Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Time for a makeover!

First admission - I ­­­am not a website designer. I started the Power Windows website almost ­­­­20 years ago when I was tasked to put together a simple website for the job I had at the time. To get my feet wet in website design, I first created this Rush website as a means to share Rush wallpaper. This was back in 1998 when the internet was a dull place and there were very few Rush resources out there, and even fewer Rush images. I know what I like to see on a website, however, and basically pieced it together as I went along. I used my site to serve my Rush addiction, and accordingly it has grown significantly over the years.

For the last 19 years things have gone fairly smoothly until I started getting complaints that my site wasn’t “mobile friendly”. What? Mobile friendly? “Who cares” was my knee jerk response, but as this happened more and more frequently I realized I either had to close up shop for good or do a site redesign.

Obviously I opted for the redesign and it has taken months to finish, but before I began I thought about how I could make things more simple. My old site had stuff for any given album spread out into various pages. Now, everything for a given album (or video) release is found on that album’s page. There you will find not only the linernotes and lyrics, but also the tourbook (if there is one), desktop wallpaper, themes, and more. I drew the line at chopping up the Transcript Archive, as there are many articles that are not album specific that couldn’t be pigeonholed into any given album’s page. It’s a complete redesign, truly, but it still is not quite done - my News page is on Google’s “Blogger” platform and needs lots of work, but that will have to wait.

So there you have it, I hope it works. Oh, and it’s mobile friendly…