For the past few weeks, we’ve been working on re-launching the Tailored Web Services site. For a long time its been a painful mix of Blogger and static pages. The design was also a bit outdated. There’s a ton of content on this site, but poor navigation and structuring makes the good stuff very hard to find.
Today I give you: Tailored Web Services Reborn.
Based on the Thesis wordpress theme, we’ve customised it heavily. Customisations include;
- Custom widgets
- For twitter, Sponsors, Featured Product
- Also to show 1 category of links at a time (Recommended Reading, Worth a Look, Top Resources, etc)
- Additional dynamic sidebars
- The three columns in the footer are widget-enabled, for easy management
- Heavily customised Header area
- Includes Blog Archives, Newsletter Subscription, and Contact Info
- Custom 404 page
- Youtube video in Multimedia box
- This can be customised on a page-by-page basis with the new version of Thesis
And of course, we’ve had some birth-pains. Shortly after launching, we discovered a bug in Internet Explorer. (Isn’t that always the way?) Fortunately, I’ve run into that bug before, so it didn’t take long to fix.
Importing all the old posts from Blogger is a hassle, of course. With almost 2,000 old posts going back to 2003, there’s a lot of horrible blogger-brewed code soup. It’s going to take us a while to go through all that, and clean things up.
There’s also a lot of redirects that don’t work. I’ve caught most of the big ones, I think, but I’ll be monitoring the server logs for a few days looking for 404 errors I’ve missed.
