Dev Blog: SA Rally Evolution 2 Launches

Today is a great day, with the new "Evo 2" SA Rally design launching.

With the new site launching in February 2008, many problems were seen with the original layout. From this point onwards, considerable additional research was undertaken over the past 2-3 months, with hundreds of hours spent investigating excellent web design techniques, and looking at award winning web site designs.

The result of which is the Evolution 2 design you are now looking at, which is the most visible aspect of the Evolution 2 upgrade of SA Rally.com.au. We hope all our visitors enjoy it.

Evolution 2 also sees the debut of our new Development blog. Reasons for the development blog are twofold:

1. Many of our users don't understand the time, effort and struggles that go into the running and development of the web site, and the features that the site supports.
2. I receive many emails from members of the Drupal community for help on their sites, and information on how we implement specific features or functionality on the site. I will outline this here for those interested.

This will be the first and last development blog which is promoted to the front page. All future blogs will be accessible from the "About" menu. This blog is written using the blogging tools available to every SA Rally registered user, so any user can have a similar blog.

The technical aspects of the new site design are thus:

1. New design based on ad_novus theme, fixed page with, CSS-based.
2. Suckerfish Menus, developed for SA Rally by Radiant Flow, in order to make site navigation much easier.
3. MANY transparent PNGs, making the site Internet Explorer 5.5's worst nightmare.

This comes off the back of one of our biggest months in terms of traffic, and we are hoping to build on this in the coming months to make SA Rally the Australian benchmark in 2009.

Many new features are planned for the coming weeks, including:

1. Officials & Navigators Database
2. Enhanced team profiles
3. More usability enhancements
4. Better navigation
5. And some very special features soon to be announced

All of these features require time and research, and will be rolled out when this is completed.

I'm always working in the background on the site, whether content is going up or not, and addition of content assists in keeping the site relevant and up to date.