A couple days a go, I wrote a blog post announcing a brand new DANK.org was coming soon and that I would have more info in the coming weeks. Well, work on the new site is coming along quickly, and it looks like the design has been finalized. I know some of you may be wondering why DANK’s website is getting redesigned so soon, so I would like to detail some of the reasons in this posting.
Revising the Current Content
When DANK.org got it’s major facelift last year, we essentially took the old website and gave it a new look. There was some new content and a few new features like the blog and forum, but around 80% of the content was unchanged. The goal was to completely update the content after the initial launch in February last year, but in reality it did not happen. So that is one of the main goals of this new update…to tackle the remaining 80%.
Keeping Up-To-Date on Design Trends
The web is constantly evolving, and what once looked fresh and up-to-date now looks stale. DANK’s current website design was done back in 2008, and at the time it featured design elements that were popular. 2009 saw some large changed in design trends, and DANK.org quickly looked outdated. There has also been a change in the way people are accessing the web. More and more people are visiting websites using a mobile device and it is important to have a site that functions well on touch screen phones and devices.
Working Out the Bugs
One of the most time consuming parts of managing a website is to make sure everything works they way it is supposed to. The current website has quite a few bugs in its current form, and part of the difficulty in fixing them has to do with problems in the websites core structure. Not only that, but when designing a website it is important to make sure it looks the same on all web browsers. 59% of our visitors use Internet Explorer, 25% use Firefox, and 13% use Safari. Designing a site for that works for that 59% is what takes the most time and effort. Internet Explorer does not follow the official standards that are in place for web design, but since a majority of web users still use it, the time has to be taken to create workarounds so that it looks the same as the standards compliant browsers. To make a long story short, a lot of work is being done on this new site to make it look and function the same in all major web browsers.
Hopefully I have answered a few questions and in future posts I will be giving a sneak peak of the new design, and detail some of the new features. So check back frequently for the latest updates!
Find more like this: Website Update
Stephen, thanks again for all the hard work you put into the DANK web-site. We all sincerely appreciate it very very much!
thanks for doing a GREAT job!!