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I've upgraded all of the site's film reviews: Behind the scenes of running AALBC.com


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For those of you interested the behind the scenes activities...

finally migrated all of my film reviews to my website's new format.  Basically the web pages for the old film reviews, indeed all of AALBC.com web page were static web pages.  They were essentially MS Word documents, so if anything needed to be changed I had to open the document up and edit it directly.  This is cool for a handful of pages, but it is entirely impractical for large websites like AALBC.com.

As I added new content the problem just became progressively worse.  To make any site wide changes like converting to https, or optimizing for mobile devices, just became very labor intensive.

Today changing the format of a film review is trivial.  The design of the web pages and the content are completely separate.  This ideal is not exactly a revelation in website design, but for a site started in 1997, keeping pace has not been trivial, but it is the only reason AALBC.com has survived and grown over the past two decades.

Every Wordpress blog is designed the same way, to keep content separate from the design.  This is why you can click a button and dramatically change the look of an entire Wordpress website.  But a Wordpress site, as flexible and easy as they are to use, would be too limiting for AALBC.com.  I employ very different designs for different types of content; the design of a film review page is completely different than a book club page, or an author page, or a book review page as an example

The other trick is that I have not broken any of the old URLs.  They all continue to work even through the pages now have new URLs.  This is critically important so that I don't lose any of the benefits I've gained in SEO (search engine optimization) over the years.  In fact with the site redesign and the changes I made in the page's meta tags (the stuff read by search engines) I should actually gain some benefits in SEO. 

black-movies-banner.jpg

 

 

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