Virtuosi Media Website Redesign
- Benjamin Kuker
- December 10, 2010
Virtuosi Media is proud to announce the redesign and relaunch of its website. I'll get into more details below, but this is a big update for us. It's the culmination of a lot of hard work - countless hours spent researching, designing, coding, and writing. We're extremely excited about the relaunch, the things that the new website is going to enable us to do, and upcoming products and services.
Let me give you a few highlights of what the redesign includes:
A completely new site design - We did a whole lot more than just a new coat of paint. If you remember our old site, there isn't much that the two designs have in common. We wanted a more polished and elegant feel and so we went all out.
You'll find little details all over the site where we tried to go the extra mile. For this redesign, we redid all of the artwork, the fonts, and the copy. There are well over 40 custom icons across the site, with more to come. We've progressively enhanced our design. If you browse the site in different browsers, you'll notice a slight difference between Internet Explorer 8 and older versions of IE and modern browsers like IE9, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. (Also, despite our massive tutorial on the topic, we've dropped IE6 support for our website and all products going forward. Talk about a relief!)
New software - Our old site was a static site, but now we've installed a content management system which will make maintenance and management far easier. We were able to create over 30 different page configurations without breaking a sweat. More on that below.
More content - If you haven't noticed, our new site is significantly bigger. We've expanded our content categories and we've added new content. We have a lot in the pipeline that we'll be releasing over the coming months. If you're interested in business, development, or design, you'll love our site. We are also accepting external authors for the first time, so if you have a passion for any of those topics and want to write about them, let us know.
A new search interface - Searching for information on our site should now be a lot easier. We have search available on every page and also an advanced search feature. If you're familiar with any Google search hacks, a lot of those will work on our website as well.
A brand new tagging system - If you want to browse different topics across our site, our new tagging system will be your new best friend. Tags are available at the bottom of most pages and our tag filter can help you narrow your focus by creating tag sets with just a few short clicks. If you want to see all of our tags at once, check out our tag cloud.
RSS and Atom feeds for every category, tag set, and search - We went all out on this one. Now you can subscribe to our content in multiple ways. Take a look at our feed directory for our category feeds. Or, if you just want to subscribe for a certain tag or keyword, we offer feeds for every search and tag set.
The Real Deal
While we're excited about the website redesign, which we've been working on over the last few weeks, what really has us pumped up is the software that the site is running on. We've built a completely new type of content management system and we're about to run it through its paces.
I'm not going to give away too much information about it just yet. I will say, however, that it will be a commercial CMS and that it is in a late alpha stage. We still have some features to add like user registration and comments, which we'll gradually roll out on this site over the next weeks and months.
When we get to a stage with our CMS where we feel comfortable with its stability and feature set, we'll begin a limited developer beta to really begin testing it out and to give developers a chance to begin building extensions. After that, we'll open it up for a public beta. We will have an email list for it in the future, but for now, if you're interested, send us an email.
Finally, I want to point out our email newsletters. We're going to be sending out 3 different email newsletters about once month, one for those interested in business, one for developers, and one for designers. In our newsletters, we'll be highlighting articles, products, and news of interest from our site and from around the web. Sign up is free and we'll even throw in some goodies from time to time.
That's it. We would love to know what you think of our new site. Since we're still testing out our software, there are bound to be a few hiccups. If you have any problems, let us know and we'll try to fix it right away. Thanks, everyone!
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