AramcoExPats.com Launches Version 4.0
- Lifestyles
- Special Interest
Author: Aramco ExPats
Released 30 September 2007
Visitors to the website can expect some big changes in the very near future. After five very successful years, aramcoexpats.com is ready to go 4.0. Vicci Thompson's son, Rusty Swayne, and his company, Mindfly Website Design and Development, have been toiling ceaselessly in their efforts to completely overhaul this little online community.
The first thing that users will notice is that the site has been given a dramatic facelift. New and archived articles will be organized more efficiently and be far more aesthetically pleasing. These changes are more than skin deep, however, as Mindfly's newly written code will allow pages to load with greater speed. Once loaded, your favorite bits of industry news and camp updates will be much easier to read, as well. Gone are the slightly archaic looking pages of old. The new "style sheets" created by Rusty and his team are ushering in a new paradigm in online text layout. Essentially, articles will now appear in a form more akin to traditional print formats, such as magazines and other periodicals.
Visitors who frequent the treasure trove of archived material have nothing to fear from this transition. Though it has meant much work for aramcoexpats.com staff, all the content that is currently on the site has been given a fresh coat of HTML in order to make it available on the new site starting from Day 1. All the recipes, Dhahran news, pioneering stories, reunion information, and galleries that users have come to rely on will not be lost in the shuffle.
With regard to the galleries, they have been given a 21st century makeover as well. At the new aramcoexpats.com, galleries can be viewed multiple ways. A scrollbar containing thumbnails of gallery photos will be at the top of every page. Guests may click on a single picture that may be of particular interest to them, or choose to expand the gallery to view all the photos at once. You can even choose to rate photos and comment on them as well.
Archived article lists will no longer contain the short descriptions and thumbnails that tend to spread the lists quite far down a webpage. Instead, rolling the cursor over the article titles will cause the descriptions and thumbnails to pop out of the page. This has the duel benefit of making it easier to search for favorite articles while looking quite snazzy at the same time.
The ever popular rotating sidebar photos (now called "Snapshot") will also be appearing on the new version of the site; as will the forum (which remains relatively unchanged), the suq, the expat finder, the announcements and events sections, and of course, your ExPat email.