A new web site for Wise Owl Training

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A new web site for Wise Owl Training
Although our new website is functionally still pretty much the same, it looks completely different. This blog explains why we made the change and the issues we faced.

Posted by Andy Brown on 16 November 2023

In this blog

The old site
The new site
What's changed?

It's not often that we completely change every page of our website! We thought we'd take this opportunity to wallow in a bit of nostalgia for our old site, and offer up some thoughts on what's changed (and why).

The old site

Lest we forget, here are a couple of pages from the old site (which was live up to Thursday 16th November 2023):

The old home page is on the left, and the start of the old SQL training page on the right.

The new site

By comparison, here's what the home page of the new site looks like:

The new home page of this site on the day of release.

What's changed?

Here are the 4 main changes we've made to our site:

Change	Notes
New logo and colours	This the most obvious change - the rather tired orange/brown colours have gone, to be replaced with (we hope) a fresher blue theme. At the same time, we've changed our logo from this: To this:
New gird system	The old system used something called Zurb Foundation - similar to Bootstrap - to lay out pages in an underlying grid system. It was full of HTML instructions like this: The new system uses the new(ish) flex and gird CSS constructs to dramatically simplify all of the page layouts.
New home page	We hated the old cartoon images from the day the website was released! We've rewritten the website home page completely to reflect better what we do, and to be easier to navigate.
New measurement units	It may seem a tiny change, but the new website uses rem units rather than px (pixels). What this means is that the website automatically scales gracefully for different screen resolutions, vastly decreasing the amount of work needing to be done to ensure that the website looks OK on different screen sizes.

It's probably worth mentioning that although the new site looks completely different, functionally (apart from the home page) it's still pretty much exactly the same. We'd love to hear what you think of our new website!

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