Welcome To The New GottaBeMobile.com
Well, you are probably noticing that things look a little bit different today!
I am pleased to announce the launch of our new website redesign, using a much more powerful publishing engine by WordPress, a new design theme by SoloStream, and many new features that we hope you will come to enjoy over the years. There is still a large amount of work left to do, so we are considering this new launch to be ““beta†over the next week to two. However, I promise that we won’t be in beta near as long as some Google products!
Before I go any further, I need to thank Matt Faulkner, Cary Philips, and Warner Crocker for their invaluable help in making this transition happen. There is no way I could have done this by myself. Between the four of us, we have put in a ton of hours and I’m proud of the team effort that was shown.
With over 6,000 articles published over the last 2 1/2 years, we had simply outgrown our previous publishing engine. Because of the recent server outages, we made it our top priority to port the existing content over as soon as possible, then address outstanding issues as a result of the move.
There are some conversion issues that you will notice right away, but we hope to address them as soon as possible:
- Links to old articles are currently broken. We are working on 301 redirects, but it will take a few days to get those in place. Even then, there will likely still be some broken links. We’ll fix those as we come across them, too.
- As hard as we tried, we could not get the blog comments ported over this weekend. We utilized a number of different BlogML conversion utilities to get the comments and experienced problem and problem with the utilities. We are not going to give up on porting those comments over, but we deemed it a higher priority to port the article content over and get the site running under a stable and more powerful platform. Your understanding is greatly appreciated.
- Most of our articles have the author byline of ““admin†. We’ll be getting this addressed, too.
- Search isn’t quite as robust as we’d like, but we need to get the 301 redirects in place before implementing a Google search solution.
- The forum look and feel still matches the previous design, but we will take care of it later in the week as well.
- A drop down menu for easier navigation to find the InkShows and other news stories you want to follow.
- A redesigned logo and color scheme to match our new look and feel are also in the works.
That is just a short list of items still on our to-do list. Do let us know of things you find that are not working or any other suggestions you’d like to pass on.
On behalf of the entire team,
Rob Bushway
Editor In Chief
GottaBeMobile.com
Category: Uncategorized
This is an excellent move and i really like the new look
keep up the good worki team GBM
kadaro
A great step forward!
The new layout is really nice. Looks a bit slashdot’ish :-)
Just don’t forget to monitor for security issues in wordpress and patch your installation really fast. I haven’t checked where (what OS and Server) you are running this blog, but if it’s apache you might want to consider using mod_security.
@Rob: would you consider to update your review of the motion LE1700?
As you proably already know there was a minor update from core solo ulv to core2duo ulv and also the displays got updated (or just renamed?). might be time to do some comparison!? :-)
Keep up the good work!
Pretty layout and seems really fast compared to old set up. Thanks.
Well done on the move, site seems faster and I like the look, although the old site would stretch to fill the full screen.
Hopefully you’ll resolve all your snags soon and look forward to what the future brings!
It looks great! Thanks for the continual work you 4 guys do for us, your public!
The New Site looks good.
Sorry to be the spoiler here but on a high resolution laptop like the T60p this just became one of these blogs with a huge amount of wasted real estate. There is more ad space widht wise on my screen than content. And as much as i love your content, presenting it in white letters on dark beackground or even green on darker green??? I am not at all afiliated with that blog but a look at http://ilovetypography.com/
might help in choosing an alternative style. I realy loved your blog because it was on a white background and not one of those many style over substance enterprises out there.
Sry for being so negative but you spoiled us all with your excellent work so far…
It sounds like it was the hardest move to WordPress ever! Comments and author names usually port over to wordpress easily…thanks for all the hard work.
Wow! What can I say but excellent! Thank you for all the effort went into maintaining the excellency of this site. Its no wonder most of you are MS MVPs.
Best regards,
johnl
The previous site was too slow in my experience. This is much faster than the older one. Design looks nice too. Good job!
I’ve always liked the articles at GBM and I really like the new layout.
I like the new layout also. Dark backgrounds are easier on the eyes for those who do a lot of reading.
One small appearance glitch, however; your banner ad (Currently for Motion) is placed weirdly. As you grow and stretch the browser window horizontally the ad moves around and sometimes ends up part-way off the page to the right.
Thanks everyone. It is good to read your comments after all the hard work.
@mark – yeah, I’m trying to fix that today – a layer issue that I don’t have set right.
Love the new layout guys. Good work.
Any reason it has to be fixed width, the way that it is? As mentioned above by Maximilian, it just doesn’t look good on a high resolution/ widescreen display.
On my 1080p desktop display:
http://img148.imageshack.us/my.php?image=site1lw4.jpg
It gets even worse once you scroll down past the sidebar:
http://img293.imageshack.us/my.php?image=site2pn9.jpg
I also like the new layout, but my feelings mimick maximilian’s on the real-estate. That Google Ads panel on the left-hand side of the front page really throws me off. When I first visited the site, my eyes weren’t drawn to the articles at all. They looked like ads to me and I overlooked them.
Overall though, I like the new look. You all have done a fantastic job.
I was reading a few more posts and I was wondering…what if the Google left-hand banner on the article pages were a horizontal footer (or maybe even header) instead of being vertical on the left-hand side? Sorry…don’t mean to sound like I’m being picky.
I totally understand regarding fixed width vs 100%, especially when viewing the site with widescreen monitors. The theme is designed to be fixed width / centered, and unfortunately can’t be changed without a lot of work. We liked this design because of various features it offered us and felt comfortable with the fixed width aspect. We also knew that some folks wouldn’t like the fixed with.
We’ll be playing with various placements for the google ads. There are some changes we can make to the 3 column homepage, but we want to be careful in balancing ad revenue potential and readability.
No worries. I entirely understand regarding the amount of work and especially the ad revenue aspect. I’ve been balancing both of these for one of my sites lately too.
The Motion ad seems to be acting much better now. Being an obcessive-compulsive person, I like its centered placement :).
Hey great look guys! I’m really liking the style. I do agree about the advertising real-estate, however, but with any new design comes a period of tweaking and adjustment.
Looks great guys! Welcome to the WP club.
I miss the time of day being posted with each entry on the home page. It helps me figure out which posts I’ve already seen. Is there any way to get it back?
Thanks in advance,
Rich
@rich – I miss that, too. let me see what we can do to add that in.
Rob,
Thanks very much!
Rich