I have finally updated the website. I have been wanting to update it for a while as the data was getting very old. I did not realize how old it was until I started reviewing what I want to keep. The update took quite a while for a few reasons. Firstly I have been busy working on doddle doing updates and working on the Pro version that has call sheets. Secondly I was not sure how to go about updating the website. I had thought of getting a professional designer to create the website for me. I knew I would get a great design, and someone else would be spending the time. But my problem is keeping the website relevant. Doing the HTML myself was also out of the question. I needed a template system that could be easily changed. I dislike iWeb, and using iWeb was the main reason why I was not update the original website. The theme I had used was absolutely ridiculous, as far as page weight is concerned. One simple background image was over 1MB, way too big for the web. Dreamweaver was another option, and is used by the pros, but I am not a pro web designer and seemed to be overkill for me. I gave Rapid Weaver a try and was not totally satisfied. Rapid Weaver is kind of like iWeb, but with a bit more power. After investigating Rapid Weaver a bit more I discovered that the functionality could be extended by adding plugins. Their website however is terrible for trying to find plugins and descriptions. Google however came to the rescue and I found a plugin called Stacks, that looked just perfect for me. After seeing what Stacks could do I knew I was onto something. The next thing was to find a theme as I did not like the themes that were bundled with Rapid Weaver. Once again Google came to the rescue and I found a great theme called “Backlight 2” created by Henk Vrieselaar. I just love the Internet as it turns out that Henk Vrieselaar is located in the Netherlands. How would I have found him pre Internet days. (Guess I would not have needed a website). After a quick purchase of the theme and Stacks I was on my way. I had a look at a few other iPhone developer websites to get a feel for what they were doing and then came up with what I wanted to do. I wanted to present a more professional look as I am doing more business type apps, but still wanted to keep some of the playful aspects for the kids apps.
Stacks has nice features, but I found that if I rotated images they would end up having jagged edges, so I previewed the images using Rapid Weaver and then did a final rotate of the images in Gimp to get a better quality picture.
I said goodbye to the old website look and feel and updated it with the new files and within a few minutes I was up and running with a new look. I still have more work to do to finished it, before it is outdated, but now I can update it when I need to.