Tuesday, March 16, 2010

FreeAdobeFlashTutorials.com Version 3

I'll admit, it has been a good long while since I've gone back over my website freeadobeflashtutorials.com. Almost 2 years now. As stated in my last post, my wife had a baby, we then moved across the country for a great web development job and we've been on our toes ever since. So I'm afraid to say my first real project got put on the back burner. I still receive emails almost daily and I do still try to return them when I have a solution for their questions, but adding to the website has always been pushed back on the "things to do" list.

A big reason why it kept on getting pushed back was in the way it was made. I put this site together myself writing out all of the html. Which worked fabulously. It was the beginning of my understanding and using html, CSS, and web publishing and I think it turned out pretty good. As good as it was though it was a pain to update. If I wanted to change any content I would have to do it on every page. If I wanted to add a page or link I would have to recreate the page and add everything in code manually. I will admit a few people have sent me links to post and I never got around to them because they were such a huge pain to add and it wasn't really on my radar.

My web development experience has come a long way since I created the site and I decided that it's finally time I put some of that experience to work for my flash tutorials site. Over time the tutorials and site has picked up more and more interest, so I decided it was time to revisit and update the site again.

So today I'm happy to announce the next redesign of Freeadobeflashtutorials.com. In fact I released it today. It's not a redesign in that it looks different, I tried to keep it visually the exact same as it was before. In fact I'm hoping the visitors who aren't reading this post never even realized I've remade it. It is the first phase laying down the infrastructure of hopefully many updates to come. So although the site looks the same, it's actually completely different from the ground up from a coding perspective.

The site has been redesigned with a whole new infrastructure to handle my content and updating the site. This puts the foundation in place so that I can now pull in the blog and forum and integrate them much more into the site. I can add links easily on request, add interactive features like comments on the tutorials pages and a contact form to get a hold of me directly. And when some of that is done I'll get back to creating more simple Flash tutorials.

I'm very proud of the changes and although they don't seem big now, they will be in the coming weeks. So thank you for reading and come back soon and often to see how the site changes over the coming weeks.