After months of development the new site is out of beta and launched. It's been a long road and involved building two new versions of my other sites. The new version not only has a more modern look but also I hope a more easy to use form of navigation. Which has always been an issue with this site. Since 1998, I've been adding content to this site in the form of blogs and other content. In this version my goal was to make the site completely focused on Body Piercing and the studio. To do that I pulled all the non-piercing information out of the site and built a brand new personal site at http://davoaxiom.com.
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Shortly after finishing the personal site, I discovered that my old host service just couldn't handle the scripts that I wanted to run on the new version of this site. There was other issues with the old hosting service including a number of times the Cpanel and FTP accounts being hacked. The service that I will say begins with host and ends with a reptile that lives in the Southeastern part of the US, seemed to have no interest in updating their servers or increasing their security. Sure they were happy to sell you additional security services at the rate of $80 a year but claimed to have no idea how malware files and a complete take over of the front page of the site happened. The new hosting service that I'm using is Siteground and I have been impressed with the speed and lack of issues when installing and configuring the new sites.
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Since I was moving out of the old service, I have to also build a new version of the Have Nots site and move a couple of older non-public and sandbox sites to the new server. So, that meant a quick rebuild of the one site and a day or two of transferring content. At this time I'm leaving All Ages Des Moines and the Monster that is Underground Archives on the old service for now.Â
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Here's what's changed:
- All of my personal blogs and Spotify Playlist blogs have been moved to my personal site . I have also added a new blog series called At the Show. Also all the music related content like reviews, Axiom Promotion/Talent buying, personal galleries and poster gallery have been moved there.
- All three of the sites are now running Drupal 8, It has been a bit of a learning curve but I have to say I've enjoyed the changes. The only real issue that I've come across is views still having issues with being responsive.
- The navigation has greatly changed, I hope for the better. By reducing the content the menu is much simpler and I hope makes it much easier and faster to find what you are looking for. From the menu you can now go directly to blogs, information on each piercing, pricing, and general information. On mobile the menu is now easily expandable unlike the old site that required scrolling through tons of content to find what you are looking for.
- The site is a great deal more mobile responsive. Not only is the menu a great deal easier to use but all the content adjust to the size of the screen you are viewing the site on.
- The Axiom Newsletter - Want to be kept up to date on the latest content, special and updates to the site and at the studio? Just subscribe to the Newsletter and the updates will come right to your e-mail inbox.
I'm sure there is other changes and just explore and you will find them.Â
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