This wonderful old site was a lot of fun to redesign! I kept getting distracted reading the stories about travel, Nevada history, and steam locomotives!
These days, I rarely get the opportunity to redesign sites with a lot of existing content. This site was an exception, with several thousand posts and pages, and over 10,000 images. I enjoyed getting to write a lot of SQL and use the stream editor and awk to get all that data ship-shape for a nice, modern theme update!
After evaluating and discarding several themes, I settled on the popular “Newspaper” theme. Its modern features include ajax content loading, infinite scroll, smart sidebars that optimize ad views, and lots more.
Much of the work in this project involved data cleansing:
- Taxonomy clean-up and link fixing
- Turning pages into posts
- Fixing author attribution issues (an ongoing project)
- Implementing a sane display advertising system
I have high hopes for this site, and hope to see its traffic grow significantly over the next year (it is already pretty big!)
Further goals for the near-term include AMP pages for mobile, and cleaning up the remaining broken links.