Oh hi! You miiiight have noticed that things are looking a bit different at the online mooncabin. We decided that we were long overdue for a facelift, since we’ve been rocking the same look since 2014. The outside was workable but the inside was a bit of a time warp. Plus in the past few years we’ve been itching to add some new content but couldn’t figure out how to cleanly implement it with the old template.
The old template
Our old website was a wordpress template implemented before the invention of “page builders”. The inside was a scary land of stacked shortcodes. We didn’t like touching it because each time it required diving back into learning the mystery pseudo-code that stitched everything together. The template ceased being supported a few years ago but at that time we were mid-mobile-dev-mania and didn’t have time to look into alternatives.
What next?
So here we are: 2019. Web development has totally evolved, search engines are now super fancy/picky, responsiveness is key. Even WordPress, itself, decided to undergo a bit of a renovation this year. We’ve built a few other websites in the meantime and it’s helped me have a better idea of what we want and don’t want. We still recognize that we are better mobile devs than web devs, so we weren’t looking to build anything too custom. I’ve test driven several different page builders in the past: Avada’s Fusion Builder, WP Bakery’s Visual Composer, and this newcomer Tatsu run by Brand Exponents. I really dig the interface for Tatsu – it marries flexibility with simplicity and since it’s relatively new, it isn’t saddled with a ton of baggage/backwards compatibility like the industry leaders so we went ahead and dug in. Several iterations later – I think we have our final result.
What’s new?
EVERYTHING! Just kidding. Some stuff is really familiar, because its true and it works, but we did want to revisit how we talk about our work. We added a huge section on our Process. Building mobile apps is still a new concept to many people and “how does all this work” is the #1 question we get from leads. Dumping an entire load of process on someone in an initial meeting can be somewhat overwhelming, so it’s nice to have a place that potential clients can check out at their own leisure. We have a new area that focuses on our internal projects, which will grow in the new year as we add new ideas and ship more.
In the meantime, keep checking in. We’ll keep adding and polishing in the upcoming months, but I wanted to go ahead and kick off 2019 with some fresh code. Hope you like what we’ve built thus far.
As a side note: There’s really only one ongoing debate to settle – ARE THERE ENOUGH SPACE PUNS ON THE SITE? (Wiley always thinks there should be more.)
