I built the site from the ground up 3 years ago when I was attending Penn State.
The website has evolved a lot since then and has signed up over 1,200 users.
The past couple months I have been working on a complete redesign of the site.
After lots of hard work, I was able to finally launch the new site last weekend.
The new homepage of the Penn State Snowboard Club.
Let’s start with the new design.
For those familiar with the old site (photo below), you will notice some drastic changes.
I decided to go with a custom designed header photo for each of the main pages.
Each menu item has a unique header (and color) associated with it.
This is the homepage of the old PSSC website.
It’s very boxy.
Officers page with new header image and the green color scheme.
In addition to these design changes, I made some other improvements to the sidebars on the homepage.
Big thanks to Ben Birk who provided the gorgeous photo for the left sidebar background.
The new design explicitly shouts at you “This event is TODAY”.
Many of the most active club members are actively using Twitter.
Upcoming Events and Recent Tweets sidebar items.
Another huge feature that I rolled out with this release is a completely revamped Inbox/Messaging page.
There was no central place to view your messages.
To compose a message, you had to find that user’s profile page.
Well, with the new site I’ve built a GMail-like Inbox page.
This was quite a task, but I think it turned out extremely well!
Brand new Inbox design to view your PMs.
I also spent some time working with the Video page.
In actual use, this was very clunky.
I wanted to create a dead simple way to add a video.
The new Video page.
I started by moving the site over to my brand new server hosted by Linode in Newark, NJ.
This server flies in comparision to the shared server where was previously hosting the site.
Overall, these improvements have made a very noticeable difference in site performance.
Here is the Forum.
This is the most popular section of the site.
None of the New/Edit/Delete icons will appear for regular club members.
