I like to do this every year, and 2016 will not be different. As time changes, my ideas change, so does this blog. So today is the time for this years update. If you look around, you will already notice what changed, but here is a little rundown:
- New home page – the whole organization of the home page has changed. Now it no longer shows just the latest posts, but it features a random selection of posts on top (or some that I want to point your attention to if needed), the recent updates, most viewed and most commented posts, direct links to top photography pages, and a selection from guides, reviews and process posts. If you still prefer the old way, just click on the BLOG in the main menu, to see just a list of the updates.
- New categories – guides, reviews, process posts and tops spots are now handled as categories of posts. Like this I can create and overview easily, and they are updated automatically. So no longer you will see just a text list, but nice picture grid of whats available.
- No more site color – the new site is only black&white, with red links. There are no other colors used. Now, I leave all the colors just for pictures
- Faster load time – now the site should load faster as before, as the high quality images are available only directly in the post they are included in. All other images, show in previews, overviews, lists, menu and similar, are highly compressed versions, downsized for the particular use
- Related posts – each post now shows related posts under it, based on categories
And there are many many more small tweaks. My main reason for the changes was, that since the blog already has 2000+ posts, with many guides, review and other articles, everything that is not on the front page gets lost in time. So my goal is to provide a better gate, through which also these can be discovered, and shown to you, the visitors. I really hope that this will work :)
But a little side note. While changing the theme, I also started some needed cleanup tasks (for instance, some posts still used the old blog address, which caused slowdowns and similar), and those are still in progress. So it can happen, that if you access some of the older posts, that there can be images missing, or the formating could be a bit off. I’m working on correcting any problems like those, but it will take a little time, due to the huge amount of posts. I’m also still tweaking few small things, as it’s hard to find all issues without having the theme on the live site. So there will also be few small changes here and there over time. Please have a little patience with me :)
Regrettably, the new theme uses a different post view counting method, so all posts will show 0 right now, so don’t be surprised.
I hope you all will like the update, and we will have a great year 2016 together :)