We’ve completed the initial phase of our website redesign!
In the next few days, we’ll be editing all of our old pages with redirects to the equivalent page at the new website. Some of the pages already redirect property and a few of them (like the main home page) automatically do so after a second or two.
We want to keep the old site in place for a while to let the search engines catch up with the move. After about a week, we’ll move all of the old pages into an archived subset of our new website for historical purposes only.
We’ve painstakingly recreated every page on the old site in the new design so that all of your important information is still there in the new one. The first advantage of the new site is the great site-wide search function.
The move was done for a couple of reasons. First, our old site was looking pretty aged. It was created by hand in static HTML. It has been tiresome to edit and keep up to date because of this. I think that the design looked OK but it was based upon Windows XP – which contributed to the “yesterdays web” look.
So, we moved to a CMS based upon Joomla 1.5. It was a significant learning curve but I was able to draw upon the knowledge of people smarter than me to get me on the right path. I am immensely greatful for everyone who has helped me switch paradigms into the world of Joomla.
Now that the initial change-over phase has been completed, we can start looking for ways to make the website more interactive and social. I’m very excited about the possibilities. There are so many smart and talented people using VNCScan in ways that I never imagined. You guys deserve a website that can let you share that knowledge and help each other out.
Any comments on the new website will help steer it’s direction.