Web Site 2.0

We’ve been doing a bit of house cleaning here online.

Actually, “house cleaning” isn’t the right word. More like, “Totally disassemble the house, rethink what we’re trying to accomplish with our online presence, test to see what works, and rebuild the whole shebang from the ground up.”

Let’s just call it house cleaning.

The first thing you’ll notice on our new website is that we’ve changed everything. Every single page was rethought and rewritten: our navigation, our content, our downloads, and of course, our design. Our goal was simplicity, a sense of energy and movement, and beautiful typography.

Our design was spearheaded by Karen Klefman, the resident genius at Klefman Creative, Inc. She conceptualized the new look of the site, including our logo and newsletter. (And by the way, you’ll be seeing a lot more of that logo in the future. Stay tuned.)

And as beautiful as Karen’s design is, the programming behind the site is just as well thought out. We’ve created a tableless site that is fully HTML5 and CSS3 compliant, all without the use of Flash. The site makes use of microformats and semantic markup, and is PHP compressed for a lightning quick response on your mobile device. (To help with our programming efforts, we looked to Dan Durski at 3Design Studios. Great guy, tons of experience, and a CSS and HTML wizard).

I could go on and on, from the new functionality in the site map (go ahead, click on those XML files), to the expanded payment options, to the stunning pictures (thank you, Kathleen) that are now accessible on your computer and smartphone.

But, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

We hope you like the new look.

7 thoughts on “Web Site 2.0”

  2. You know I was just saying to Ryan as I clicked on this link, “hmm, wonder when Jerry will post a blog about the new site?!”

    tadaaaa

  3. Thanks, John.

    We’re looking for constructive feedback, particularly if the site fails in some way on your browser. We tested the site on IE, Safari, mobile Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, but there are tons of devices out there.

  5. Squashed the remaining bugs. Specifically:

    1. Added 301 redirects to htaccess file, for better google-fu.
    2. Activated the expires module server side for a faster mobile experience.
    3. Fixed videos in blog that got borked during the transition.
    4. Some typography fixes.
    5. A missing resource fix that turned up in Safari’s web inspector.

    Yay!

    Big thanks to Dee who did the bulk of the heavy lifting.

    Now, the *new* newsletter and Grady’s website….

  6. Grady,

    I removed the picture and rank board on your dojo page, and added three seminar photos. Is this what you had in mind? Please let me know.

    I also experimented with the background color, but now think that the current blue works best. It matches the other elements on the page.

    What other pages do you want to refresh?

  7. Might as well make this a reference post for the new website. More changes:

    6. Removed microformat metadata on main pages and replaced with microdata, using schema.org markup.
    7. Corrected microformat metadata on blog.
    8. Improved semantics of website with h1 - h3 headers.
    9. Improved accessibility with the lang attribute.
    10. Added more discoverable home link to blog. Credit to Anastasia.
    11. Added other blogs to sidebar. Credit to Lawrence.
    12. Typography fixes.

Comments are closed.