll be telling me that the new style of the site is more than I need and can’t possibly justify having a web-site. Either way, you can comment on that too! 🙂
Seems to load several seconds slower than the old one. Looks good, though.
It’s more picture-heavy so I expected a bit of slow-down but it appears the actual slowdown might be on account of the translation widget. I noticed things getting slower with the old site a bit as well in the past months. Time to start looking for a more ‘serious’ VPS host this year, though, as I plan to consolidate all the sites back to a single server at some point.