Beginning the Update

In order to update the previous site, whilst working on the new one, the word content of the previous site can be updated quickly, requiring only the new design to be applied later on.

It becomes a bit of a balancing act, as the old site was designed using bad design principles (as mentioned in the previous post). I can't change the content until I make a more flexible layout, I can't test out the layout until I have better content.. and on and on.

The About Us Page

This page seemed a good place to start, for a number of reasons. It features a large body of text, and is practically bloated with buzz-word cruft. I was looking for tools to help check text readability, and came across a fairly useful one - using the Gunning-Fog index we can check readability based on how difficult its words are (based on amount of words with more than 3 syllables, with an increasing scale of difficulty). The old site scored an index of 30 - ranking worse than most government or academia pages.

My new content scores at 12, which is about the level of a magazine or newspaper.

By starting here, the page with the most written content, I can start to set the mood of the content for the rest of the site. Once this is given the thumb's up, I'll be able to assemble the rest of the template, and then fill in the content for the rest of the pages. A good start, indeed!