Roller-Coaster.com.au Development

Normally when I develop a website after I conceptualise it my mind, I’ll jot down on paper notes about what it’ll have as well as sketches of some particular layouts to get a feel for where everything will slot in. Especially now that I’ve started designing entirely using DIVs instead of tables, having every single box drawn as they’ll appear on paper makes designing CSS to go along with the DIVs much easier.

This time it’s different. I started with a basic idea for a website. I’m not going to say what that basic idea is - all will be revealed soon enough - but I started with nothing more than an idea. Then, rather than design a site’s functionality around that idea and finally come up with an attractive design to fit that functionality, I’ve got a design that is based on that one key idea.

It’s interesting, because where normally the design facilitates functionality, this time the design facilitates the big picture, the essense of the site. Designing this way lets me think of graphical solutions that best serve the idea. Where there’s a graphical solution, designing code that brings that graphical solution to life in a dynamic fashion is a piece of cake.

I have spent two weeks, probably working a minimum of 2-4 hours a day on it, just coming up with an index page. At a very basic level it’s pretty much similar to how Roller-Coaster.com.au looks now. The latest article in the top left. Instead of having the older news to the right of it, I’ve put them below. To the right there is the latest gallery and above that a new feature which, again, I’ll save for another day. The Random section and construction watch remain in their same spots, both will look and function completely differently to how they do now. Underneath Random will be press releases (truncated significantly), to its right will be latest forum posts.

I’ll confirm a few things:

1. The Park / ride / coaster counters will be scrapped. They just haven’t been popular enough to warrant redeveloping them. And trust me, they need a complete overhaul.
2. Opinions I’m unsure about. Their main problem at the moment is they’re confusing and hard to find. If I find a simpler way to include them in this new project then I’ll keep them.
3. The way videos are published will be changing. I’ve mentioned in the forums that the current system is being redeveloped. Most likely it’ll happen in two phases - first I get the current system working in its revised format, which will only be a temporary solution until the new site is made available.
4. I hope to make the site overall a more interactive experience. This means blurring the lines between “us” and “you”, and hopefully make how you perceive this site a lot more real. I’m sure you can tell I’m being pretty vague about this, and that’s really because I have dozens of different ideas and which ones make the final cut I’m not sure about.

 In the next few months, Roller-Coaster.com.au turns three years old. With it come some changes - probably among the biggest in the five years since Total Thrills launched.

A few key points about what the future will entail:

1. Roller-Coaster.com.au will be changing directions. No, we’re not turning into a field hockey, model trains or Klingon fansite. It’ll still be theme parks, but in a different way. Yes, we’ll still be bringing nothing but top-notch reporting and quality photographs.
2. The changes will warrant a new design. I’m very happy with the current design for Roller-Coaster.com.au, it works quite well and with the many changes to the articles system over the past year I think that graphically we display the best theme park news on the Internet. The change isn’t about limitations of the current design, it’s to reflect the direction change.
3. The scope of the site will be expanding. The strengths of Roller-Coaster.com.au currently lie in our reportage. Statistically, people visit our site for the news and construction updates. Construction updates have been difficult for a while because it’s hard for me to find time to visit the parks (most updates in the past year or so attributed to me have been taken on my way down the coast for a surf), but whenever possible I do publish them because they are a huge draw. So with that said, we will still maintain our focus on breaking Australian theme park news. It’s the rest that may (or may not…) change! Expect everything that is good and much, much more. This also means that certain things will be removed as they’ve been deemed clutter and unpopular.

Sometimes things just click. Ideas that come to fruition exactly how they’ve been planned. That’s how I feel about the future here.