Roller-Coaster.com.au Development

Hmm…

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Articles system is nearing completion. It is a fully searchable system that adds categories so now press releases are combined into the same system and we have greater scope for editorials and reviews.

New site’s article homepage. From here you can search for articles, narrow it down so you can only view press releases for instance, by year or the most frequent contributors.

The actual article page. It’s very similar to our current article system’s view, really a testament to the constant refinement that has taken place with that system over the past 18 months. The look has been tweaked however to just make it cleaner and easier to read. The new photo system can be seen in action here, where articles can easily include smaller thumbnail photos throughout; a feature we hope will help brighten up articles. I think this new look gives it a much more spacious and clean look.

The bulk of the design and programming is completed. The focus is now on tying up loose ends, tweaking design elements, adding user-friendliness and fine-tuning our backend system that lets users submit content and us approve it.

I’ll see how things go over the next week or so, but I envisage that the first announcements will be made in coming weeks. My December is chockers with work, travel/leisure and all that usual Decembery sort of stuff, so the plan will basically be get things out there so everyone knows where the site is heading (i.e. international, but still very much Australian) and has a chance to weigh in on it all, but not launch until January.

There will be a beta testing period in the weeks that lead up to the launch, so we’ll also be putting up a notice for anyone that’s interested in spending a little bit of time trying to break the site before everyone else gets to.

Today I spent a lot of time working on a system that’ll convert all the existing data to the new site. Obviously with around 250 rides, 50 parks, 50 roller coasters, 1700 photos and 150 articles there’s no way this could be performed manually in any reasonable timeframe, and the huge differences in the site’s programming mean that I can’t just do a direct copy + paste, so I am working on a series of scripts that take the original data, transform it into the new form and insert it into the new database.

What you see to the left is success after plenty of frustrations.

Check out the next page to see a screenshot of how things are going… Continue Reading »