Announcing a Modernized, Mobile WFB Site!
I’m sure many of you noticed! There’s been a bit of tweaking going on at The Winchester Family Business lately (No, not that kind of tweaking). I’ve been slowly but surely doing some long overdue site maintenance, all designed to keep us current and performing well. A lot of that maintenance is behind the scenes (data and application cleanup), but there have been some big site changes too, especially with site navigation and the front page layout.
I’m sure the question is, “Why are you doing this Alice? The site is just fine.” Well, it isn’t. I get the Google stats that tell me more and more people are accessing The Winchester Family Business on mobile phones and tablets. Around 50% of our hits are now mobile. Catering to such devices requires some special configuration. For one, the main page cannot have a ton of things on it. It’ll load slowly and convoluted on a mobile phone, which loads everything in single columns, while a web page usually has three to four columns. Fancy graphics, rotating objects, large images…what looks great on a laptop doesn’t necessarily translate to a mobile phone.
The second problem is that a slow loading website kills our Google rankings. It’s the Google ads that pay the bills around here otherwise we wouldn’t be running.
Third, as we constantly bring on new site visitors, issues with navigation became a huge problem. For example, there was no way you could get from one Photo Gallery or Episode Guide to another without hitting the Home page button and then finding the page in the vertical menu. Every page on the site is on one menu now and can be easily accessed from anywhere. It’s easy, it’s fun, and pages load way faster this way because everything is organized in a proper menu hierarchy.
Here are the features of the changes so far, and what is coming in the near future:
New Dropdown Menu: The left side vertical menu has been eliminated. Everything is now folded into the main menu, which is the long menu that runs at the top of all our pages. As I said before, all our site pages can be accessed from this menu now. Everything has been grouped into Articles, SPN Fandom, Spoilers, Photo and Video, and About Us.
Articles has Feature Articles, News, WFB Article Archives, Episode Guides, our Ratings page, and one of THE most popular pages on the site, Latest Comments.
SPN Fandom has the Discussion Page, Polls, Games, CBOX Chat Room, Download SPN (to be updated soon), and Recommended Sites.
Spoilers and Photo and Video is pretty self explanatory. Our Photo Gallery is where you’ll find Motivational Posters, Episodes screen shots, Conventions Photos, and other misc photos. As an added bonus, Lilah Kane began updating the WFB Video Page regularly and it contains quite an interesting archive of fan and convention videos. Have a favorite SPN video? Send a link to us via the Contact Us and I’ll pass it onto Lilah for the page. Where’s Contact Us? Well that’s in…
About Us has Contact Us, the WFB Writers page, and a link to our sister site (please check it out if you love other CW or genre shows), TV For the Rest of Us.
The Rotating Banners. Usually when I make a big site change, I introduce a new “The Winchester Family Business” banner. Well, this time I went with something different. Meet rotating banner, aka a random display of all our past banners through the years. There’s about six or seven to choose from, so you’ll get quite a selection each time you refresh the page. This new program is mobile friendly too!
Recent Posts Section. We are pretty active at the WFB! We often post news updates, spoilers, polls, and other articles throughout the day. It’s hard to keep track of it all, until now. Recent Posts, located at the top right hand side of the main page, will list everything updated on the site starting with the most recent addition. I’ve run this feature on TVFTROU for a while now and it’s been very popular.
New Tweet Summary Location. We discovered that when it comes to social media, our largest and most successful presence is on Twitter. So much gets tweeted there by the Supernatural cast, crew, writers, production executives and in-the-know fans! You can see it all happen here in one easy summary now. This used to sit at the bottom of our long front page; now it’s on the top.
Article Archives. One of my big projects over the last several months has been cleaning up our article archives. We have a rather vast archive of roughly 19,000 articles that have accumulated now that The Winchester Family Business is entering it’s 8th year (can you believe that?). A majority of those articles are Feature articles that offer reviews, meta analysis, top ten lists, games, fun diversion-y stuff and just about anything else you could image that can be written about Supernatural.
One easy way to view archives now is through our Tags, which are now on the WFB Article Archives page. Click on a tag and any article in our history with that tag will appear. They load six articles at a time, so if you want to see more (if more than six are available), just hit ‘Load More’ at the bottom.
Several of our articles were corrupted with off characters and missing pictures during one of our server moves back in season eight, so fixing these has been a big job. They are being addressed slowly but surely, though, and will all be back to normal eventually. As I fix these articles, I’m adding Tags as well, so that all of the archives will eventually be included in our Tagged articles list. Our recent articles from the last year or two are well tagged and ready for easy access.
Our article archives are also available by category or author, including former authors for this site. We’ve had some brilliant writers over the years and now is the chance to see their work.
In the near future, I hope to get a “You Might Like” Article list going within the current articles that will tap into that vast archive and recommend other articles for you to read. I’ve been reading these articles as I’ve been fixing them, and I forgot how good most of them were. I’m hoping you all will get as much joy reading them as I have.
New Commenting System
This isn’t here yet, but its coming soon. For the past six months, I’ve been running on our sister site, TV For The Rest of Us, a test pilot for Disqus. It’s been a success! It retains most of the current functionality, it’s faster and makes tracking comments very easy for a moderator like myself.
For those that have never heard of it, Disqus runs on around 75 percent of the websites out there. You can logon using a Disqus ID, Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus logins. It will work on any site that uses Disqus, so you would only need that one login for both the WFB and TVFTROU. Disqus runs on a third party server, which will drastically help our site performance. Our biggest killer for load times right now is our commenting system.
Our current commenting system is also not mobile device friendly. When there are strings of nested comments (and we get those a lot on this site), eventually on a mobile phone comments in a long reply chain will display one character per line or sometimes totally off page. Trust me, when I’m at work, reading comments on my lunch hour is brutally painful. We’ve also had huge problems with spam posts, something that is well controlled under Disqus.
Before the switch though, I have some technical considerations with our old comments that I must address. The comment archive on the WFB is vastly larger than TVFTROU. Once that problem is addressed, the switch will happen.
Current Known Issues
With any changes, there is pain with the improvements. Changing all the site menus changed all our links as well. Most are okay, but several links suffered in the process. The biggest problem right now is that when you click on an article, you might see our main page. Scroll down to the very bottom. The article you selected is usually there, but the old link is confused and opens the main page first. I’m fixing those as soon as they’re identified, but it will take some time.
There might also be times where you have a bookmarked page for the WFB and get a 404 error (page not found). I get a list of 404 errors that happen and I’m working on getting the old link redirected. This is something that will work itself out over time.
I have bumped to the first page the “Having a Technical Problem on the Winchester Family Business” thread on our Discussion Page. If you’re having any site technical issues, just share it there. Or, if you have feedback or suggestions, you can do it there or in the comments for this article.
Thank you everyone for your patience. We are all very excited about these improvements and hope that the updated look, functionality and navigation improve your experience here at the WFB! Bounce around the site and explore for a while, then let us know what you think. Onward and upward!
Thank you for all of your work on this site, Alice! It’s obviously a labor of love. I can’t even imagine how many hours you put into it. Your work and effort have made this site an excellent one! And thank you for explaining the reasons for the changes. I am a person who honestly hates change, so knowing that there are reasons behind it helps me to adjust. And if it is beneficial for my favorite site, then more power to you! I especially like the rotating banners.:D
Can I mention that TV For the Rest of Us has been wonky for for about a week? Last weekend, everything that I pulled up, youtube, this site, TVFTROU, had problems, and I put it down to internet access issues at my school, which we have been having for the last month. Now, though, TVFTROU is the only site that is just not loading correctly. I’m not getting the graphics, little boxes appear instead of pictures, the text reads straight down instead of being in boxes, Disqus doesn’t load. Like I mentioned, we have been having issues for a month, so it may be something on my end. Thanks.
Thanks! It has been a lot of work, but the site is running so much better!
Yes, TV For The Rest of Us has been a source of frustration this week. It went down several days ago without warning. We were working with Go Daddy to figure out what was going on. Basically, it was just loading an HTML archive of the site and wasn’t accessing our servers at all. We couldn’t even get into the backend to see what was wrong. It finally got resolved at 5:00 this afternoon (still not sure what happened). I have a review from Roxanne and Nate ready to post right now. Thanks so much for supporting both our sites!
Update on TVFTROU. I borrowed my brother’s iPad tonight, and tried to get to TVFTROU. It would look great starting out, but it would kick me off before completely loading. Sorry to add this comment here, but this site kicked me off when I tried to go to “contact us.”
It’s possible the web caching hadn’t cleared when you checked. Sometimes it takes a while. Have you tried again? I tested on a variety of devices and it seems to be working.
took some getting used to the new layout, but I like it. The tagging is very helpful in referencing/finding things.
Thank you for mentioning the tags. It is helpful to know that they are being used.
Does Google count the visits on the site? I want to believe tnat every time I drop in it it helps a bit (with ads and things) 🙂
Yes, Google counts every visit to the site so “dropping in” helps a lot! They also count the number of pages visited, so popping between different pages (articles, then discussion, then news, etc) makes the numbers go up! They especially like clicks on the ads that appear on your page so if anything EVER sounds interesting, please click on it from our site! That’s the bonus round for us! You know those Amazon links we included in the holiday shopping guide? Clicking on those helps us too. Basically every page, button or ad you click counts (and helps pay for the site).
[quote]Our current commenting system is also not mobile device friendly. When there are strings of nested comments (and we get those a lot on this site), eventually on a mobile phone comments in a long reply chain will display one character per line or sometimes totally off page. Trust me, when I’m at work, reading comments on my lunch hour is brutally painful. [/quote]
[i]Thank you![/i] This has been the biggest contributor to me not contributing :p
With time-zone differences, most of the good conversations are happening whilst I’m at work. Because I couldn’t read most of it on my iPhone, by time I got home, there are dozens more replies, and I couldn’t be bothered.
Oddly enough, I never remembered to bring it up when I was home and on the main site (like now).
Thank you for addressing it, Alice.
Sorry you’ve experienced the same pain. We plan to switch over in a week or two, when Supernatural goes on break for a month. The old commenting system will still be in place, but it’ll be around to display old comments only. Adding and updating will be turned off. New comments go to Disqus.