Megatokyo Site Redesign PROJECT

Public beta for new website for Megatokyo webcomic. CountAlpicola, Kalium, Dark Morford and I were working on this in secret for the last 10 months. I’m glad it’s finally seen the light of day.

This was started by another team some three years ago, but restarted from scratch by our team in January 2007.

Features are numerous, and mostly invisible: There’s a completely re-written back-end support structure with normalized database. The site sports the same 1990’s-style public interface rewritten in clean, fast-loading html/css. The drop-down-of-doom is gone, with a transcript search engine in its place. Some slight changes have been made in the site artwork, like the top banner and navigation buttons. We embedded twitter feeds to replace the old status box.

Primary goal for this endeavor was to streamline administration by the Artist, so he can focus more time and energy on his Art, and less on website maintenance. Thus, most of the work will never be seen by the public. The RSS feed is now generated from the database, rather than maintained by hand. Strip and rant-image uploading is built-in, no more FTP. Rant authorship uses TinyMCE for Dom-friendly goodness.

Performance was also a focus. In recreating the site with xhtml/css, the deliverable html and css was reduced from 94k to 25k. The site’s design allows for scaling out across a farm of http servers, front-ending it with a load balancer like a squid reverse proxy.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on this project for a while, looking for performance and render problems. If you have any critique or bug reports on the site functionality, send an email to core@megatokyo.com.