Welcome To The New & Improved Avalon5.com

WELCOME at last to the new look Avalon5.com site folks. There has been a hell of a lot of hours work put into this by yours truely – not all of it productive it must be said – but I’ve finally got to the stage where I can launch the new look Avalon5.com website and with it a host of new features.

I’ve got more planned, but let’s leave that for a version 2.0 release and for now just focus on the big changes in the current release, so here’s a list of the new or changed functionality…

First up is of course the brand change. This site has been known as “Howl @ The Moon!” for over three years now, since February 2005 when I took my first tentative steps into the blogosphere, but it’s always had the domain name of avalon5.com behind it. I’ve decided that it’s time to rebrand to avalon5.com to avoid any confusion going forward, so please adjust your links accordingly. Howl @ The Moon! is dead, long live Avalon5

The next big thing you will notice is a completely redesigned front page, and a static one at that. I’ve opted for this style to enable me to highlight specific content (see the new funky featured content panel on the left of the front page!) and also to enable a more graphic layout with summaries of the articles I’ve been writing. Now on the front page you can see the latest article, the featured content, the latest articles by selected categories with thumbnail images and a collection of other headlines as well – giving you an overview of what’s been going on at the site in one page.

I’ve also decided to include an embedded video section for those videos that I deem “worth it”, and in this case I just couldn’t resist showing the Radiohead “All I Need” video which highlights the difference between the “haves” and the “have nots”… check it out, it’s inspiring in it’s simplicity and it really does get the message across.

I’ve also gone for a completely redesigned navigation system, now incorporating a drop down dynamic menu for all pages on the site as well as all categories in horizontal menus in the site header; I hope you like them. It certainly makes getting around the site a lot easier.

And with navigation in mind I’ve either updated or added in a bunch of new static pages with features such as sitemaps, a dedicated links page, an archive page, site statistics etc. so go check them out and see what you think.

As if that wasn’t enough I’ve also completely redesigned the site to operate in a fixed width, as distinct from the fluid width of its predecessor. This means I can – over time – use standard image sizes and layouts and it should make the site more predictable and therefore more readable from a browser perspective.

There are many many more tweaks and fixes embedded within the site which would take too long here to describe but you will discover them as you go through the content. No doubt I’ve missed a few things and there may be a few bugs lurking around for the next few days as I go through the transition to my new layout and setup, so please be patient while I hunt them down. Also – don’t be shy about letting me know if you come across any bugs.

Lastly it remains for me to say that I hope all the effort was worth it, but I am open to criticism or suggestions to improve things so let me know what you think. I’ve already got a V2.0 release list in my head so if you come up with anything else of interest I’ve got no problem making that list a little longer. Ok so. Over to you. Do you think it was worth the effort? Is it better or just different?

What do you think folks?