We wanted to share a very early look at the new version of Shur’tugal! The design is mostly complete – content placement, navigation, sidebars, and content formatting is all still in the very early stages of development. Shur’tugal will also be running on an entirely new news, content management, and comments system. We have more details to share with you if you keep reading, including a big announcement regarding a new website!Upgrade to WordPress
Shur’tugal has been running custom made home-grown news systems since its founding in 2004. However, despite the hard work and creativity that went into the development of these systems (mainly by Robert), the internet moves faster. To keep up we’ve opted to upgrade Shur’tugal to WordPress, the web’s most powerful blogging platform. WordPress is the foundation for many key blogs online, including the CNN Ticker blog, Mashable, TechCrunch, and many (and we mean many) more.
WordPress will offer us a whole host of new and innovative features. Most important to many of our visitor is the majorly improved comments system, which allows threaded conversations (tabbed replies which display under the post they’re in reply to), the ability to post using Facebook and OpenID accounts, and more. WordPress also comes with a library of thousands of plugins which enable us to easily add new features to the website in a matter of minutes.
Increasing the Website’s Size
Back in 2008 when Shur’tugal initially launched our current layout, the sizes used were chosen due to default monitor sizes. Over the past two years, average monitor sizes have increased rapidly allowing webmasters more screen space. Our new layout will expand in width, allowing more content to display on the page with less clutter.
It’s Faster
Not much more to be said here. The site will load faster!
A New Website
We will be launching a new website alongside Shur’tugal which will focus on fantasy and scifi news and information appealing to visitors of Shurtugal.com. This new website will be accessed by visiting Shur’tugal, however, non-Inheritance news will remain off of the front page of Shur’tugal (for the most part). Shur’tugal will eventually be your one-stop shop for Inheritance cycle news and information in addition to news and information on all fantasy and sci-fi media!
Please let us know what you think about the early preview of the layout, its features, and any suggestions or improvements you may have!
