If all goes well, we won’t have a need for a version 6 anytime in the near future.
The “v5″ in the title of this post refers to version 5, as in the fifth version of this web site. Previously: v1 was our 1995 frames site, v2 was our first forum (which was a failure), v3 was our second forum site which, like the first, never caught on, and v4 was our last site. Version 4 was an award-winning site, and it was even featured in a web design magazine, and it was also detailed in a rather in-depth book about web accessibility. In light of these awards (even though this version, too, will easily be an award-winner, what with its extensive accessibility) you may be wondering why we’ve produced another version of the site and what it brings to the table. Well, it’s a fair question. Here’s why:
Updating
The last version of this site, even though it was run by a content management system (CMS), was hard to update and publish to. Moreover, it was felt we were outgrowing the blog/news and feed. Instead of waiting a couple more years, letting the job grow, and then doing it, we decided we were better off doing it now. We decided to use WordPress for the site’s administrative back-end. This is an application we’re expert with using so employing it here was easy. Now that the site is re-done, and is now powered by what’s called a MySQL database, managing our content will be a breeze — and this should lead to more updates, more articles, etc. We also added several other listed technologies if you’re interested in this sort of thing.
Bug Blog
What used to be our news page with Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed was indeed a blog, one we scripted ourselves, but it didn’t allow commenting, excerpts, and interaction, and archiving was poor. With our new Blog (weblog) (with a new feed), our readers will be able to comment on articles, and it’ll have a more extensible archiving system. We do hope you comment on our articles as this will help confirm what’s interesting to you, and what’s not. To see our past content, visit our archives page (linked above), or start with our categories list (see the sidebar menu).
IPM Products
We also added an entirely new section to this site specifically geared towards providing information about selected Integrated Pest Management (IPM) products. This was missing from our last site so this will hopefully be a nice addition. The size of the site is quite a bit larger than our old site (we have over 224 pages thus far) and part of the reason is because of this new informational section. Specking of sections, we also renamed and greatly expanded our old “GM 101″ section. Now we call it Necessary Info.
Online Shopping
We have also added an e-commerce shopping cart since several customers have in the past requested this. But, to be be clear, the focus of this site has been and will be unchanged: We want this site to be first and foremost a biocontrol and IPM resource. In other words we added a shop to our info site, instead of adding an info to our shop site, if that makes sense. If not, ask us to explain — you can now that we accept comments.
Anecdotes Moved
On the last site we had an entire site section dedicated to our bug-related anecdotes (short stories). We decided to move that into our Bug Blog as it’s a lot easier to manage, yet has less emphasis. If you like our often amusing stories, please see them all in our Anecdotes category. Also, expect to see more of them in the future.
Print Pages
We used to offer specially scripted print pages. We tackled this differently on this site by simply offering a print-media Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). Thus, to print all you have to do is use the link provided at the bottom of our pages/posts, or simply use the Print function on your web browser (File > Print or ctrl+p). Printing this way, assuming you’re using a modern or legacy CSS-supporting browser, will give you the data you want to print and it’ll strip the rest. Easy as pie; we think you’ll be very satisfied with this solution. We also added a convenient print link on the bottom of most of our pages (will work if you support JavaScript, will not be visible if you don’t).
Handheld Devices
Speaking of Cascading Style Sheets, we also provided one for handheld device users — cell phones, PDAs, mini-computers, etc. Thus, if you’re a small device user, you should be able to access our content in such a way that it remains extremely usable and accessible.
Broken Links?
If you’ve linked to this site in the past, there’s no need to update anything on your end. All of the web addresses or URLs are different now, but all old pages will redirect automatically so you don’t have to worry about it, and so we aren’t guilty of breaking the Internet. This is rather important so if you have a site and choose to move it someday, make sure you learn the techniques needed to preserve the validity of old links. To do this we use a file called .htaccess. To learn more, Google it.
Mastheads
As you move about this site you’ll probably notice that our masthead (banner) images change. We created a script to change these on page load and randomly draw new images from a data bank of well over 100 mastheads extracted from about ten different collections. (We control the collection used and will change it now and then.) If you ever have questions about one the masthead images (what kind of flower or bug is that?), just hover over the masthead and more info will be provided. Not the answer to your question, but a reference to the image so you can ask us about it.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is important if you want to be found by major search engines like Google. We’ve learned a tremendous amount about the art and science of ethical SEO over the past three years so we’ve employed it all here. To the hilt! Once this site is six months old we should be number one on just about all related searches. In fact we’ll be surprised if we’re not. We shall see.
Advertising
Even though we own our own web hosting company (a three year-old division), hosting still costs money so we support a small amount of advertising on this site. If you’re interested in this, please check out our advertising info page.
Questions, comments, feedback…?
As always, we’re interested in your thoughts and opinions. Thus, do feel free to comment below to provide feedback about v5, or contact us via our contact form. If you do have questions and need site-related help, please do check out our help section first as we’ve probably responded already.
It was a ton of work, and the site uses a lot of new-tech, so we hope you like what we’ve done. It’ll be great for us, and hopefully for you, too. If all goes well, we won’t have a need for a version 6 anytime in the near future. So, what do you think? 
Finally… GreenMethods.com v.5 - Beast-Blog.com responds:
Posted: September 23rd, 2007 at 1:51 am →
[…] The site, of course, has a blog. The Bug Blog I call it (read about this launch there, too… be the first to comment!). The last version also had a blog of sorts. It had a feed, pagination, and archived, anyway. But it was difficult to use and edit, had no support for comments, and there was no categories support, only date and title archiving. WordPress is so much better as a blog publishing platform. So much so that I decided to stop foolishly trying to reinvent the wheel. […]
David Zemens responds:
Posted: September 23rd, 2007 at 7:48 am →
What a terrific new web site, Mike. The sheer size of it is daunting to me. It is pretty easy to see how WordPress handles the site nicely.
The artwork and graphics are really impressive, too, even compared to your normal high standards. Very nice work.
Beautiful site — I can’t wait to study it and learn from it.
Elliott Cross responds:
Posted: September 23rd, 2007 at 8:31 am →
Wow! Nice work and amazing accomplishment Mike! Can’t wait to dig into it more in depth and see what all makes it tick! I can always look to you for inspiration and the ability to come up with something new that I hadn’t thought of for testing and accessibility. Great work!
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: September 23rd, 2007 at 8:50 am →
Thank you fellahs!
David Zemens responds:
Posted: September 28th, 2007 at 9:20 am →
After studying your new site for the past three days, I applaud you for the use of the
current-catclass to highlight the current category in the sidebar navigation.Further accolades for using the
is_search()and related WordPress functions to make your main navigation bar more dynamic when a user is on the active Search page, Error page or Archive page. Another great idea, Mike!