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It’s not like this hap­pens all the time, but we’ve gone through three re-​​designs on the Urban Dater since we opened it up in 2008.

I’m not gonna lie, this post will bore the pants off of you, if you aren’t sweet on techie talk. Nev­er­the­less, I’ll press on and share where we’re at and where we came from.

2008 -The Not So Dis­tant Past of the Urban Dater, in it’s Infancy!

I lit­er­ally asked to punched in the throat for com­ing up with this layout

I vomit in my mouth just a lit­tle bit when look­ing at this lay­out and really it was my own damn fault since I designed the damn thing to begin with. This was the first iter­a­tion of the Urban Dater, which was pow­ered by Joomla 1.5 + MyBlog 3.x. I was not crazy about this site, even though I do rather like Joomla. The blog com­po­nent was, sim­ply put, lim­ited. It allowed for mul­ti­ple users but it didn’t have enough “Oomph” to get things mov­ing in the right direc­tion. Dur­ing this time we also played with hav­ing an actual online com­mu­nity to dis­cuss dat­ing and rela­tion­ships in groups and forums and the like. That, too, never took off. How­ever, the blog did gar­ner inter­est, not much, but there was some inter­est… That gave me a lot to think about, at that time. Also, I was eye­ing Word­Press and Dru­pal as plat­forms to run the Urban Dater. Which to choose?

2009 — This is the lay­out that we are most known for, not hor­ri­bly shabby!

Sniff Sniff, I’m gonna miss you, boy

I decided that I would move the urban dater over to Word­Press, after much research and test­ing. The lay­out changed as well to what many of you remem­ber, pics of cou­ples at the top of the page and rotated each time you vis­ited a page within the site. It was a nice three col­umn lay­out and it was func­tional. I designed and put it together and I was pretty happy with my hand­i­work! In a month’s time we saw our traf­fic jump by well over 200%, no joke. There was a “but,” how­ever; the “but” here was that the site suf­fered from longer than aver­age load times for page requests. It became too unwieldy and caused issues…

August 2010 — Ta Dah, Mother F@ckers!
Wel­come to the yes­ter­day of the future… Or some­thing like that. My dear friend and the female half of the Urban Dater, Tay­lor­Cast, pretty much slapped me around and demanded we get some­one else to do the design on the site. We reached out to our friends at DigiSavvy to see if they could help us out with a sim­pli­fied theme that was also highly func­tional and easy to read. DigiSavvy actu­ally took care of us pretty well, I’d say. The theme is clean and sim­ple, unlike me, of course. We think the new theme is a great fit and will prob­a­bly stick with it for a good long while.