By Asheesh Laroia - 11 Jan 2016
If you take a look at https://sandstorm.io/, you’ll see our new website, created by Néna Nguyen with assistance from Kenton Varda. They took feedback from many users and the core dev team over the course of building it, and we’re all going to keep adjusting it over time. If you have feedback, please share it with the community in the sandstorm mailing list.
I wanted to highlight a few important things the new website does better when compared to the old website, available at the Internet Archive.
Responsive design. If you view the new website on a phone, you’ll get something reasonable. This wasn’t true a year ago, and it required some thinking. If you’re new to responsive web design, start by reading Ethan Marcotte’s article at A List Apart.
Flexbox. We use the new display: flex; layout mode so that we can express columns very naturally in CSS. So far we’re very happy with it. You can read up about it at MDN or by playing Flexbox Froggy, an interactive learning game. You can also read our CSS on the GitHub repository for the website to find out how we use it.
SCSS/SASS. We now use a CSS extension language called SCSS. This lets us use features like variables and nesting. You can see how we use it in the sandstorm-website GitHub repository.
Multiple pages. The older Sandstorm.io website had just one page: index.html. The new site goes into more depth about how Sandstorm works, how to get involved in the community. how businesses can make the best use of Sandstorm, and more. It was time to have more than one page. A side note: if you hear us talking about how the “front page redesign” is finally done, this is because we’re used to the entire website being one page.
A button to sign in to Oasis, our hosting service. Sandstorm is open source software that anyone can install; since not everyone wants to install it, oasis.sandstorm.io is our hosting service where you can run Sandstorm apps without your own server. The new “sign-in” link above the fold makes it easy to log into our Oasis hosting service.
One repository for the blog and the website. Until now, we maintained the Sandstorm blog separately, with its own templates and no version control. Kenton built the Hacker CMS app for this purpose. Now that the main website uses Jekyll, we’ve integrated our old blog posts into the main sandstorm-website git repository.
A simpler top banner. In the previous website, the banner at the top of the site would allow you to subscribe to our Facebook page, or try a demo, or download Sandstorm, or sign up now for the Oasis hosting service. We’ve limited the number of options to help people learn more faster.
Those are the most essential changes. You’ll find a lot of subtle changes as you click around the new site and compare it to the old one! If you have comments, consider filing a bug or emailing the list. Kudos to Néna Nguyen and Kenton Varda for getting these changes ready in record time.