New and Improved

OK, if you linked here from The Sleaze and are a regular reader, you will have noticed that we've finally made the switch to the 'new' Sleaze. I finally managed to engineer it in the early hours of the morning and, so far, so good. Visitors are still finding the site, search engines are happily indexing it. Whilst I'm glad to finally make the switch, after so many months of planning and preparation, the move is tinged with a little sadness, as it marks the point where I have effectively relinquished control of the site's design and back end to third parties: I bought the theme from eleganthemes (it's called 'The Style'), and the whole thing is now powered by Wordpress. However, the fact is that my hand crafted flat pages just couldn't cut it anymore - visitors expect a far more professional look these days, and my coding skills just aren't up to that.

The switch to dynamic pages and a Wordpress back end means that the site is now far easier to update - it now takes just one click to publish a new story. No more farting about with HTML editors and manually updating menus and tags. The only thing I'm still manually updating is the RSS feed - it's the only way I can guarantee it is formatted exactly the way I want it. Of course, the big question is whether all these changes will help the site regain some of its lost traffic. The jury's still out on that. Whilst today's traffic is well up, (both in terms of visitors and page views), part of this is down to a Norwegian aggregator service reindexing what it sees as 'new' pages. Interestingly, I've noticed that when someone uses the search facility, the results pages count as page loads in their own right. (Virtually as soon as the 'new' site went live, a visitor used that site search facility, and others have continued to use it throughout the day - clearly there's a demand for it). It only remains to point out that the 'new' site comes complete with a new story. I promised Nazis for the 'silly season' batch of stories and I've delivered with the Health and Safety Nazis! Actually, there are a couple of other things - I skipped the testing period using invited visitors to save time, so some aspects of the site are still unproven. So, if you've got a smartphone, can you let me know if the mobile-friendly version of The Sleaze is working? Also, if you click on the facebook button in the 'follow' section of the sidebar, you'll be taken to the site's facebook page - give us a 'like' if you're feeling generous!