Ausdroid is now in it’s sixth year (as of the 20th of March) and in that time we’ve gone through an awful lot of changes. We’ve grown from a one-man-band to a merry band of many, we’ve gone from a hobbyist project to a small business, and we’ve gone through a number of iterations of design too.
Let’s face it, some of the earlier implementations of Ausdroid weren’t much to look at. In fact, many of them were downright ugly. We had designs inspired by The Verge (which they’re still using.. eugh), which we’ve come up with ourselves, and some fairly minimal themes. In fact, our most recent design (codenamed Alpha) was quite successful, but we began to see its limitations.
So much of the functionality we wanted on Ausdroid did not come natively with the Alpha design; much of it was hacked on after the fact, and while it worked, it wasn’t particularly coherent in terms of design, and it was rather intensive to produce and maintain. Ausdroid’s theme could readily bring down a server if we saw too much traffic … and we had to be rid of it.
And so, most of you will notice, we’ve launched a new theme today. It’s based on a commercially available theme with some fairly extensive modifications, all made with the goal of keeping it sleek and fast, and quick to produce and render. You should have noticed, by now, that the site is substantially quicker, and this should remain the case.
We welcome your feedback on these changes, in the comments on this post, so that we can tweak and perfect the design over the coming days and weeks.
New Infrastructure, Too
We dabbled with Ausdroid in the cloud, using Google’s Cloud solutions. However, it quickly became apparent that this just wasn’t going to be suitable for us. We expect a lot from Ausdroid’s hosting environment, and sometimes we need the power that only a dedicated server can provide.
For this reason, we’ve moved away from Google’s Cloud and we’re now on a dedicated server hosted by Digital Pacific (thanks guys!)
It’s a lot faster, gives us a lot more control. You should see a lot more stability around here.
Let us know your thoughts, your feedback and anything else. Please. Your feedback is actually important to us, and we know we don’t have a monopoly on design sense (or even a grasp of it), so if you think something would look better some other way, speak up, and we’ll do what we can.
