Welcome to the new site! If you're a regular visitor, you are probably checking the URL to see if you've landed on the wrong site. But no - it's still SQL-Server-Performance.com. Whilst all the content and contributors are the same, we have made some pretty big changes. Most notably:
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Updated Content Management System. This involved custom coding a new CMS from scratch to manage the site content. The site had developed so rapidly in the past few years that it had outgrown the original site architecture. For the new CMS, all content resides in a database and there are no static pages. This will help reduce the admin and make adding new site features far easier. The new site should also be more responsive than the old one.
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New forum. The old Snitz based forum has been replaced by the Community Server 2007 forum, which is more feature-rich and stable.
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New site design. Times change and web-design styles change with them. The previous site design had not changed much in four years. The goal was to give the design give the site a fresh contemporary feel.
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Refocus the site on key content areas. Previously the main navigation included no less than 54 items. Whilst the diversity was great, the vast bulk of visitors were only interested in several areas of the site, resulting in key links being drowned out by links to areas of limited interested. Most important was to give the search function a more prominent place on the page, as this was the second most popular feature on the site. Some links have been moved to sub-menus, whilst other areas have been deprecated altogether. The biggest casualty of this was the News page.
All the development doesn't mean we've lost sight of the content side of site (which is after all the reason for any visit to the site). We are currently working on updating all the content on the site for SQL Server 2005. A unique, in-depth article is now published every 2-3 days and we are launching several new article series. The ASP.NET / ADO.NET article series began at the start of the year, and we have already begun adding benchmarking articles to provide quantitative measurements of SQL Server issues. I hope you are as happy with the new site as I am.
As ever, I would love to hear any comments and suggestions you may have.
Jude