WELCOME TO VELVETLORI 3.0

Velvetlori 3.0 is now LIVE! Thank you so much for your patience during the site's downtime. I decided to postpone from making a blogpost until all of the pages on the site have gone live— the gallery/videos page took a little longer to set up, but I was eager to get the construction page off of Velvetlori ASAP so I rolled out ver 3.0 a little early. I'm finally relieved to have everything up and running again! I've truly missed maintaining a website and interacting with the smallweb  

WHAT'S NEW?

Everything!! I switched from Wordpress back into a standard HTML/CSS format with some bells and whistles tacked on to it. 
As stated in my about page, Velvetlori 3.0's design is heavily influenced by the 2003 Baby the Stars Shine Bright store page. Coming up with the site design was actually the hardest part of the re-haul.... I shuffled through many ideas until I decided simple was better and settled for a layout reminiscent of old-school web design.  Here are some scrapped mock-ups I made when conceptualizing the site rehaul:

WHY THE OVERHAUL?

I wasn't a fan of blogposts being the primary source of content for my page, and I disliked the file bloat in Wordpress that made it tedious to add or alter files. I wanted to skew the website back to its original purpose which was to serve as an archive for my lolita adjacent interests   Don't get me wrong! I still enjoy making blogposts; I simply prefer to do it on an occasional basis. Right now I'm much more satisfied with my current set-up which utilizes the Mala loves 2 blog script. Pretty much 99.9% of the PHP files on my site use a variation of this script. I modify it a bit for my personal needs.
Thank you Malalaika  

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE OLD BLOG?

Gone. Reduced to atoms. The reason why I put up a construction page instead of leaving the site contents untouched was because of a database screw up that resulted in the loss of all my data Unfortunately, I was unable to restore the content, and the wayback machine has only archived the index.... I'm a little bummed out about the loss, but I've been embracing impermanence lately so I'm over it. Kind of   

REMOVAL OF THE MINIBLOG

The retired twitter user within me yearns for short-form blogposts!!!!! However, to my own detriment, I have found myself more inclined to post there instead of my actual blog....  I really want to practice long-form writing, so I made the difficult decision of abandoning the miniblog on my site re-haul. If the urge strikes, perhaps I'll dust off my status.cafe  

THE RSS FEED AND UPDATES TAB

The RSS feed is not a new feature on my site, however, I have added an additional updates tab on the index page for any minor updates that does not require an announcement on the RSS feed. Here are some differences between the content you will find on the RSS feed vs the Updates tab:

RSS FEED

• Major site updates
• New pages/Page re-hauls
• Updates to the blog page
• Updates to the image gallery
• Updates to the video page
• Joining the Potoooooooo webring

UPDATES TAB

• Minor CSS/Design tweaks
• Updates to the closet page
• Updates to the links page
• Updates to the collectives page
• Everything else that's announced on the RSS feed

WHAT'S NEXT?

Right now I'm satisfied with the number of pages on my website! It's a manner of updating them with new content and polishing things up from here on out. In the future, I might look into new things such as a coordinates page or askbox, but for the time being, I'd like to focus on filling out my existing media directory pages (i.e. my blog, gallery, and video archive).

CONCLUSION

Whew, what a relief to finally get my site up and running after a bunch of life related circumstances got in the way of development. Once I overcame the initial hurdle of designing a new site layout it was smooth sailing from there! If there's any other questions that may have been left out in this blogpost feel free to leave a comment down below! Thank you once again for stopping by my page! Until next time