Infinite Frontiers Website - A New Beginning...
Website As you will have seen, we're in the process of giving the Infinite Frontiers website a makeover. Please bear with us on this as it is going to take some time because of the size of the site. With almost 1Gb of data online and over 500 pages of text and articles, it's not going to be a small task!
Why The Changes?
We've decided to do this for a number of reasons. Firstly, we felt that the old design was clumsy and to a degree some areas were lacking in content. We wanted to make sure that each area of the site was used to its full potential and made more sense in terms of the content that was found there. There were some areas with literally just one or two items or others with a lot of "Coming Soon" articles but little actually present and we thought that this needed rectifying.
In addition, the design itself needed some work. We wanted to bring things inline with our sister website, Auto Assembly which has also recently undertaken a facelift. The new front end there is much easier on the eye with a smaller central text block, the menu bar rather than a large block of buttons, and the advert block.
Advertising
You will notice that we will be featuring more advertising on the site. Sadly we don't really have a lot of choice here as we do need to fund the site somehow. The adverts on here are being provided through a few affiliate schemes that we are signed up to and we receive payments based on commissions from sales made after people click through to advertisers sites or when people sign up for services etc. so we only receive income based on performance of these adverts.
We've got access to about 100 different advertisers at the moment covering a wide range of subjects and wherever possible we'll check these out and use the services before they appear on the site so we can vouch for the quality of service and products that they are offering. If there are products you are looking at buying or services you are interested in, please contact us and we'll see if we have any companies that we are working with that we can feature adverts on the site.
It does cost us money to run this site and as we run this as a hobby in our spare time it's hard for us to keep it online sometimes, especially when the downloads section goes through it's popular phases! At it's peak, this has cost us over £100 a month to keep online!
Colour Scheme / Links
One thing we felt that was important for us was to change the colour scheme of the website. Having two different colour schemes for the site was starting to get rather confusing so we're changing this to a standard colour scheme throughout. Having some sections with black text on a white background and other areas with yellow text on a black background just didn't work. From now on, we are moving over to the same colour scheme as the Auto Assembly site - very light grey text on a black background across all sections of the site.
All text links will be yellow and we'll be slightly re-coding the way we handle graphic links as well - you won't notice this as visitors but it will streamline the code from our point of view and hopefully make our file sizes smaller! In fact, the way we handle links will be revamped completely as most articles will now be handled via text links meaning faster loading for pages and article lists generally taking up less space on screen and as such being easier to use.
Section Re-Structuring
In the short term, there will be some areas that will be offline while they undergo assessment and in some cases, a complete re-working. These will either be merged into other areas or redesigned completely if we don't think they are meeting their full potential at the moment. The buttons will be on the front menu for the site as it was during the transitional period so it will seem like the old-look site, but at times some of these may be inactive links or over time these may disappear or may lead to revamped sections.
We don't know which sections will be merged yet, but we will make sure that it will be done to keep things in a reasonably structured manner without wasting space on the server and not having empty menus on the site and offering good content.
Forum Revamp
We're not limiting the upgrade work to the website though. At the moment, we have two discussion forums - one for Infinite Frontiers launched in January 2003 and one for Auto Assembly launched in August 2003. We are preparing to make some dramatic changes here... the Infinite Frontiers Forum is no longer as active as it used to be and at the time of writing this, it has hardly been used for the last couple of months.
Most of the posts on the board tend to cover computing, gaming, sci-fi / fantasy and general chat and since it's launch it has just over 100 members and has had just under 2,000 posts. However, the Auto Assembly Forum, in contrast, is incredibly vibrant and active. It has almost 150 active members posting constantly and is approaching 21,000 posts in total spanning a vast number of subject areas. Despite the focus on Transformers and our Auto Assembly conventions, the board has an active "Off Topic" general chat area with over 4,000 posts, a computing section with over 1,000 posts, a sci-fi / fantasy area with 1,000 posts and a wresting section with almost 1,000 posts.
What we are proposing now is to close the Infinite Frontiers Forum and just leave it online as a read-only forum and offer all our members the opportunity to join the Auto Assembly Forum. Even if you have NO interest in Transformers at all, as you can see there is an incredibly healthy area covering other topics that is considerably larger and more active than the Infinite Frontiers Forum covering the same subject matter.
It makes sense to us to focus on one forum that is of a higher standard than have one good quality forum and one that is inactive and seems to be stagnating.
Manual Update
The biggest problem we have with this job is the time it is going to take us. To keep things compatible with as many browsers as possible and keep the site simple, we avoided using any specific web-based languages when we coded this website, instead choosing to code the entire site in HTML page by page and avoiding using anything that we think could cause problems with some browsers. What this means is that the site upgrade will involve recoding every page of code on the site and that means I will be recoding over 500 pages of HTML by hand over the next couple of months - not a small task!!
Old Look / New Look
One thing we will need to stress is that because of the sheer scale of the task, there will be sections that will have the old look during this upgrade and will have the old colour scheme/buttons. Please bear with us on this. We felt that the gradual update was the best option rather than trying to update the entire site in one go which would have taken a couple of months and taken several days to upload but we will try to update entire sections at once where possible.
Downloads Revamp
This is one area that will be getting a major improvement in a number of areas. We started making some changes a while ago here with the Anco section and this is going to be leading the way for the Legal Downloads part of this area. Basically, each software house will still have it's own section, but within that each game will have it's own page. These will have screenshots and/or pack art, a brief synopsis of the game, development credits, cheats, tips and then links for the downloads for each version of the game available.
This is not going to be an easy task and will probably be one of the last parts of the site to be completed because of the number of new pages that will need to be created but we think that it will be worth it for the enhancement it will make to the section.
That's not all though. There will be some files that we will be removing from the Downloads section. There are a few games that we feel are too large to make available simply because of the amount of space they are taking up on our server. We feel that in some cases, by removing just one game, we could replace it with a large number of other titles that would make better use of our server space offering you more choice and variety. Space on our server is now becoming tight and there is one game in particular that - if we remove it - it could be replaced with almost 100 games that we have waiting to be uploaded on about a dozen formats!!
Site Content
Obviously, while we are concentrating on giving the site a makeover, we're not going to ignore the content. We're going to be bringing a lot of sections up-to-date that have been quiet for some time, adding a lot of content to areas that are in need of attention and we will be bringing in new writing staff to make sure that we can add new articles, reviews and features on a more regular basis.
As we have said, please bear with us while we make these changes to the site... we think it's going to be worth the wait!
Simon Plumbe - Webmaster, Infinite Frontiers
12th October 2004
