W H Y  T H E  C H A N G E ?

UKA has been in need of recoding for some time now. Standing at over 560 pages of content spanning the last decade, it had become an uneven blend of different coding styles, outdated content and a few broken links (most of which were fixed ad-hoc thanks to all of you who emailed telling me where they were).

The site itself had become a little neglected. Thanks mostly to the efforts of Kev and Rory it had carried on with fresh content, new reviews and the occasional article, but it lacked organisation. Back in August we realised that the site needed to be taken in hand, so we started to analyse it.

I N I T I A L  F I N D I N G S

The first thing that struck us was the amount of traffic the site receives - averaging 6,000 unique visitors a day and rising, the bandwidth report was scary indeed. Coupled with a lot of off-site linking to our images, we decided to move the site to our London facility, and take a more professional approach to the running of the site.

UKA was officially handed over to Tech Networks Ltd, the company I set up 7 years ago - the advantage of this was that the site could now be worked on during the day, rather than the odd weekend here and there. Over the last few months we've been talking to a lot of people in the industry and attending meetings, launches and so forth, a side effect of which was our creating the Miyazaki Movies website for Buena Vista - funny old world innit? Of course, my own commitments to running the UK Anime Club for MVM and sorting out all the correspondence it generates ate into my time too, but it did provide an insight into the changing demographic of anime fans in general. ^_^

So, with the site in hand at company HQ, changes were planned. The first major shift was going from .html to .asp. Originally we had wanted to create a Content Management System with which to edit the site's content, but given the scale of the site that would have taken almost 6 months. We decided to build a halfway solution - the site was recoded page by page into .asp, with the main menus and header graphics being called from other files, which gives us greater flexibility and the ability to update whole sections of the site by editing a single file. It also gives us a much stronger starting point for Content Management further down the line.

As we looked at each section of the site, some pages were discarded due to either age or irrelevence, whilst others were redesigned to create a more professional look to the site. We also made a concerted effort to remove nested tables and any crappy bits of redundant code which had crept in over the years. One thing we didn't want to do was take away too much from what had become the site's distinctive look, so we established a framework for the site and stuck to it as closely as we could.

T H E  W O R K

The work on version 4 has been going on since August with initial talks leading to the first coding stages at the end of October. Since we still had a lot of commitments to our clients we couldn't spend as much time as wanted on the site initially, but as the workload evened out, I managed to spend more of my own time deciding on the direction of the site and what was to change.

For example, the review pages were overhauled. Nested tables were removed to allow for cross-browser compatibility and faster loading, with info boxes added at the bottom of each page in order to direct readers to similar titles or supply info that didn't really fit into the review itself. Many of the reviews have also been updated, re-written or extended to bring them up to date. This was also carried out on the non-review sections, with the links section, UK TV and release schedules being revised so that they are now more relevent/up to date.

What you see now is the culmination in a lot of very patient coding and some sweeping changes to the way in which the site works - I hope you all like it 0_0

W H A T ' S  N E X T ?

The new organisation means that the site will be updated fortnightly with major new articles and reviews, with news and other features being added ad-hoc. With any luck Anime Connect's very talented sub editor, Gemma Cox, will be providing us with some new articles on a regular basis (and anyone who has read her work in Anime Connect will know what a coup that is for us :) and I'll be able to take a far more active role in the site now that I can work on it as part of my working schedule.

The next major change will be our regular newsletter. We develped a highly succesful mail management system at Tech Networks (thanks to our Technical Director who you'll most likely know as Liquidkristal from the forum) and we'll be setting this up soon to keep you posted about site developments. Incidentally a similar system is also being set up for MVM's UK Anime Club site as well.

Over the next month or so I'll be restoring and filling up all major areas of the site - as I write the Articles section needs to be added, as does Manga Reviews, but their absence will be short and when they reappear there'll be a lot of new content in all of them.

UKA is still evolving, only now its got a lot more to offer. We'd love to hear your comments, positive or negative, and we are, as always, happy to recieve your submissions. I hope you'll stick with us as we grow to keep us on the right track!

Ja ne,

- Ross Liversidge, Ed

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