New website

**Workshopshed** · Jan 20, 2015, 09:08 AM

I've done an update to the Workshopshed website, it should be a lot easier to find the information you are looking for, navigate the site, find out about me and the shed and get in contact if you want to.

Example: Tools Archives - Workshopshed

Hope you enjoy the new site. Let me know if there are any glaring errors.

**kbalch** · Jan 20, 2015, 10:41 AM

Looks great, Andy. Nicely done!

Ken

**Jon** · Jan 20, 2015, 10:41 AM

Wow, looks great, and has a ton of content! Nice work

**Workshopshed** · Jan 20, 2015, 11:11 AM

Thanks guys, yes, I managed to get 500+ articles across and a whole stack of images.

**Jon** · Jan 20, 2015, 11:19 AM

Not sure if you're familiar with UserTesting.com, but their "Peek" service offers 3 free videos of people browsing your site. I use it when launching a new site to see if there are any usability errors I may have missed. Your site displayed and functioned perfectly for me, but you still might be able to get some mileage out of free user videos.

Also, we've been getting a lot of use out of the free SumoMe App on homemadetools.net recently.

**Workshopshed** · Jan 20, 2015, 02:00 PM

Thanks Jon, I will check those out. I did have a review by Lorelle Vanfossen of a much earlier version, that taught me a lot and I ended up with over 100 things to review. I would recommend getting an expert eye for a new site.
Cheers
Andy

**Doc** · Jan 20, 2015, 02:40 PM

Just what I need - ANOTHER excuse to sit online and not get any work done

Looks good Andy.

Doc

**DIYer** · Jan 20, 2015, 07:13 PM

Looks great, Workshopshed! You've obviously put a lot of hours into your site.

**Workshopshed** · Jan 21, 2015, 09:23 AM

Originally Posted by DIYer

Looks great, Workshopshed! You've obviously put a lot of hours into your site.

Too many by far.... I started the project 2 years ago and got sidetracked by the fact that the importer from blogger did not do all that I wanted it to, e.g. it was broke and did not port the images.. Many hours were spent coding that and I ended up supporting the plugin too.

I also built a whole new plugin to handle the display of the twitter tweets only for twitter to change the API and all my hardwork had to be thrown away.

The review by Lorelle almost made me give up hope but I slogged through that by making a list of EVERYTHING that needed looking at and systematically working through them. Also I flagged a few points with "Really not sure how to deal with this" and just moved on. No point worrying about something if you can't do anything about it.

Part way through I created a second list of "do later" items that could wait till after the site was created. I then either completed items or moved them to do later until I was ready to go.

I'm now working through my "do later" and either chucking or completing each one. The next "big" task is to set up a development VM so that I can play with settings etc without breaking the live site.

**Jon** · Jan 22, 2015, 10:35 AM

Originally Posted by Workshopshed

The next "big" task is to set up a development VM so that I can play with settings etc without breaking the live site.

I procrastinated this exact task for years!

It turned out to be much easier than I thought. The codebase is hosted on bitbucket, and we use AWS EC2 instances for development. Every developer gets his or her own dev instance to test everything out, and then pushes code updates to the central repository. From there, I can pull it to my dev server, test it out, then pull to the live server.

If it's just for development, you might be able to do it all on the AWS free tier.