Sometime last year, I don’t exactly know when, I decided that the geocaching news site I run needed an overhaul. The site had been running quite well for awhile but the truth was, I wanted it to look a bit brighter and a little less dark. So, the CUNB 2.0 project began.
At first, I was looking to just change the theme and as hard as I looked, I couldn’t find one I liked that was free. So, I finally found one that was actually relatively cheap and I paid the money and got it. After mucking around with it in my spare time, I finally managed to get it the way I liked it. The big problem was time. Trying to find the time to make the new theme work with all of the old information from the old site. That took a lot of tinkering.
But as time went by, I found myself wanting to do a lot more with the site. So I explored creating some mobile apps and found a quick and easy way to put something together. Then with the help of Chris, we started looking at ways to add even more functionality to the site. Sure enough, in no time flat, we started piling on the new features here and there. Thanks to Norm, I got an awesome new banner to really liven the site up, and before I knew it, I was starting to think about when to let this new look loose.
Well, as it turns out, the two year birthday for CUNB was in March so I thought, why not have an event to celebrate, and show everything off then. Turns out that coincided with CUNB’s official partnership with Groundspeak (the company that owns geocaching.com) kicking off as well.
The last few weeks have been insanely busy for me workwise. I’ve been on the road a lot and knowing that this relaunch was coming, I was getting a bit worried. Even as late as today code changes were being made, and things were being tweaked. I spent a lot of time doing tests. What people might not realize is that despite the fact that this site is a hobby of mine, I took the relaunch pretty seriously and put a lot of time and effort into making sure it would go off relatively issue-free.
Much like my real job, I staged the setup with a bogus version of CUNB that I could play with. I also did test installs and configs while the main site was in maintenance mode. That made it much easier to make sure things were working as expected before the actual cutover. The first two tests failed BADLY! The site was SO horribly slow that it rendered the new look useless. Thankfully I had an idea of what was causing the problem and sure enough, removing one plugin cured the problem. Once that was solved, the rest was easy.
Last night, I built all of the new menus from scratch and did a few other tweaks but beyond that, I was ready to go.
Tonite I was a bit nervous about the whole thing. It had been discussed over and over again and a lot of work had been done and after all of that, you really want things to go off without a hitch. Well, Ken came over at 8pm and around 8:30 we started the switchover. It took about 2 hours and there were still a few glitches here and there but all in all, the switch went really well.
I’m pretty excited about what people are going to think about the new look. Hoping to get a good crowd at the event tomorrow and then after that, I can put this relaunch behind me and start working on my next caching project which is the next race in August.
