New website up
After a long time working with my own custom joomla version, I decided its time to give it a slight overall
(Especially for working with bigger resolutions

Please be aware that some old stuff is still missing until
I shift all stuff to the new server








     


sitenews: Complete overhaul


Its been a long time since I really did a significant update to the site since the server is moved, I took this as an opportunity to update the underlaying structure of the website, and in verge of the new design redo a lot of the content of the site.

So, lets dive into the design philosophy of the general splotchdog site, why I do use a cms, and whats up for future

And yes its a boring article, but I think it would be interesting in the thought process.

THE OLD HIDDEN DRUGSTORE PHILOSOPY
This was allways a concept I really wanted to have. A website wich simulates an overcrowded small shop, where you can find goodies, play with them, wonder what they do..... think the difference between amazon and aliexpress multiplied by 3000 on weirdness.

THE OLD NEEDS ARE THE NEW NEEDS
One specific specification, or need, for my website is to publish my content as fast as possible. With a regular html design, I would have to fiddle with the menus, update an article list, setup the articles, and on and on. With up to 20 pages this might be manageable, but at the end of splotchdog version 4.0 I had about 135 articles to take care of (this also counts pseudo articles, where I only changed the header description, but linked back to the original updated article). With regular html I would have gone through several redesigns to cope woth that amount.

A cms system supports the blog like structutre of my articles from the beginning, not only that but it allows me to quickly add articles, wich get indexed and searcheable. This goes on the cost of individualism wich in contreary to a system wich should display creativity. (More on this later)

Another element I've implmented since version 2.5 of the webpage was the implementation of a rigorously article sturcture. Meaning, the way the logo stickers are designed. This allowed me, once a logo for the specific page had been created and a banner image has been chosen, to generate the rest of the content in a fast way. This allowed me several times to publish a plugin in less than half an hour.

Another thing I started to implement for future expansion was the switch of the stickers from a jpg with the rounded corners to full 24bit png, so I could change the background quite easily.

WHAT WILL CHANGE ?
Not much. I will implement a more rigorous color coding for navigation. (Yes 4.0 had already a color coding for plugins...this will be expanded to all sections of the site. Green is for hdri panos, black/grey for sitewide infos etc. I'll keep the blog structure, but I will be much more bold on graphic elements. Especially on the gallery side, wich will benefit from some nice expansions inside my cms. Also I do want to expand the blog like structure, wich I promissed in the beginning of version 3.0 (The last major update).
The braindump section was the idea behind it, but I think its worth to split it into a goodies and article section

Also the bigger resolution of the whole website allows me more artistic and design freedom than the old 800px site.....but hey, it definitive need another 8 years until I go full hd :)

POST MORTEM
Not much...What I have seen is, that those videos I embeded in several plugins explaining what it actually do was actually a good thing. It was well recieved, and I think I will expand on this.
I have plans for further expansion but I won't lay them out now. expect an follow up on this article