Not sure how many folks will be interested in my ruminations on the new design…
The first four days of the new design were plagued by server issues. We were grossly underpowered and as a consequence everybody had trouble getting to the site. We crashed the server a couple times and on Weds, the ISP told us to rack off in the nicest possible way.
So, we’re on our own dedicated box and are now going pretty quick. No complaints about speed since the move.
As usual, I’m learning as I go. I’ve never done something quite like this, so I’ve probably not done an entirely great job. Still, the move had to happen because the old site was such a nightmare to manage and maintain.
This is so much easier! I can do lots of little chores very quickly and the underlying blogging platform is radically more flexible than what we had.
But the audience is not uniformly in favour of the changes. A poll I had running on the site showed the majority felt it was a bad move. Rightly or wrongly, I’m taking this with a grain of salt because the service was so diabolically bad when that poll was running. My hunch (hope?) is that main problem was not the overall design, but the annoying slowness and error pages we were getting.
I’m still trying to get a mag out, but once I finish with that, I have a plan to write a series of posts about how folks can use the new system. I hope that will brighten up those who are dark with me about the changes.
Over the weekend I’ve started knocking over a list of stuff I couldn’t finish for the launch. There’s lots more to do, but the good thing is that I can roll the changes out as I do them. As I’ve said elsewhere, I really should have put a big “beta” somewhere on the site to let people know that things aren’t set in concrete and that we’ll be evolving quickly.
More on these topics soon!
-Don
