I know what you're thinking. It's about time we updated our old, tired-looking website. This has been in the works for some time now, but as Chad mentioned recently, we've been in a pretty busy season the past few months. But enough with the excuses. Let's talk about the new design!
This new evolution of WacoFork.com is less about adding new features and more about cleaning house a bit. Here are some of the high points of the new design:
1. It's Responsive
Responsive design is one of those buzz words that's been thrown around the web design world for the past several years, but it basically means making your site look look good on any device, regardless of the size of its screen. The layout responds, or adjusts, to the size of the device being used to view it. That means no more zooming or squinting to read the latest blog post on your phone. You're welcome. We really should have done this a long time ago. We're way behind the curve on this one.
2. No More Ads (for now)
We've had Google ads on the site for a couple of years now, and frankly, they were ugly. Not only that, but not very many of you like clicking on ads, which means we don't get paid very much for having them on our site. If we include any ads in the future, they will be relevant ads about local businesses and not some mass-market pay-per-click ad from Google.
3. Cleaner Design
Along with removing the ads, we've removed a lot of the excess graphics that really added no value to the site. We wanted to make the site as clean as possible and get the design out of the way of the content to make it easier for you to find the content that is relevant to you.
4. Upgraded CMS
This one likely means very little to you since you don't really see the underlying CMS that we are using, but we have upgrade our CMS (Joomla) to the latest version. This gives us a much more stable platform upon which to out future functionality.
That's It!
We didn't really add any new "features", per se, unless you count the responsive design as a new feature. Our goal with this redesign was to strip everything away and get the site down to its essence, so that we can build upon that from a cleaner slate than what we had before.
