It is July 2014 and the AMIS Blog celebrates it’s 10th anniversary. While diving in the history of the AMIS Blog it is very interesting (amusing and somewhat shocking) to see were we came from. Using the Internet Archive (https://archive.org) I made some screenshots of the AMIS blog depicting the different styles. We made 3 major steps in the design of the blog. Please join me for this trip through memory lane….
640*480 age
By 2005 used a template based design to fit for our corporate style. Stunning to see the effect of a limited screen resolution of 640*480 on current widescreen laptops. In the current days this version might work perfectly on modern smartphones, no adjustment needed since we did not use a menu or additional content. Nothing to hide or minimize. This site was mobile ready!! I am also happy to see we made great steps in our corporate style. I guess in those days bordeaux-red and mustard-yellow where in fashion. The usage of pictures (especially high resolution pictures) was limited due to bandwidth considerations of some of our readers. Yes we have come from the dark ages of blogging :-).
Before this date I was not able to retrieve a version with a working stylesheet. However some of my younger colleagues (@robertvanmolken) suggested this was the time before CSS was invented. Duh!.
Full width screen
About mid 2006 we made the switch to a full width blog. Since a lot of our consultants and our visitors where using wider screens and there was a demand for more images. The previous design of the blog had a limited content aria and did not support wide images. Happy to see we still had our colorful design in place. One distinct difference compared to the previous version; we also advertised our upcoming events on our tech blog. This is the little box next to the AMIS logo.
Modem Interactive template
About start 2008 we upgraded our blog template. The blog got its own style. This was more or less modified version of a default WordPress template. We included a menu and more prominent place for events or leading articles. From this time we also included out @AMIS_Services twitter stream and made comments and categories more prominent. This template had better support for images. Also in the blog listing.
Magazine style
In 2014 we treated ourselves with a gift in the form of a new template compliant with the AMIS corporate style. A clean blog template with more possibilities to engage interaction with AMIS and our bloggers. A magazine style homepage with a more prominent place for categories to present an overview of our recent articles. Social media got a more prominent place in a “connect with us”- bar at the top of the page. We improved the comment option and added an easy social sharing bar at the bottom of each article.
And most important; finally an adaptive design to fit readers from desktop, tablet and mobile devices. Still 80% of our readers are using a desktop to read our articles. The new 2014 template also gives images a more prominent place. Every article has a leading image to make the articles more attractive.
Thanks to our support staff
As you can see we had a colorful history of designs for our blog. All these years the blog was supported by our own employees spending working hours and lots of their own time in creating this great Oracle Technology Corner. Thanks to all people who have contributed to our blog; in content, technical support, design and administration. Special thanks to Lucas Jellema for his never lasting stream of content and encouragements, Wouter van Reeven, Marco Gralike and Robert van Mölke for their years as blog administrator, Chirs Gralike for his tech support many more active contributors.
