It’s been over three years since the Station received a redesign, back in July 2018 when we also got our own domain. It was a big step forward in making this space unique to us, but there were still major issues that I simply had to ignore at the time.
Following the changes to permalinks, it is now time to witness the second redesign. One on a whole other magnitude from the first, and one that I am particularly proud about, given all the work and self-teaching I had to do to complete this redesign myself. All in all, it took approximately 80 hours of searching, setting up an environment, coding, reverse engineering, and a lot of testing and iteration to achieve the results you see today. Every idea I tried to implement except for two eventually worked out.
Improvements:
Website loading time may be marginally faster now that the code was cleaned up. If anything, maybe less resource intensive? (Didn’t seem to make a difference to me, but I have a fast computer.) No longer does it need to render the default WordPress theme I’ve chosen, which is a bright white and red design, then go back through and re-render it with different fonts, colors, alignment, and spacing for pretty much every part of the page.
Speaking of alignment and spacing, the layout of content on the page should be friendlier to use, especially for screen sizes smaller or wider than a typical computer monitor, like a mobile screen. It is an improvement I could have done before, but only now given myself the time to really play around and iterate. And, complete the work in a fraction of the time it would have taken before, now that I have a proper process setup to develop.
There is now a breadcrumb bar at the top of each post, pointing back to the primary category the post belongs in. This feature is especially useful for serial posts, being able to return to the cover page with one click after reading through a few chapters rather than requiring two or more clicks and a few scrolls by going to ‘Series’ then finding the right cover page for the story.
Finally, I did end up implementing permalink redirects to the Station, making my last announcement partially mute. What this means is all the old links with the date in them will still work. They will simply redirect to the new addresses. This affects Station 191 and older. What drove me to implement redirects was the breadcrumb bars for serial posts. Since the plugin I am using for breadcrumbs cannot link to another post, the best I could do was set them to link to a category page, then redirect to the cover pages.
And many other improvements no one else but I care about:
The colors of pretty much every little thing on the website are what I want them to be now.
The SEO is not as suicidal as before. They’re still as good as they can be for a fiction writing website, compared to a news website, but each post now has a proper meta description and searchable keyphrases.
Conclusion:
I will of course continue to tweak a few things here and there as I use the website, just as everyone else does. But I’ve pretty much got it in the state where I am satisfied with the appearance and user experience. With this redesign out of the way, I should be able to rest easy and put some more focus back into writing. If you have any feedback or suggestions, or you notice something wonky, feel free to drop a comment below. Otherwise, I hope you have a pleasant experience, and I’ll see you at the next station.
— taikode