Pre-War Cards

As promised, the new website is here. Fortunately, it wasn’t nearly the headache that I thought it would be requiring only a few hours to sort out. Some tinkering remains but for the most part, the big stuff is ‘done.’

I mentioned recently that the site was headed for changes. That was mostly due to the old interface no longer being supported and giving me some headaches. I don’t typically enjoy change and when I had to unexpectedly go in a different direction with the site, I wasn’t real thrilled.

Usually a change like this takes place over the course of at least a month. Time to plan. Time to reconfigure. But an inadvertent click of the mouse on my end forced me into a change with no time to prepare. Without going into details, that was partly my fault and partly the fault of a crappy interface.

The good news is that nothing changes much from a user perspective and even the design is somewhat familiar. From a functionality standpoint, there are a few things I’m no longer to do right now. But overall, it hasn’t been too bad. Here’s a look at some of the few, but important changes:

Improved Mobile Capability – I didn’t use the site from a mobile vantage point too much but from what I can see, it’s a more user-friendly than the old one. For those of you that use the site in a mobile capacity, I think it’s a little improved on that end.

Article Excerpts – Another positive thing is that articles now display a bit of an excerpt. I couldn’t really do this before because it added the excerpt at the top of the pages before and that just looked odd. But that problem is gone and that’s another small, but nice feature.

Past Articles – As before, the front page contains quite a bit of articles. It goes back a few months but I know that people also like to view the older ones, too. Over in the sidebar to the right, I’ve added an ‘Archived Articles’ section (near the top and bottom of the page) and a single click will give you a long, scrolling list of all of the articles in the history of the site.

Search – This isn’t new but it’s worth highlighting because I know it’s not used as much as it should be. If you’re ever looking for articles and information on a specific set or type of card, simply use the search box. I’ve added one at the very top of the page, at the top of the sidebar, and in the footer.

Random Set Generator – One of the things I miss from the old layout is the inability to have a box to display a random set over in the sidebar. I don’t see an easy way to do that right now so that could be gone. But I believe that’s the lone main feature from the site that is disappearing. If I can find a way to bring it back, I will.

Finally …

I’m always happy to try to add new/different features to the site as well. If you’ve got some ideas, feel free to shoot me a message using the Contact link at the top of the page. The goal is to not only provide as much information as can be done but also make the user experience here as good as possible.

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