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| *tears of joy* |
While I was browsing Reddit last week, someone mentioned that my "blog" looked a bit dumb. When I thought about it, he was actually right. The old design was just a modified default Blogger theme and it was an extremely crude one. For a long while, it was all I needed but now that I've amassed a considerable amount of content on this website (300+ posts not counting YouTube and Twitch content), it was nowhere near adequate.
The biggest problem was that the content was buried after a while. It was very hard to find them when they dropped from the frontpage unless you googled for it or somebody linked it to you. Since I didn't have a menu system, I couldn't do anything about this either. I just hoped people would use "Blog Archive" on the right side. Another problem was the huge walls of text on the homepage since my old design didn't support summaries or snippets. So it was really hard to navigate and because it loaded seven full articles at a time, the main page also took ages to load. Lastly, the design was . . . very crude. The dark colors were unnecessarily depressive and everything looked so like the last decade.
Long story short, it sucked. Thanks to Tarogato for that comment and which led me to do this. I also wanted to do it because IRL has been a bitch lately and I needed something to distract my attention from darker thoughts.
The result is a completely different look. This time I chose brighter and more vivid colors. The main content area has a white background with black text on it for the best readability. The other main colors are orange and grey. I added my artwork in the background which livens up the website even more.
The main focus was on discovering content and presenting it to the readers. Now, there's a menu above which I decorated with some hand-picked stuff. Under it, there's a content carousel that showcases latest content. On the right side, there's a widget that shows the most viewed articles during the last 7 days.
Lastly, I added Patreon as another way to support me. I think it's a great way to support regular content creators. Feel free to give me feedback about it (rewards for example). I still have ads on the website. They bring very little (2-5$ per month or so) but it also helps. Please consider adding my blog to the your Adblocker's whitelist if you want to financially support me without donating.
I hope you enjoy the new design. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments below.
The next big thing on Rak's Armory is going to be the Marauder review.
Known issues: Comment counts on the index page are sometimes missing and sometimes they lead to the wrong article. It's driving me nuts too. Menus also don't behave properly if you open a menu before the page fully loads.
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