Remember this: (click to enlarge image)
Well you are now reading this post on DGB 4.0. And yes, it’s a little late. As always, whenever I start to revamp something, I always have to encounter difficulties and this was no exception.
A little while ago I asked you all to help me choose a new theme for this website. A lot of you kindly voted on the small poll I set up and left me comments on the post for it as well. In the end, I made the decision to go for this one:
However as nice as this one was, it was not widget ready. For WordPress geeks and general IT and code aficionados, you will know this is less than helpful if the previous version used widgets as part of the site. So unfortunately, I had to can this one. Which was a shame because it looked pretty swish and was fairly cheap.
So I had to go back to the drawing board. I had a little re-think too. If in this new version of DGB I wanted to cover more topics and areas outside of fenestration, should I be going for the magazine look? After searching around www.themeforest.net for some inspiration, I was about to purchase this magazine style theme:
But I had second thoughts. Whilst the theme looks great, and would actually allow me to increase potential ad space, I probably won’t have the time to create the content to fulfill the potential of this theme. Perhaps if this was a 4 man team, but it’s not. So this one reluctantly got shelved as well.
Back to slick modern themes it was then. And I thought I had landed on the best one:
I liked the amount of customisation that came with this theme, so I went ahead and bought it for $57. However all did not seem well as many of the features it boasted I could not find. I tried several times to reinstall the theme, as well as trawl through forums and other online documentation to find out why I had so little of theme uploaded.
However conscious of time, I decided to go with the theme which you are all now looking at. This is a theme I have used on two other websites, so it’s tried, it’s tested and I know what I’m doing. In the end, after wasting time and money, this is what I should have done in the first place. But never mind, live and learn and all that.
So, one massive disclaimer to make right now:Â THIS IS NOT THE FINISHED ARTICLE!
I was very anxious that time was getting on and the proper working week starts today so I wanted to get a fully functional website up and ready for you to all explore. I will be making many little minor adjustments and additions as this week goes on, hopefully getting the site as I’d like it by the end of the week. But for now, I just want to guide you through a few new things on the site:
Special Features
You will see on the new landing page near the bottom that I have something called a Special Features section. These will be dedicated to the bigger issues within our world of fenestration that I am either covering, have covered or will be covering in the not too distant future. Trust me, there are some topics I will be covering shortly that you’re all going to want to pay attention to.
Sponsors Own Pages
I have now expanded the sponsors resources on DGB 4.0. On the old site, you could see all the sponsored content in each of their own content boxes. Whilst this was organised, it did clog up the front page a little bit. So, as you can see on the home page, I have created a section showing you the very latest sponsor content posts for your perusal, but I have also given them their own dedicated pages accessible from the main menu at the top.
Now you can easily browse all the latest and latter posts from each of DGB’s sponsors!
Other Bits
There is a proper footer now. The old one had one, but I couldn’t do much with it at all. This new one allows me to customise and adapt it to show any form of content I want.
DGB now has a proper landing page. This is my front cover to the site, with all posts now able to be found in the Blog section on the main menu. You can still of course read the latest posts from the front page.
My Contact page has changed. I got bored of the little contact tab on the old site, so this new one allows me to have a more professional looking contact page which I can add to as the site matures.
That Logo
I’m not quite sure about that logo anymore. It may be about to change. We designed this logo before we knew what the site was eventually going to look like. But now it is up there, I’m not quite sure about it. Please leave me your comments about it, good or bad, so I can see where I need to change it.
Overall the site looks a lot better than the old one, and was worth putting in the hours and cash to make it happen. I’m also very excited to be covering lots more on this new site. As I hinted at earlier, our industry is going to experience some potential painful problems in the coming months that we simply cannot ignore. I shall be covering those issues on here, as well as starting to introduce other areas such as a consumer section, IT and tech, world events and others to help diversify the reading on here and hopefully stop you all getting a bit bored of windows and doors!
Thanks for reading this and bearing with the down time whilst I get the new site in order. As always all comments about this post or the new site, good or bad, are welcome in the section below. If you have any tips on what you think I need to tweak with the ne design, make sure to stick them in there too!
