News
Version 6 – a whole new website!
This is the 6th major redesign of the txGarage website, and it’s been a long time coming. On average we’ve updated the look and feel of txGarage just about ever year in the past. Our previous design, V5, lived for almost exactly 3 years. That design was our first crack at making our articles more reader friendly no matter if you’re on a smart-phone or desktop computer. It was an adaptive design that would adapt the site for the smaller screens of the smart-phones of 3-years ago. Well, a lot has changed in 3-years with phones, tablets, retina/4K displays, and everything in-between. It was long past time to make a fully responsive site that would look good and could engage the readers no matter where they lived on that spectrum.
While starting this project we already had a lot of goals in mind. There were definitely limitations with the old design that we wanted to overcome. It was also becoming increasingly difficult to publish new articles and was taking longer than ever just to get stories out to you; our readers. So we started taking notes and formed a plan and direction for the new design.
Our first goal was making the site fully-responsive. Again, this allows the readers to enjoy the content no matter what they’re reading it on. The design is very fluid and I personally think it looks great on my phone, tablet, as well as my laptop with a retina display.
Next, we wanted to address the time it was taking to publish articles. We were adding custom styles to every post, and from post to post we were making different decisions on how we wanted things laid out. Making changes to the V5 code wasn’t easy either so we just added a bunch of custom code as we published articles. Needless to say, this wasn’t sustainable. Not only is the process of publishing articles much quicker now, it’s also an easier code base to work with when we want to add custom functionality or even whole new features. So if you have some ideas for us, hit us up on social media!
This all makes our lives easier but in the end it’s all about you, the reader. Throughout the process we wanted to make it easier for our readers to find and view our content. We’re optimizing articles for publishing on social media and we’re making sure that you’re able to get right to the content without popups or ads jumping out in your way. The font is larger and easy on the eyes. Things are laid our better, and everything loads much faster. This is something we’re going to continue to tweak and improve upon in the coming months.
Again, all of these changes are to make it easier for us to get new features and content out to our readers and once you get here, make it easer to read. If there’s anything that bugs you about the new design or that’s not working for you; please feel free to reach out to us on social media.