The site may look a little different today (or over the past day and a bit). The entire layout has been stripped down by removing all the images. This is to make the site load faster and to provide me with an easy way to organize the site to feature the proper areas before slowly building up a new template again.
The menu will be vastly simplified again just to make everything that much easier. New sections have also been added to the menu which now has a complete focus on providing easy access Neopets news.
The news area is also the main focus of PPT with a large link inviting people to submit their own news for inclusion. Let’s see how this plays out over the next few months.
Update: The news boxes and the left and right navigation boxes have been converted from HTML tables to CSS for faster loading times. Paving the way towards the future here people!
Update 2: The more news box at the bottom of every page is now also converted to CSS. Hello faster page loading times!
Update 3: I’ve just gone to heck with it and bought a license for cutenews which is the official news updating platform on PPT. Time to put those PPT funds to good use I say. Interestingly the comments seem to be working now. Very well. Curious…
Demulesca on May 22nd, 2007 at 6:17 pm says:
Glad to see the new changes. It’s unfortunate that you’re on cutenews now ;), I’m not a big fan of it but I’m glad that the website loads a lot faster.
Kym on May 22nd, 2007 at 8:11 pm says:
Ta for the comment. Yeah I’m liking how the page loads faster, but moreso it allows me to feature the important things properly before building up the template again.
Not a fan of cutenews eh? Got any suggestions?
Demulesca on May 23rd, 2007 at 11:09 pm says:
Yeah, although I’m not a big fan of liquid, it’s working pretty well. I think it suits the type of webpage.
I hate cutenews, I tried it a while ago. Now I’m a big fan of Wordpress. I don’t want to harass you about which script you’re using though.
It just allows a lot more freedom and what not that cutenews doesn’t have, on addition to that: it’s completely free. Hehe. Instead of having just your dynamic front page, the entire website is on mySQL database that Wordpress uses.
Thus, it’s easy for you to edit every single page on the website just by logging into WP. Also you can have user accounts (the same as cutenews) but the user-ranks are dealt with really well. You can control everything that everyone can do. (That has an account.) Not to mention it has tons of awesome plugins because of it’s larger professional community. But anyway, that’s just me being a fangirl of WP.
Demulesca on May 23rd, 2007 at 11:10 pm says:
My God, I just realized that you’re using Wordpress right now. *rolls her eyes*
I should pay attention to what I’m doing. But anyway, I think that you’d really benefit from switching the entire website to WP.
Kym Huynh on May 24th, 2007 at 4:00 am says:
Lol yeah this blog is on wordpress. I would switch everything over but there’s simply too much to do. We’re talking nearly two thousand pages of content
Demulesca on May 24th, 2007 at 9:52 am says:
Yeah but think of the benefits.
And there’s always people who know what they’re doing that can help you. *cough*
But most of your pages are outdated, like the guides that have tips that don’t work anymore, so it could give you some content refreshing power too.
Kym Huynh on May 26th, 2007 at 5:36 pm says:
Yeaaah… I dunno… I’m just not convinced of the benefits of converting to a wordpress yet for the entire site. First issue is how they articles can be all categorized… for example, if you visit a game guide, all the links in there go to solutions, secrets and tips etc. etc. etc. How would this all work in the framework of wordpress?
Also, putting everything into wordpress format, although with extra hands will help, will still take a LOT of work… there needs to be some substantial benefit to justify the effort…
Rhian on May 26th, 2007 at 10:50 pm says:
Wow I haven’t been to PPT for a while but I really like that you changed the layout - it does load waaaaay faster so good job
Kym Huynh on May 27th, 2007 at 12:17 am says:
Thanks for the feedback Rhian!
Demulesca on May 27th, 2007 at 2:09 pm says:
I don’t quiteknow the situation you’re describing. But you know what, I can send you a link to a Wordpress database I have set up, and I’ll let you login and play around with it. I’m sending you e-mail!
Demulesca on May 27th, 2007 at 2:17 pm says:
Ah crap, I just realized again that you already have WP.
Sigh.
I really wish I could delete my comments.
Anyway, any clarification on what you meant about the categories?
Kym Huynh on May 27th, 2007 at 6:48 pm says:
Categories aside, how would the guides and articles be sorted? Would they be created as “posts” or “pages”?
Would news only be reserved for “posts”?
I guess we could trial it to see how it works. How about I set up an empty wordpress site and you go in and show me what you mean by uploading a couple of articles from PPT Main, and we’ll work it from there?
Demulesca on May 28th, 2007 at 8:46 am says:
Oh, sorry I misunderstood your question.
The guides and articles would be sorted as pages. The posts are for your front page as your news. Posts however can be categorized to interface with the pages if you want them to. Wordpress has lots of tags dedicated to both sections so you can display all your posts in one category. Say, if you had a bunch of posts that you wanted in the Games section as opposed to the news, you would just code it in PHP in their templates to ensure that that page only shows posts that are categorized as games.
I can show you how PPT might work in WP, although would you want it in PPT’s current template? Because that would take considerably longer.
Gfaerie on May 29th, 2007 at 8:49 am says:
I’m glad to hear that the main site is going to have a complete overhaul.
I for one have had difficulty browsing through the numerous neopets articles in the past in a vain attempt to find exactly what i was looking for.
Good luck Kym (and anyone else involved!). It sounds like you have quite a task on your hands.
Kym Huynh on June 1st, 2007 at 9:01 am says:
Hmm ok I see what you mean Demulsca. It could be a very interesting project… I’d like to perhaps see a sample… maybe 5 or so articles put up to see if something like this could work.
Are you able to create pages in this blog Demulsca? Maybe trying here first and if it works - we’ll convert it to the main site.
Template wise, it’s not really a big issue. It’s always an evolving process.
Demulesca on June 5th, 2007 at 11:23 am says:
Yeah, creating pages in this blog is easy.