Been lots of talk about rebuilding in town, right?
Hey, we're bounding down that same road.
After a month's worth of meetings, research, more meetings and more research, we've reached the conclusion, my wife Dali and I, that we're going to blow up the site you see and start from scratch. Completely new tech. No carryover.
Meaning none at all ...
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DKPS / OFFICE SPACE[/caption]
Mind you, we haven't figured out exactly how we're going to do that. Nor how we're going to finance it. But both those facets also have been part of the monthlong back-and-forth, and we're eminently confident it'll come to pass and, in fact, that it'll be underway sooner rather than later.
What'll it be like?
Well, here's what it won't be like: It won't be a WordPress-based, Frankenstein-type construction built on 27 different patchwork plugins, each requiring its own maintenance and manipulations. This is the root of all our issues. For all the fun we had in starting this venture in 2014, we did so with zero upfront money and, rather than ever having a custom-made site, we just kept grafting garbage onto garbage onto garbage.
This will be a custom site. Just for our readership. It'll be fast, clean and user-friendly when it comes to the community, multimedia, reader accessibility and other new wrinkles that maybe we still haven't conceived. And again, it'll be based on five years of learning what you need and want from it. Not just the login thing. Everything.
The one thing we'd like to preserve is the general look, albeit with some vital tweaks. People often compliment the site's structure/arrangement -- the one area we can control ourselves, I might add -- and that'll be part of this, too.
Oh, and this: We might scrap the apps.
Our research and meetings have motivated us to very strongly consider switching from the standard Apple/Android models to what's called a PWA, or Progressive Web App. It looks like an app, works like an app, plants an icon on your phone like an app. The main difference is that it works precisely the same way on all devices, all platforms. Including, for the first time in our case, Amazon, Microsoft and other types.
If you want more details on that, we've got some techie subscribers I'm sure would be happy to elaborate in comments.
Android's been an absolute train wreck from Day 1, and even Apple's been a pain in its own way behind the scenes. Eliminating them would be a blessing. It's even been broached that we could kill Android outright in the very near future and encourage readers to use a mobile browser on their Android devices. (Which work perfectly, by the way.) But first, we've got to ensure that the PWA meets all of your needs and, indeed, represents an upgrade from the user's view. We'll see how that plays out.
I'll answer any and all questions about this below.
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