The new Sharpened.net!

February 1, 2005 — by Per Christensson

Welcome to the new Sharpened.net! After a month and a half of production, the new site is finally here. I hope you enjoy the new look and new features that have been added to the site.

If you're a regular Sharpened.net visitor, you'll notice that the overall layout has not changed much. Believe it or not, this is something I debated for a long time. In fact, I went through six different design ideas before deciding on the seventh one, which was the most similar to the old look. I guess the old interface worked so well, I figured it was best to leave well enough alone. However, the new site design is more three-dimensional and hopefully more aesthetically pleasing. Also, the size of the text has been increased to make reading the pages easier. Since a lot of this site consists of technical computer terminology, I figure it's best to make the reading process as easy as possible. =)

The navigation menus at the top of each page have been rebuilt with a cleaner look as well as new menu options. Each menu has three main sections, which you can access from any page on the site. If you click the actual menu header instead of the links within the menu, you are now directed to a "Main Index" page for the appropriate section. This page describes and links to all the pages within the section. Furthermore, there is now a Site Map for Sharpened.net! This page conveniently lists all the main pages within the website, so you can easily find the page or area of the website you are looking for. If you don't know about all the resources that Sharpened.net has to offer, the Site Map is a good place to find out.

The popular Glossary section has been cleaned up a bit and I improved the efficiency of the database access for the main glossary and definition pages. This translates to less processing time for my Web server and faster-loading pages for you. The Help Center has been seriously overhauled and the main page now has a more intuitive interface. New pages have been created for each Help Center category as well. The Resources area has also been given a facelift and the previously published Unix Commands and Vi Reference pages have been brought back.

The most exciting news is that there is a brand new section -- The Sharpened Review! This new area contains product reviews, movie reviews, and music reviews, all written by the Sharpened.net Editorial staff. The reviews are meant to be informative and helpful in guiding your buying decisions. While only a little over twenty reviews have been completed so far, rest assured plenty more are on the way!

So I hope you enjoy the new site. As always, please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions regarding the website. And be sure to tell me if anything isn't working correctly as well! The Contact Page as well as all the other pages with forms have been updated with PHP-based form validation, so no more blank e-mails. =) Thanks for visiting, and have fun exploring the new Sharpened.net!