Some time ago I mentioned that a completely new web standards based version of the site was in the works, to make it compatible with (amongst others) the Mozilla based range of browsers.
I didn’t talk about it on the boards anymore after this, because I had no idea how long it was going to take to finish it. I decided I was going to wait with announcing it until it was actually done. I’ve been working on it on and off for the last couple of months (hence the lack of site updates), and I’m happy to announce it’s now finished and online.
What has changed in the new version of the site:
(Please note, the changes below do not apply to these message boards. It uses a separate back end than the rest of the site, and hasn’t been changed yet. This will be done sometime in the future, but not before there has been a significant number of updates to the site.)
- All pages are valid XHTML 1.0 Strict + CSS (modern web standards, making the site both backward and forward compatible with different types of browsers), making most pages a lot smaller and therefore faster to browse. This is most noticable on smaller pages, as it had the most impact on the ‘framework’ of the page. The audio page is a good example, about 21 Kb before, about 11 Kb now. This will leave a lot more room for audio/video downloads in the future. Another advantage of the new code is that the site should be indexed even better by Google (and other search engines), due to the improved semantics of the code.
- ‘Cleaner’ interface on a lot of pages, and completely new index page for the photos section with sortable tables.
- Correct punctuation characters in most text (with the exception of the news and diary entires for the time being), such as single and double quotes, ellipsis, en/em dashes, instead of the default ‘straight’ plain text single and double quotes, etc.
- New look for quotes in articles, and newly added quotes in all interviews and reviews.
- More internal links in articles such as interviews and reviews, to albums, singles, biography, etc.
- More internal links to related pages, such as links to other albums from an individual album page, and links to the singles and other releases from the album overview page.
- More external links to movies, albums and books from press and biography pages.
- Proper titles for links, shown in ‘tooltips’ by most browsers (with the exception of most links in the news and diary entires for the time being).
- The search engine in the header now uses Google, as the results are better than the ones from the Atomz tool we used, and most people are used to Google. The downside is that we have less control over which pages will be indexed and when Google will update its index. The site has been well indexed in the past, though, so I don’t expect this will be a big issue.
- Suggestion box on the bottom of every page, with just one input field to make it easy for visitors to give us feedback about a specific page without having to enter personal information and without having to look for an e-mail adress.
If you come across anything that doesn’t look right or doesn’t work properly, please let me know by posting here, or by using the suggestion box on the bottom of the page where you’ve encoutered the issue.
If you’d like to compare a new page with the old version, to get an idea of what’s changed add ‘/1.0’ in the URL in your browser, right after ‘.co.uk’ to see the old version of a page.
For example:
…co.uk/1.0/discography/…
Almost all pages have an old version with the same address, but there might be one or two exceptions where you’ll get a ‘page not found’ error. This is when a page has a changed address. The old live adresses are being redirected, so there are no dead ends, but this doesn’t apply to the temporary old site.
With this project out of the way, Sarah and I will work on getting the ‘normal’ site updates back up to speed.
To everyone who has e-mailed me with suggestions and content for the site in the last couple of months - your e-mail has not been forgotten and will be dealt with, now that this project is done.
I hope you see the benefits of the changes and that it all works as expected for everyone.
Posted on Sun, 31 July 2005 at 18:41
