Recently (over the past week or so) we have been doing quite a few updates to Enfuzed. Most of these updates are visible, some of them are performance updates. We will continue to make performance and aesthetic improvements to Enfuzed, if you find any bugs along the way please don’t hesitate to point them out to us either via contact form, or comment below. Here I will highlight the updates/improvements we’ve made thus far:
Aesthetic Improvements
- One of the first things we did was move the red category box that you see on the homepage and category pages down on top of the post featured image. We did this to save space and clean up the post excerpt boxes a little bit.
- You may notice the text in the posts and excerpt is a little easier to read, we increased the line-height in the paragraphs for a little more space for easy reading.
- Within the actual post page we decided to remove the featured image. We thought it was redundant and took up too much space, plus the text wrapping around it looked terrible.
- We increase the width of the website on PC’s to 1000px wide from 960px wide. Doing this let us make the sidebar wider and increase the padding between the main content and the sidebar so the separation between the two is visible.
- The text box on the homepage slider is a little wider now. Some posts text was wrapping weird so we thought it would look better if we widened it giving the text more breathing room.
Usability Improvements
- All of the categories on the category page are in alphabetical order now.
- There is now a sitemap which displays the post archive by month, all categories, tags, and pages for quick access to finding what you need.
- We increased the height of the header bar just because we could :)
- The search bar in the header is now more user friendly. Simply click the Search text and the search bar appears (where as before is was a jQuery drop down).
- We now have our Newsletter Subscription in the sidebar directly connected to Mail Chimp, so when you register you will get a confirmation email from Mail Chimp now.
- Polls are now only 10 days long instead of 30, we thought 30 days was too long for the same poll and we’d like to have more polls!
Performance Improvements
- As I type this we are combing through all the code for Enfuzed and cutting code that we don’t need. Our goal is to create and keep a fast loading website. Right now we are scoring a 90 on Google’s Page Speed tool, we hope to continue to improve upon that.
- We have some more mobile improvements planned, but for iPhone we fixed a horizontal scroll issue in portrait mode so everything should fit well now.
Site Additions
We have added more sections on the website in an effort to appeal to more crowds. These sections include:
- Company Spotlight: When we find new companies and start ups that we like, we help promote them by writing an article on them.
- Tutorials: We will now be adding tutorials to Enfuzed!
- Snippets: We will be posting regularly code snippets that are useful in helping you with your website.
- References: This section will include useful references like pseudo classes, keyboard shortcuts and the like.
- Deals: We have a freebie section, but not everything is free, so this is the deal section where we will post deals on various design related resources.
- News: We will post major updates and upcoming design/development related things here.
I’m positive I’m forgetting some stuff but this is the major of it. We love suggestions and read all of them so feel free to leave us some feedback!
