There are a few things you can count on in regards to the Cavalcade. Our reviews will be both snarky and informed, our events will be wild and fun, and that our website is a living thing that is constantly changing and evolving.

To let you in on a little secret: A week hasn’t gone by since this site was opened that we didn’t make some modification to the underlying technology that keeps us humming along. Be-it something as simple as a plug-in for Wordpress (our Content Management System) to allow for better collaboration amongst the different writers, or a bug-fix to a line of code here and there-our dev team (read: Micah) is constantly digging through the backbone of the site in, hopefully improving the experience of visiting.

Every once in a while though, the changes are large enough that we feel we have to mention them, so you can understand why we did it, and give you an opportunity for feedback.

Front Page

We have to admit: We were pretty happy with the last redesign, and from the bump in traffic we received, we were pretty sure that you were as well. The massive changes in formatting and technology driving the site layouts took over two months to fully implement, and once we were done-we mistakenly thought we were done.

If you recall, the goals of that redesign was to clean up the archives, beef up the trailers, and change the focus of our main page from daily news (which we don’t do) to editorial reviews (which we do…uh…do). A secondary goal was to feature some of the great art our design team creates for each event and feature. We had it, why use it only once?

Well, we’re willing to admit when we’ve gone too far.

In our effort to simplify the front page, we made it even busier on the eyes, and something had to be done about it. The first thing was to strip out the sections we weren’t really using, like the now-defunct Live Streams. Next was to pare down the number of images, compressing the Facebook fan box on the sidebar even further, and changing the format of the featured reviews. The side benefit was that this allowed us to feature more reviews than before, all while giving a cleaner look!

The next addition to the front page actually segues us to the other, larger change we made…

Store

One of the first things we added to the site after its initial opening was a little store designed to showcase some of our nifty gear, while generating a little revenue to help deal with the considerable costs of hosting monthly film events and running this site. Unfortunately, it just…wasn’t, and when we asked people about it, they frequently (and frustratingly) would respond with “what store?”

What also bothered was the layout and look of said shop. In an effort to tie it to our site design and give it a uniform look, it got cluttered. So what to do?

First, we tore down the old shop and completely rebuilt it from scratch, giving each section its own description and write-up, as well as streamlining the products offered so that we were satisfied that we were only pushing things we would want out there. The next bit was minor, but altogether more important.

We are now featuring an item from our store right on our front page, next to the reviews. This item will change every time you visit, giving you more of a chance to catch some of our fantastic designs!

Finally…

The Archives

We loved the look of the new archives when we finished with them last time. The problem was…they were buggy, frequently breaking every time a new movie was added, or we patched something in our software. We felt it was time to address this and dug through the code, redesigning them slightly in the process.

Now the movie page contains every movie we’ve ever featured here, even the trailers, and it is also much more stable. Additionally, since we’re now writing upwards of 5-6 reviews a week, the gallery has been expanded to display 20 movies per page, so you’re not constantly paging through looking for the movie you want to read about.

Finally, we beefed up the Archive for Events, increasing the feature image size to make it easier to find the theme write-up you’re looking for. We even got the design team to go back and totally redesign the original theme art, giving everything a nice polish! This pays dividends on the new “Featured Article” section of the front page as well, so we couldn’t be happier.

The End…For Now

That’s all we have to share with you today. We hope you like what we’ve done, and that you take a moment to share your thoughts with us in the comments below. But hey, if you don’t like them, we’d still like to here from you! The Cavalcade of Schlock is a community, and your opinions matter!

So without further ado, we’ve got to get ready for tomorrow’s event!