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While the current site has done us well, there's no doubt that it's getting up in years...parts of it were developed in 2012 as a template for a project that pre-dated Wintreath. Because of that, portions of the code are either woefully out of date or reflect old standards or my limited knowledge at the time, and the site has never exactly been mobile-friendly. I was checking on Google Analytics last night, and not counting devices that are using Tapatalk, 40% of our traffic comes from mobile devices. It's a big deal.

It's a massive undertaking, but I will slowly be going through every page of the website and making sure it's mobile-friendly, coded using modern standards, and perhaps tweaking it here and there to be even better in general. I will be doing this using duplicate site pages and then rolling it over to the main website once finished. However, as I'm working on it I'll be posting updates and getting input so we can make things as best as they can be.

So basically, this is the update topic for that.

As it so happens, I already have an update to share, which you can find at wintreath.com/index2.php. You will need to be logged out to see it...the easiest way to do this is to just use another browser you have installed but aren't logged in with. Otherwise, you'll just see the newsfeed instead of what people logged out see.

Basically, I made it so that I can add text over graphics dynamically, and used that to create a sort of 'welcome to Wintreath' postcard. Despite the image being physically larger than the one on the current version of the site, the file size is actually about half of what it is now, which means that it will use less bandwidth to download. Even better, the image scales on smaller resolutions, so it should look fine on any screen. And this could be done with any image...we could change the image, even have rotating images and text to advertise anything we're doing in the community. If we were to go that route, I'd just need someone to keep track of announcements and manage the rotating messages.

Of course, the page isn't done yet. I imagine there will be more below the graphic, but I was happy with how this turned out and wanted to share it. Please let me know your thoughts.

Hey, that looks real good! Perhaps some kind of 'postcard' rotation between OTPYGIW pictures with a little bit of small text describing/linking to the post? We could potentially start integrating cultural creations from our members with our website and community pages

I've updated the wintreath.com/index2.php site. As before, you will need to be logged off to view the changes (just use a browser you're not logged in with if you don't want to logout).

Tonight was all about the area below the graphic...obviously this is incomplete, but what you have are three columns which fold together on smaller resolutions. This way you neither lose content or have the screen stretch when you're on a low resolution. You can also see some ideas of what will be there...announcements, links, tidbits of interest, etc. I'll work on this more soon.

I've also given some thought to the area with the graphic. Honestly, it makes no sense to put someone in charge of keeping it maintained, because it's tedious work that nobody wants to do...it would just end up like the old forum announcement box. My thinking is that we open it up so that anyone could add to it, and the 'top 5' or so are the ones that display. Top 5 would probably be determined by some algorithm that takes things such as type (featured announcements would probably be given higher priority, post upvotes, replies, member karma, etc.). Then after a week or two, listings are removed from the system so we don't have months-old announcements being displayed. That way we can do all sorts of things, from announcements to the things you're talking about, @Weissreich.

Could maybe even tie in other things to such a system...maybe even resurrect the forum announcement box. =P