Teaching an new dog old tricks

Whoops, what is going on here? Everything looks strange. Yes, that is actually on purpose. The last version of our website started to become a bit out-dated, and so it was high time for a rebrush. Since our old website was already quite good, it would not be that much work, right? Well, actually instead of teaching the old dog new tricks, I went and got a new dog to behave pretty much like the old one, and then taught him the following new tricks.

Responsive Design

After developing the last version of our website back in 2012, I was quite happy to get it running on a normal PC monitor. Unfortunately, I did not take into account how bad it would scale to mobile devices. Since I work in the field of mobile Apps myself, this was immediately a thorn in my side. However, the old WordPress theme was so bad, that I would have had to redo everything to get it to work for mobile devices. And that is exactly what I did now. The new version of the website works with any device at least as big as a common smartphone.

New CMS

My experiences with WordPress also showed me that I grossly underestimated the topic of security five years ago. A huge percentage of blogs on the internet are running WordPress, which paints an equally huge target on your back. Starting with spam-bots leaving automated comments, to malware infecting the site through new exploits, it simply pays off to crawl the web for WordPress websites and target them. Additionally, I used a huge amount of third-party plugins for WordPress, which sometimes delayed me from updating the site, leaving us open for exploits, even if they were already patched in a new version. The new website runs on a different CMS, which has a higher focus on security. Also it is not used as often as WordPress, and that alone should help reduce automated attacks. Regarding the plugins, this time I wrote them almost all myself, so I won't depend on many other developers for updates.

Completed the Functionality

I must admit, I was getting a bit sloppy in the final stages of the redesign of 2012. Consequently, some of the site's most important contents were simply half-assed. Some other things were poorly thought-out, leading to good content disappearing on our site. With this update, I re-thought all areas of the site, and I removed obsolete content, and added what was missing in the first place.

Over the next weeks, I'll gradually introduce you to the most important changes.

I have put great effort in migrating the existing content. If you notice any mistakes or errors, please don't hesitate to write me. I hope you have fun with our new website!