I’ve been planning on designing and building a new family website for a while now, but haven’t been able to make time until recently. Now that we’re all settled into our new jobs and home, and I’ve had a break from school, I decided to finally step up and get it done. My goal was to have this new site completed before starting back up at school, and classes begin tomorrow, so I’m just in time. Jessica and I came up with the color scheme and general layout a couple months ago while we were still living in San Diego, but I’ve only been able to work on it sporadically until these past two weeks. I really love the site, both for its design and its functionality.
One of my favorite new features of this site is the ability for visitors to leave comments on our posts. I say ‘our’ posts because Jessica will now finally be able to write posts along with me, which is really cool. Previously she would have had to learn HTML to write posts but this new site has an admin panel for her to login to and write posts in. Users will have the option to register an account with PellegriniPage.com or login with their existing Facebook, Twitter, or Google account. Even if you don’t have one of those accounts, and you don’t want to register with our site, you’ll still be able to leave comments if you wish.
One of the things that bothered me most about the old version of the site was that the entire site was on one page, which made it very slow to load. We really wanted an archiving system for this new site, so now you have the ability to browse older posts by month. There is also a search bar in the header which makes it easy to find specific posts. The other main thing I didn’t like about the old site was its lack of mobile support. There was only one version of the codebase, which was meant specifically for computer screens. If you visited it on a phone or tablet there was just a shrunk down version of the same site being served and it didn’t look very good. For this new site I have developed 3 versions: one for desktop and laptop computers, one for tablets and high resolution phones, and one for low resolution phones. Although the mobile versions don’t include the animated photo slider in the header, they are much cleaner and easier to read without requiring any zooming or orientation changes. I will point out that not all of the advanced functionality works on the mobile versions but you will certainly be able to read posts, comment on posts, search, and login from any device.
The new site also includes a photo gallery section which is still in progress. We have so many photos and I didn’t want to delay the launching of the site just because I didn’t have all of them optimized and ready for the web quite yet. I haven’t even attempted to tackle all of our baby photos yet but should be doing so fairly soon. The site will most likely be seeing some upgrades in the near future but already I’m extremely happy with it and consider it the best work I’ve ever done. It will certainly make a nice portfolio piece for me, but more importantly it will be much more user friendly and interactive for our visitors. Hope you all enjoy it as much as we do.