New site design preview

[Richard]

This latest major change to the site will bring many new features to your screens in a bigger, brighter and far more organised Roller-Coaster.com.au. In just two short years we have gone through four different layouts, each one a drastic change from what was there before. It's certainly not my intention to do so many makeovers of the site, but with the way the site has grown and evolved it has been vital. The key motives behind the current site design for instance was to a) add much-needed colour and graphical components to the site, rearrange the site so there was adequate room for the Opinions system, c) increase the searching power of the site and database navigatability and d) allow for easy integratio of the Subscriptions system. I believe the latest look brings together some of the best features from each incarnation, making for a far superior site that's easy to get around, easy to look at and most importantly has all the content displayed in a very user-friendly way. Some key features include:

• A more unified look throughout.
• Use of popups for user interactivity (adding reviews, using the ride counter system etc. - NOT advertising popups)
• More integrated linking between park/ride profiles and relevant articles and media.
• Greater access to user-driven content. It will now be far easier to add and edit content on the site to keep the database up-to-date and accurate.
• A more dynamic design which means the site can make slight seasonal changes to reflect happenings in the industry etc.

Aside from a new design, there will also be a far greater benefit of these changes. We have decided to bring the site to Australia where it belongs (currently it is hosted in the United States). Though it's certainly not slow to load at the moment, bringing the site to the Brisbane datacenter will result in huge increases in speed and efficiency. The new sever is a Dual-XEON system with SCSI (RAID configured) drives and 2GB RAM. This move will make the site virtually seamless to run for Australian users, and will eliminate 99% of outages.