RACC Redevelopment, In Progress

/Blog #Webdev

Over the long weekend, I found some time to keep working on the redesign/update of my website, including the Rec Arts Comics Creative area. I’ve had a clear picture of how I wanted it to work for a while now, but I kept getting stumped when I tried to apply a design to it... it just wouldn’t come together. Over the last couple days, it finally started to gel, and I have the following (in-progress) page in working order...

RACC redevelopment, in progress

I’ve managed to strap the general layout I previewed before with the colours and logo I put together recently, all on HTML5. Also, rather than parsing Google Groups’ RSS feed every time the page is loaded, I now have a cron script that drops all new items into a database... much faster page loads, and easier to manage.

The news on the left sidebar now have short summaries, rather than just the titles. The biggest change has been the "collapse" of the recently released comic issues in the main column. In the current live site, each posted issue had a place on the twelve-recent-issues main column... however, I was discovering that issues usually came from the same series in "bursts". Someone would write a four issue arc for example, and those issues would make up a quarter of the recent releases. There was nothing inherently wrong with that, but I wanted it to be more like a comic-book stand; highlight all the recent series (not necessarily the recent issues), and have "previous" issues available "behind" them.

The new layout is a move toward that idea. Now, when an new issue is posted, it automatically appears at the top of the column, as before. If there is an older issue in the column (released earlier), then it is removed, and listed with the newest issue under the Past Issues heading. A great result of this is the new layout lists issues from today all the way back to early November, where the current one only lists it back to mid-January... yet both only have about twelve main entries.

Hope you RACC-eteers the preview. Feel free to comment with thoughts and/or suggestions :)

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