Over the next few days we'll be posting more in-depth articles on all of the new and improved features of the new Awakening 2.0 website. For now, we'd like to just give you a brief overview of what our new website offers.
Behind the scenes streamlining
The Awakening web team have spent a lot of man hours over the last eight months toiling on the behind the scenes workings of the website. Although the majority of this can't be physically seen from the front end, we can guarantee that 2.0 is an absolute monster compared to the previous website. This will benefit you the viewer with an easier to use menu system and slightly faster browsing experience.
Inevitably and unfortunately we have had to introduce advertisements to help pay for the upkeep costs of the website. We will endeavour to keep out the irritating and intrusive adverts that you might find on other websites.
Improved Home Page and News Feed
As the first port of call for most users it was important for us to organize the home page. We have taken out the useless clutter altogether and added restyled the important stuff that our viewers were interacting with. To increase your interacting pleasure we have integrated community ratings and social media commenting on a lot of elements and we really hope you'll add your input where you see fit.
New Menu System
We decided that our old menu system was needlessly confusing, so we have simplified and restructured all of our content to help you the viewer find what you are looking for quicker. For example, we found that our photographic work was less important to our viewers so we removed it from the main menu and placed a link to our galleries in the footer.
Global Female Martial Arts Register
Our athlete database has been improved greatly, it is in fact the main reason we began developing 2.0. If you are someone who used and saw our first database, we're sure you agree it was ground breaking but lacked some obvious features. In 2.0, we've added those missing features and then some.
Our promise to you is that each day (including holidays!) new information is added to the database, and on most days there will be new athletes also added.
New Global Martial Arts Event Calendar
As far as we know, this is another world first. We were unable to find another calendar online that shows an across the board look at what events are going on around the globe. This is our first incarnation of the event calendar and although we're pleased with it, we will be evolving it over time to bring you an even better experience.
New Gallery System
If you saw the old website you would agree that our gallery system was a royal pain in the ass. We did a huge overhaul and changed the system completely. Goodbye to that horrible and unusable nuisance, and hello lovely browsabilty! If it doesn't keep you guys happy, it will at least shut our photographers up!
New Search Function
In the top right hand corner of every page you will our new search feature. Although this might be a boring function to mention, we feel it is worthy of presenting to you. All to often these search functions don't work on most sites, even some of the highest level sites. We found out why during development - these things are a nightmare to get right. Our head developer spent a very long time making this work and he's very proud, and we hope you use it whenever necessary.
Keep an eye on our news feed over the next few days for a more in-depth look at a few of our features.
