Dear Reader,
As the old cliché goes, “Change is constant“. When we switched to Shadows Galore V3.0 in August 2012, we thought we had found the panacea to all our problems, the perfect design we ever wished for Shadows Galore. That was a painstaking effort, slogging away night after night on the new design, tweaking things, modifying code and what not. The final product, and I will risk being vain here, was a beautiful looking blog.. Just the way we wanted it to look.
However, in last one year and three months, we matured enough to notice the issues that plagued us. The first one was the loading speed, the website would load very slow (sometimes taking as much as 15-30 seconds) and was generally heavy. There were no updates for many of the defects from the Service provider and we would need to wait for months before we got a chance to be with the latest WordPress release. Then, the design would break on lower versions of Internet explorer and in mobile devices. In a world where an increasing number of people use mobile devices to access Internet, it was a glaring shortcoming.
Finally after procrastinating for a long time, last week we decided to make a trade off between beauty and usability. The lessons learnt of last two years made sure that the turn around time was much lesser and we have been able to switch almost whole of the site into the new design. Some tweaks remain but they will be resolved as we go.
So here is Shadows Galore 4.0 for you. Apart from the usual sincerely written travelogues, photographs taken with love and some thoughtful reflection on the world around us, you will be able to see the following new changes :
- A stripped down version which will remove the unnecessary clutter and show only what is relevant.
- Minimalistic design with plain white canvas so that your eyes wander only on the good things.
- Better performance, lazy load of photographs and load time below 2 seconds for the Home Page on a decent broadband connection.
- Support for all browsers. IE 7 and Safari will not break the site now.
- Responsive design which will work great on the mobile devices.
As always, thanks a lot for the love you have showered on us. Do let us know your feedback on the new design, please feel free to tell us if you think we have made a mistake. But do let us know 🙂
Yours
Puru & Ekta
Excellent design! Minimalistic is the way to go… Good deed on happy birthday! 😀
Thanks Rahul .. hard work of a weekend 🙂
I absolutely love the new look of your site, Puru. Kudos to you for setting this off! I am myself thinking of changing my blog template for such a long time now, as you said, even I have been ‘procrastinating for a long time’. 🙁
Thanks Arti. Start working on a new theme. Do let me know if you need any help