After launching a new site that wasn’t all that new, my next project was a redevelopment of DetroitHockey.Net that removed features rather than adding them.
With the fantasy side of the site gone and no longer reliant on the rarely-used DH.N Community Forums, I reworked DetroitHockey.Net to remove the forums. I also pulled out my custom blog software and replaced it with WordPress.
The idea behind going to WordPress was that, while I enjoyed writing my own blog software, it left me somewhat behind the times as far as what the site was capable of. It’s a wheel I don’t want to reinvent, so instead I learned how to tap into native functionality of WordPress to do the things I wanted to do.
With the loss of the forums and the continued simplification of the site content, I was able to go with a more streamlined design. The header features the site logo (I launched with the 20th Season logo in place but it will revert when that season ends), an advertisement, and one navigation bar. This is in contrast to the old version of the site, which had a logo, three navigation menus, a login menu, an ad, and a set of links to forum discussions.
I also took the opportunity to implement the sub-navigation menu system that I developed for FantasyHockeySim.com.
The home page features seven recent headlines from the WordPress-driven news section, an embedded Twitter feed (replacing a custom developed version of the feed display), the score of the most recent Red Wings’ game, and a calendar showing the current month’s schedule (with games denoted by opponent logo).
The individual article pages use a modified version of the WordPress Twenty-sixteen theme, wrapped in the DetroitHockey.Net template.
The only other page that was heavily modified was the DH.N Contributors page, which pulls from the WordPress user system.
This version of the site is intended to be transitional, with further revisions coming after seeing how the forum-less site is used.