I did a little redesign of AsForFootball.Com recently. The redesign started because our version of PHP -- the programming language for the site itself -- got stale, which in turn caused some of our basic plug-ins to quit working.
This was a pain in the ass.
I did not intend to do a mini-redesign of the AFF site over the last few weeks, but that happened for a variety of reasons.
— Danno E. Cabeza (@DannoECabeza) January 26, 2023
It's mostly subtle stuff, but social sharing should be easier now & the latest podcasts will be more visible, I hope.https://t.co/rOSLqZxw2L
Honestly, I was hoping to just sort of ignore this problem, especially during the heart of football season, but then the slider plug-in that we'd been using to feature new posts also quit working. That forced us to do something.
I disconnected the old slider and found a new one, but that changed the basic look of the site. I wasn't happy with the new look, but I also wasn't sure what to do about it, and I knew that I was way too busy to do a whole science project and figure it all out.
Sigh.
Thankfully, our Internet Service Provider (ISP) moved us onto a new server with an upgraded version of PHP just as football season was ending. Suddenly we not only no longer had a problem, we had a whole new set of possible plug-ins that we could use for the site. Now, instead of simply bandaging over emerging problems, I could actively change stuff, doing pretty much whatever I wanted.
Of course, the right answer in these situations is not always immediately obvious, but in this case, we at least knew a few things that could guide us in some kind of general direction.
So sharing like this needs to be easier. We need to encourage it.
— Danno E. Cabeza (@DannoECabeza) January 26, 2023
There are 4 of us, but there are LOTS of you. So it’s you guys that make or break any given thing. You guys have to like it enough to show it to your friends, which needs to be an easy thing to do.
2. The corollary is that if folks are stumbling onto whatever their friends like, we need to make sure that they then see our best stuff.
— Danno E. Cabeza (@DannoECabeza) January 26, 2023
Hence adding the call-to-action bit below the main image slider advertising our shows. I then added a little grid for the latest shows.
It occured to me after I wrote all that on Twitter that most folks are looking at this stuff on their phones, in which case they won't see 75% of the new stuff. That's fine in the sense that we've gone to some trouble to make sure that everything works well and looks at least reasonably good on mobile -- though substantially better in landscape mode -- I don't know... I mean, maybe you're curious about what we actually did here. Granted, probably not curious enough for a post on As For Football itself, but potentially curious enough for a post on my personal blog.
Anyway, here's a little explainer. You can click on the images to expand them to full size.
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| Front page |
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| Posts page |
That's it, friends. I'm headed to the gym.
Have a good weekend!
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