It’s only the second time we’ve revamped the entire website, but the upgrades are huge. Now, the website is much more mobile friendly.
If you’ve been with Freezenet since the beginning, you’ll know that we started with a generic WordPress theme. This effectively represented version 1.0 of the front end of Freezenet.
Then, in November of 2014, we announced our first full re-code of the site. That represented a very significant upgrade to the overall look of the site. For the first time, Freezenet sported a fully customized look. For me, that was a major moment of pride because I overcame a lot of obstacles to get that new look going. That basically represented Freezenet 2.0.
From there, in February of last year, we introduced HTTPS. That ultimately required some reworking of the code, so ultimately, that wound up being Freezenet 2.5.
Now, in the last two weeks, we pretty much worked non-stop re-coding the website again. While it mostly looks the same, what is going on under the hood is completely different now.
The first big improvement is the navigation bar near the top. First, we fixed the bug where there is an added space between the logo and the bar itself. Secondly, the bar itself is now much slimmer. This new design removes the content-over-content aspect present in the previous design.
Additionally, this website is now much more mobile friendly. It supports resolutions that go all the way down to 320 pixels wide. This is thanks to the new responsive design built into the CSS code.
The comments form has been tweaked so words line up with the form a little better.
On some devices, the background doesn’t display properly and causes the text to overlap the background image. There is one piece of code that’s supposed to adjust the resolutions accordingly. So, in theory, that should actually fix this problem. If not, the code base we worked with also contains code that is supposed to help with mobile friendliness. In theory, if the first bit of code doesn’t work, the second should. If all that fails, we’ve got a third bit of code that reworks the format anyway to (mostly) eliminate this visual problem. In short, we hope we finally fixed that bug.
This version also carries over the bug fixes we previously fixed. This includes support for lists in posts themselves as well as emoticons now displaying properly.
An addition is that small things have a subtle animation added to them to add to overall smoothness.
Finally, an ad has been adjusted to accommodate the new mobile friendly nature of the site.
So, in summary, we hope this represents a massive improvement for your experience. We poured a lot of work into this and hope you like it!
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
