Blog

Following three months of development the new Imphenzia music site has been launched to start off the new year. This time it was a total re-make from the ground up of the music site and I had to learn how to develop using JQuery in order to get the visual effects, real-time updating of pages without page reloads (using “AJAX”), and at the same time keeping the development effort to realistic proportions.
During the development process I set two requirements upon myself to fulfill, 1) make the new site clean, and 2) make it very simple to use. By using JQuery and quite modern features of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) I realize that there are visitors that will experience problems with the design and functionality, namely the visitors that use old browsers or have disabled javascript. For the first time, however, I felt that it is a sacrifice for the greater good as the vast majority of visitors will benefit from a much improved experience.

I also had time to reflect on the historic designs and trends that my site has endured over the past 13 years. In recent time, for the launch of the 2008 site, it was all about content, content, content, account features, google ads, and more content. Following the trend at the time the font was small to fit in as much text and information as possible and the layout was split into three columns complicating it even further. The 2011 site is the complete opposite with much less information presented in a tidy manner with larger text and without columns. I also think that the time of content packed sites was a natural way to progress as it was expected to make use of fancy layouts and high screen resolutions, where as we’re now back to putting the visitor at the center of attention making sure that the message you want to get across is clearly visible and simple to understand.

For some time I have been contemplating over how I should release my music. In the very beginning it was only possible to purchase physical albums, then the addition of mp3 albums, then single mp3 tracks, then a “donation” to download all tracks for a period of six months. I found the various options, and how they were presented on my site, to be very confusing. What would my visitors think if I thought it was confusing? The idea of a donation, for example, would only make sense if all tracks were downloadable to begin with since a donation is giving without the expectation of receiving anything in return. Bottom line; it was very confusing.

I hope that the new site has taken a big step in the right direction to combat the issues outlined above. The album section has been totally redesigned with a clean look and a visitor can add digital albums and CD albums into a shopping cart. The donation feature has been replaced with a new feature for full access that still focuses on allowing the visitor to contribute with an amount of his or her choice and is return rewarded with longer term of access depending on the size of the contribution.

Many many hours of hard work finally resulted in the launch of the new 2009-look for Imphenzia.com. All previous sections (music, games and soundtrack) have been united and also a new addition is the section textures which is a searchable database of textures for game makers and modellers.

The new site has cross functionality between the sites and it was developed in PHP with a MySQL backend. The sections now share a common user account feature which will enable anyone who has previously purchased a track, mp3-album or registered a game to access this content at all times.

Another feature is that it was designed with the ability to skin the site so it can be customized, maybe becuase you want a different look or because you want a bigger font or narrower page size etc. There is only the default skin available at the moment but now that the site is launched I may find some time to create some skins.

I hope you like this new site and please feel free to give me feedback or comments. You can also discuss it in the Imphenzia forums :)

Just an update to say I've been working extremely hard on the new Imphenzia site structure the past week, probably put a good 40+ hours of development into the sites the past week and I hope to be able to make the results visible over the coming week :)

I've also added the blog to
Nynäshamn bloggkartan.se :)

Continued my efforts on the 'Imphenzia Soundtrack' section of the site. It's coming along nicely and it will be possible to inquire about custom made exclusive tracks and also download non-exclusive tracks in high quality etc.

More updates on this to come.

It's been  a long time since I've spent so many hours on something producing such a small visible result. First of all I had to learn all about protecting PHP code and form fields that are inserted into the database when logging in with mysql_real_escape_string and the joys of some servers having magic_quotes_gpc enabled and when stripslashes should and shouldn't be used. I've finally protected the code enough from malicious visitors - I don't want to end up like the old imphenzia forums once were if you remember those days. Since I already developed the login / logout / remember me features of the new sites yesterday, the 4 hours I spent on just protecting the code was just plain boring - but not wasted as the result is good and I learned something very useful.

Originally I used a javascript called "Live Validation" to verify the contents of form fields as you type in them and the result was quite cool - what it didn't support, however, was verifying on the fly that a username already existed or if invalid characters were entered. A friend of mine advised me about AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and this is something I find very exciting (sadly enough!). What AJAX enabled me to do (amongst a million other things) is to verify if a username exists in the database as a user is typing into the form field. If the user enters a username while registering that already exists, the web page will warn you that the name is taken - this all without submitting the form or using the tedious back button etc. Now then you might think - why waste so much time on learning this stuff as I may never have a huge amount of registered users on imphenzia.com - but my reply is that learning this stuff is extremely useful as fast and intelligent websites is the future.

I found out that when troubleshooting javascripts, FireFox with the extension 'firebug' is very useful for debugging when things go wrong. Firebug will display error messages and scripts neatly and in my case the AJAX feed that is returned. At the same time, I must admit that I very much prefer IE as a browser - mainly because it renders web pages much nicer and - and also because so many sites look incorrect in FireFox... and if you are a true FireFox fan you will probably explode now and say that all these sites look horrible because they were incorrectly developed, the fact is that they still look horrible regardless of who's fault it is hence me prefering IE :)

Well, I still have some work left to do with the validation method tomorrow and the easter weekend is nearly over. Once validation is finally taken care of I can move on to more fun stuff on the site such as the music section.

I've completed the theme functionality on the new site. Changing the look (and width) of the site is extremely easy and fast. The screenshots that you can see demonstrate this functionality although changes to templates are only minor for testing - in the end result the themes will be quite different from each other.

In addition to themes I've completed a user registration process with live java validation of the form fields as you type. This will simplify the process making sure that your passwords match up and that your address is valid etc. The registration process also features validation by e-mail to ensure you don't get unsolicited spam.

 Finally - the most important thing I've learned so far is KEEP YOUR CONTENT AND DESIGN SEPARATED. This is the best way to work as changing a theme or page content is super simple once the framework is in place. It's 4:14am now so I'm going to eat something and watch some TV now... then off to sleep.