It took a couple of days’ tweaking, but the Wordpress part of Jack Yan & Associates’ website now (nearly) matches the new template on the home page, T&Cs and contact page. This was a tricky one due to the conflicts between the BootstrapMade template and the standard Understrap one for Wordpress. Also debatable is whether the new look is an improvement (this could be said for any site where we’ve had to force things to become mobile-compatible). However, the mismatch between the home page and the information section on Wordpress annoyed me more, given all the incarnations of the site that were still up. And we’ve tightened up the copy slightly.
You know that there is old code on the site when the TV1 link on the home page still pointed to tvone.nzoom.com (remember them?). We removed a bunch today that pointed to dead URLs, or ones that had been taken over by other parties. Sadly, two more had to be removed from the Lucire links’ pages, too: Kitten Magazine and the old Beauty Matters blog. Kitten never loaded—it kept trying to, and the end part of the URL kept changing—while Beauty Matters, which had not been updated in a while, is gone.
Speaking of history, it was a huge surprise to find that there are no references to Style.com’s life before 2000 except here in Lucire. In 1999, Condé Nast’s purchase of the style.com domain name from Express Fashion was big news. The disappearance of this news shows how fleeting the World Wide Web is; no wonder there are people talking about keeping old encyclopædias as more authoritative sources of truth than anything that might appear online. Express was the original owner of the domain name, and held it for several years, initially posting fashion tips before branching out into e-commerce. For many years, Express Fashion continued at expressfashion.com. It no longer loads, but the domain is still registered.
The lack of trust in the web again illustrates just how important having an extra medium is, not just as a more permanent record (especially if you ensure copies are deposited with your nation’s library), but as a sign of legitimacy. The US might be an exception presently with how poorly they trust their media (with good reason) but for many of us, showing that you had the wherewithal to branch out beyond one medium suggests you aren’t a flyer-by-night. Online, keeping things alive at long-lived domains puts you in good stead, too.
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