Earlier this week, I launched a mobile version of Thunderbolt, which is designed to work on almost all web-capable handsets and mobile devices. There are many options when building a mobile website and a lot to consider, so I thought it would be useful to run through the choices I made and how the site [...]
Forum software is a necessary evil of running an online community. Few credible options are available to website owners and those that are tend to have outdated designs and a poor user experience. Three systems – phpBB, vBulletin and Invision – dominate the landscape, but with the arrival of XenForo, this could change. Background The [...]
When you’re deciding whether or not to read something, you make a calculation: Is the time it will take to read this less than the time I have available? If you notice an interesting four page article in a magazine on a long train journey, you’re far more likely to read it than if you [...]
Whenever I redesign Thunderbolt, one of the most discussed aspects of the site is its logo. Although the site has been around for nearly ten years, we’ve never had a single logo for more than a few years. Is this something we should be concerned about or doesn’t it matter what logo your website has? [...]
Whenever I tell people about Thunderbolt, one of the first questions they ask is “why don’t you make money from it?” It’s a reasonable question; last year, Thunderbolt had over 3 million page views from over 600,000 unique visitors. Sure, it’s not anywhere near the numbers that the big sites get, but it’s enough to [...]
When I founded Thunderbolt over nine years ago, the web was a very different place. There was no Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr or even Wikipedia. Nine years is a huge amount of time on the web and most sites don’t manage to last half of that, especially smaller ones. So how did we manage to [...]
When I was in Edinburgh last May, I met Philip Roberts, who handled the development for the games website SquareGo at the time. It was the first time that I’d talked to someone who does a similar job to what I do at Thunderbolt and it was incredibly interesting. Over a few drinks, we chatted [...]
This is the story of a feature in the Thunderbolt Content Management System (CMS). It is so tiny, almost to the point of being insignificant, but the tale of its evolution demonstrates the value of detail. Let me set the scene. When our articles have been through a peer review process, their author logs in [...]