70th Website update!

[DarthBarbieDoll]

Our very own talented assistant webmaster and GWL, Chris Moody, and I have been working hard on some behind the scenes updates to the 70th website as well as some new navigational items to allow for more ease of functionality. Additional changes are on the way in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. Be sure to update your bookmark for the site! Thanks so much for all of your hard work, Chris.

[Rallyral]

Good job GWL and CO, can't wait to see the additions.

[judge_hellfast]

Wow, I'm liking the new updates to the site. Chris is doing a great job. Two thumbs up, bro.

I have one suggestion. Change the font color of the "event request" button to red or something that will stand out more. It seems to be camoflauged a bit by the other buttons. I'm sure that's a button we would really like to have noticed by the general public.

Keep up the good work.

[mrivorey]

Thanks all for the nice comments. I just thought I'd detail what we've actually done, as a lot of it won't be noticeable.

• * We've added an RSS news feed to the front page. This means you can add 70thExplorers headlines to your favorite news reader, My Yahoo, or Google Start Page.
  
  * To make the news feed possible, we had to convert all the webpage file names from HTML to PHP. If you know PHP, you know this is a simple thing. But it does mean if you have bookmarked any of the pages, those will all need to be updated now.
  
  * We've added our own Event Request Form. While we will still accept requests from the 501st.com, we wanted to give prospective event coordinators another place to initiate contact with us. Submitted forms are emailed to the CO, XO, & PRO.
  
  * Behind the scenes and in the code, we've created header and footer files. With the conversion to PHP, it made it easy to put all of the menu items into a single file, and put the disclaimer into another file. This will make creating new pages easier for future webmasters, and also means future changes in the menu or disclaimer only have to be edited in one place, instead of each individual page.
  
  * A bunch of smaller tweaks have been made as well which are too numerous to list here. But some include: adding code to the disclaimer so that the copyright date always shows the current year (a result of now having PHP available to work with), removing the animated splash screen from the front page (Aaron is working to reincorporate it in a way that won't slow down the browsing experience), renaming some file names to make them more intuitive as to their content (mem.html to members.php)

And there's more to come. Check back here for details of future updates.

[mrivorey]

And FINALLY, a feature we've ALL been waiting for. You can now click the 70th logo at the top of any page in the forums to be taken back to the main (non-forums) site.