The site has been in in a movement phase for a few weeks. The layout has looked weird in many places, text blocks has looked strange and messed up, some links hasn’t worked.
But now the update is 99% finished, just some minor cleaning up on some stuffed away pages and update some old buttons. None of those are really important, and I am very busy this week, so I’ll consider this update done for now! Complete! And just tune those last small things some day when I have some spare time.
This whole update started with that I got fed up with Blogger for my blogging needs and decided to make the switch to WordPress. Blogger has worked okay for me in the past but lately I’ve got the feeling as an FTP blogger I got left out of all the new love. So with the move to WordPress I am indeed very happy now when it’s finished, as I have much more control over the blog part of the artstorm site than I ever had before. The unpleasant part was that I was running on a Windows server earlier and had to make the switch to an Apache server to be able to run WordPress. And it also took me some time to customize my WordPress template to the artstorm look.
So I had to rewrite all my scripts for the rest of the site, which I had originally written in ASP and used an Access database to feed the content with. As I have had my focus on lot’s of 3D work lately, the web site update had to be done in the background when time permitted, and that’s why the site has been a bit messed up for a while.
But now everything is rewritten in PHP and I am using a MySQL database instead for the content. And the WordPress blog runs smoothly next to my other content. I decided to update a few other things with the website when I anyway was messing around with it. So I improved the overall design, to make the site easier to read and hopefully give my visitors a better view of what I publish here, as well as adding some soon to be used functionality for quickly adding flash content to the site, streaming flash video content that is. Let’s see what I might have in store in that area.
So all parts of the site has got some love and attention and been updated now. For the first time I decided to use a non web safe font for my headings. Oh, the humanity. But it just looked so good, and it’s just a small percent, mainly Mac users, that will be affected of not having this font. Anyway, it selects some pretty good web-safe font if it doesn’t exist so no biggie really.
I also updated my URL naming policy to make these transitions between server technology go unnoticed in the future. Alas forced me this time into a massive battle with my redirects to keep my Google PR for as many pages as possible despite the new naming convention. But with a little messing around with my .htaccess files the ranking seems to have passed through to most the new pages in just a few weeks, and I guess the rest are not that far behind.
Alright, that’s it for now. I hope the site will continue to run smooth and I can focus on the much needed update of content in my portfolio and add my showreel and other things to the site.
Until next time!