Leaving trans-fusion
Careful! This post is looking a little old and could be inaccurate in many, many ways
It’s soon to be the end of an era as this will be the last post written on trans-fusion.co.uk. Over the past few months I have been working to redesign and rebuild this website on a new domain and it is nearly ready to be unveiled. I don’t want to write too much about the new website now or the reasons behind the forthcoming change in domain, as I would rather do that after the site is live.
However I do want to look back on what was the first domain I ever owned, and is still part of only a small set of domains I own today. Apologies if this may end up sounding like an obituary, but just indulge me.
Where it all began
The idea for the choice of domain name never actually came from me; instead I saw it written in graffiti on a building close to my University. For no other reasons than not fancying calling a site after myself and I thought it sounded cool I called my site Transfusion. The site has always been primarily my portfolio, an online presence to promote myself as a web designer. While at University the site always lacked the professionalism I aspired towards, but the site was always a useful outlet to try new ideas and designs.
Designs
Over the past few years the site has undergone five design iterations, with the current design being its sixth. I’ve always been a restless designer easily bored with designs I create. With my own sites the lack of content always left the design looking bland, especially when at the time I was not yet able to create sites that have the artistic flair that I am more capable of now.
Why change?
Even with the added content, the current design is possibly one of the shortest lived designs of only a few months. The reasons for moving away from the current design is that the development was plagued by problems and when time was running out to complete the site, the site was put live incomplete. The design and development process had already spanned six months and in that time the design was not fulfilling its requirement as displaying the best of my abilities. All these issues have led to the new design.
What will happen next?
The new site will be launched hopefully within the next week or two. To ensure the move goes smoothly the blog will go quiet until the new site is live with a brand new post. At that point trans-fusion will disappear hidden by a 301 redirect to the new site to reduce the amount of lost traffic by the change.
The RSS feeds will also go quiet, and new feeds will be available with the new site. A subscriber, you know who you are, will need to change to the new domains feed. Although I think there are methods to keep the old feed URL working I think the work involved outweighs the benefits.
Thank You
Although this site has never reached the heady heights of Internet fame it is a site that I’ve spent many hours working on over the years. I hope that when the site has been visited over the years that people didn’t think visiting was a waste of bandwidth. Eventually, when the traffic is all going to the new site I may redevelop trans-fusion.co.uk, but for what I have no idea.