I hate to say, but I’ve put it off as long as I possibly could. The seams are bursting, the pipes are leaking and unsightly mold is starting to cover all the surfaces. Point blank, GameFromScratch.com needs a renovation.
Even though I’ve worked in web in the past, I actually despise doing web work. CSS stands for Cant Stand Syntax. I find the process entirely and completely frustrating and even worse of all, it’s a time sink. The time I have to spend updating the website, is taken away from working on tutorials and other content.
As I said earlier though, this is something I simply have to do. Google made a recent algorithm change that ranks sites higher if they have good mobile support. I tried a couple weeks ago to simply enable a mobile theme. Unfortunately this didn’t work, in fact it seemed to really hurt traffic, although part of that is probably a reporting bug. At the end of the day, that mobile theme was pretty ugly too… and barely usable, but it did make Google’s algorithms happy.
At the end of the day though, the world has changed since I started GameFromScratch.com. I spend more and more time on my phone or browsing on a tablet. Desktop resolutions haven’t really increased all that much in common use, except pixel densities. Using a fixed pixel layout on a Retina display isn’t exactly a great idea. Basically what I’m saying is, no matter how much I hate it, it’s something I need to do.
On top of all that, there is a matter of content curation. Over the years I’ve created a TON of content here on GameFromScratch, of which I have forgotten a great deal of. If you look through the menus across the top of the site, they are in massive need of a re-org.
So coming up, I have a few tasks I need to perform, tasks that sadly take away from other work and will probably result in less massive posts in the near term… sorry about that.
First thing I am going to do is go back to day one of this site, and create a single massive spreadsheet of all the still useful tutorials I have ever created on GFS. I need to know what I’ve got before I can organize it better. Once that’s complete, it’s time to rework the UI of GameFromScratch to make it a bit more modern, less ugly and more mobile friendly.
So, sorry about the noise and dust during the construction… hopefully the disruption will be brief!