Project complete: Thunderbolt Version 9

Published on 1^st February 2009 in Websites, tagged Thunderbolt.

Yesterday I launched a redesigned version of Thunderbolt, the videogames website I’ve been running for a little over eight years.

To call it a redesign is a bit of a misnomer, at least visually. The new version retains the same clean look of the previous one, with numerous subtle changes introduced throughout the site. The main change is entirely invisible and completes the work that I started with our new CMS; moving from a procedural to an object-oriented design. Without going into the boring details, this means that far less code is being used to do the same job, it’s easier to maintain and less prone to errors. Our underlying database has also been redesigned, which has allowed us to greatly simplify queries and speed up the whole site.

Working on a personal project like Thunderbolt affords you with many luxuries and the most valuable one is time. If you don’t take advantage of this, then you’re never going to get the best results. With a lot of the previous versions of the site, I designed and coded them within the space of two to three weeks, which often resulted in bad design decisions and bugs appearing later on. This time, however, I’ve taken a few months to go through the process and I think it’s really paid off.

Getting the detail right has been my main aim with the new site design. I’ve been able to spend time refining pages like the Previews index (above), adjusting the layout of comments in articles and making the search autocomplete. In terms of typography, we now make sure that all of the quotes are proper curly ones and not ‘dumb’, while the main copy font has been increased to 100%.

As well as redesigning the main site, we’ve also moved our hosting to Media Temple. I’ve already had my blog on there for a while and moving Thunderbolt over to the same host fits in with a number of requirements. It gives us more bandwidth, disk space and a seamless upgrade path to more powerful servers if we need them.

So go and check out the new site and if you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line.