Website relaunch – 2018 edition

Website relaunch – 2018 edition

You might have noticed a few changes here, and no small ones at that!

The old hiddenoakestates.com website was built using Google’s page builder, part of their App’s platform, now known as G Suite. This page builder tool was clunky, and hard to make changes with, but it was extremely low cost.

In 2015, hiddenoak.org brought in a lot more flexibility, modern hosting, and more content that could be updated much more frequently. It was built out still using off the shelf tools that avoided reliance on the need for coding ability, but with features to make the site useful to our neighbors. Keeping costs low was a focus, and to date this site has been made 100% using open source and free tools. However lots of plugins and theme features can weigh down a website, or complicate performance tuning. We were reaching the limits of the shared hosting platform with the 2015 edition of the website, and paying for more resources did not feel like the best way to solve the issue, there had to be a better way.

This 2018 relaunch makes considerable improvements to both the visuals, as well as functionality, especially for mobile users. A much more modern code base provides under the hood enhancements for speed. Additionally, the reduction of multiple plugins has lowered memory requirements by more than 25%. This means the site can not only stay on less costly shared hosting services, but significantly improves responsiveness and load times of the website.

This 2018 Website update makes the following improvements:

  • Improved load times
  • Better mobile experience
  • Cleaner more modern code base using HTML5 and CSS
  • Lower memory usage
  • Easier content delivery

The base navigation has been left intact as well, so you’ll still know where to find information. Now writing the actual content should be the only major hurdle to providing more frequent updates, and we have additional help with that as well for 2018. So look for more to come!

If you have any suggestions, requests, or if you think you might be able to help out in any way, please let us know via the contact form.