Welcome To Sindustries 4.0

After several months in development Sindustries version 4.0 is no alive and kicking, I’ve spent a lot of hours working on the design and the code side of things to get the most out of this re-design.

Introduction, Well Kinda

Let me just let you know the website is still a little rough around the edges however I decided that today was the day to go live so if you find anything funny let me know!

Links will be broken but I’ll set-up redirects when 404s and crawl errors pop up.

What’s New?

There is many new features in the site such as: -

1. CSS3 Media Queries.
2. WordPress powered portfolio.
3. Flexible design.
4. All outputted code is HTML5 & CSS3valid.
5. Site is now fully WordPress powered.
6. A focus on usability and accessibility.
7. An awesome platform to build on.

The site is so much more powerful in the respect that it can now handle a lot of different tasks and thanks to WordPress it is super easy to add new code to build on the current site.

There is still a lot of simple tweaks that still need to be done to the site such as adding hover states and sort out visited states for links. The I ‘ve been doing a lot of reading of CSS3 media queries and because of them I’ve been able to combine 5,yes five style-sheets into one personally I think that is freaking awesome however other than a few CSS changes there is no “major” code left still to be coded.

Sindustries Past Designs

Ok so what you’re looking at here is the 4 recent versions of Sindustries, Version 1 was created a while back it was the first “WordPress Theme” I ever designed but It was more trouble than it was worth since everyday I was editing static code and then it was time to re-design. Next up was version 2 I really go into designing dark website and my hope with that design was bring “colour to life” think Abuzeedo style then I quickly notice the pain caused by that colour so that design got scrapped never to see the light of day in the web design world. I then left the re-design idea for a while to concentrate on client and my agency web design work I learnt a few more “tricks of the trade” so to speak and decided I was going to experiment in integrating all  sections of my site with WordPress. I managed to achieve a few key goals here however it was rather buggy and to be honest boring and post thumbnails with custom fields very annoying and with a 2MB page weight … back to the drawing board!

Now with the 4th Version I now had a solid platform of web design, programming and WordPress Theme Development to come up with a site that was: -

• User friendly
• Easy to update
• Awesome Design
• Flexible code

I don’t mean to blow my trumpet but I think I’ve delivered on the points raised I love the new sites look its awesome and really me! (Yeah It’s me on the front page ) The site is super easy to update every single page is powered via WordPress. The site is also extremely easy to update code-wise so new features can be made (and safely made locally then made live) I’m thinking pretty soon I’m going to convert the site to full HTML5  as it’s using only a few HTML5 elements however I do want it running all HTML5.

A Website With Extra Functionality

The latest version of Sindustries also has two “modes” these modes switch only the homepage layout to basically advertise myself for freelance work you can see the difference here: -

What’s the difference between the two layouts:-

• Contact Form
• More “calls to action” on web design work

That’s it just those two points I have a built the website with around a “what if” principle since anything can happen and if something bad does happen then I have a platform I can quickly set-up to fall back on just in-case something goes wrong.

A Big Thank You

I have to give a big thanks to Lynne from Polr for her review of the site and her insight, Next up is Callum Morell  for again providing me with some helpful suggestion into making the site better (I have a feeling he will be pointing a few more things out to me after he reads this as well) and finally I need to thank my other half for doing the user testing!

Future Updates

I currently have few “updates” already worked out first up will be converting the site to HTML5 which should hopefully be done pretty quickly, then it will ripping out the “posts” and converting it to a more Tumblr style format so posts are more semantic and allows for a more simpler post convention.

What Now Then?

Well that is a good question. Over the next month I’m going to fix a few back-end issues and then the world is my oyster. I’m thinking however that the next thing might be either a free to download WordPress or Tumblr theme… or both but we will see.

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