'Afternoon all!
While some of us are recovering from Christmas festivities we're recovering from a mammoth 13 hour tea-fuelled site session yesterday. We mentioned a while ago that we were working on the new design for Focus as the current one was only ever intended to get the site functioning and check the stuff behind the scenes all worked without falling over too much. Thankfully it all works great (thanks to Jordan's mystical code wizardry), so, on with the new design we go.
Right from the start of this project we wanted a site that was more like an image gallery than simply a list of photos, and as a result the new design is quite a departure in concept from what we currently have. We've tried to make it clean, uncluttered and simple, with several different ways to view images according to the kind of mood you're in (quickly checking something out, sitting having an in depth browse, etc). We're hopeful it will give a slightly different and more viewer-orientated experience than our current site. In addition, the new design features search engine optimised URL's meaning individual images will be easier to find.
The first version of the new design was pushed, almost in it's entirety, to our development server last night and is currently in the process of being tweaked and tested. The only page we currently have to do any serious tweaking with is the upload page, which for now largely remains the same but has had a slight makeover to make it fit with the rest of the site design. Apart from that we're very much nearing it being ready to go live, although we can't say for sure when that will happen. We still need to make sure the new bits doesn't confuse themselves - or us!
As mentioned, the concept of how the site will work is slightly different to what we currently have but we're hopeful the ease of use and strong focus on viewing will mean it's well received. As always, once we go live with the new design we're open to suggestions on how we could improve it. We're hoping to have a fairly good starting point though.
We'll keep you informed in our progress, but until then a massive thank you to everyone who's been kind enough to support the site in the year and 4 months we've been live. We've had the best start a new site we could ever wish for and everyone's support is genuinely appreciated.
Hope you've all had a great Christmas/holiday period!
Paul (The Geek) & Jordan (The Nerd)
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