OmegaSoft Development Blog
OmegaSoft.co.uk redesign
09 January 2007 - 01:57 PM
Since the new year, many of you may have noticed that the site design on many pages has been altered.
'Again?' I hear you shout. 'Wasn't this site redesigned a few months ago?'
Well, scarily enough the last site redesign was over 12 months ago, and we're kind of in a roll where we give the site a fresh new overhaul every year or so.
There are many reasons for the redesign. We not only have to keep up with presentation, websites go through fashions too! Remember OmegaSoft using frames? Back in the day when frames were cool?
Well, they ain't anymore, so its important to keep up with what users want. Using latest tools and specifications to enable the site looks perfect in many of the new browsers which have been released. Since the last site redesign, Microsoft have launched IE7 and Firefox have also rolled out a few new versions of their award winning tool.
But the most important reason for redesign, is our new (codenamed) Vision Logic template engine, which we will be launching in September.
Seperating presentation from logic on our websites have always been our bain. We hardly ever did it. We would knock up some handy website in Dreamweaver, FrontPage or whatever we was using at the time, and that was it. Blam on the servers, and you all used it.
But as the site tried to grow, this static data was inapropriate. It didn't allow for global customisations. At one point, we had a few hundred articles on the site for various products and news. And when we decided to change the design of the site, we had to manually alter very page individually!
Well, as you all appriciate... wouldn't our time be better spent developing our products and services?
Yes, thought so. Well, last year - or just before in all honesty - we decided to cut out all the fancy stuff, stick with a simple layout and focus on our web services.
This was the best descision at the time. But this still used about 30 various static pages across the site - excluding the online services we offered - PathSearch, LiveSpace, iForum...
A few pages, like the press desk and this blog made use of logic-presentation layers. Storing the information in a database, rather than on file.
Well now, we're doing it for everything! We've now found the best way to handle presentation and our information seperately. Allowing for a truly dynamic experience.
This allowing, we shouldn't need to do any major overhauls to the site for a few years to come!
OmegaSoft