New Site Redesign

• 22 March, 2025
• Update

I've been working on this for a month now, and finally, it's complete! I present: the new and improved Checkered Hell!

There's a lot of changes I made to the site, the biggest one being that the site is now coded in PHP! This allows for easier editing of sections of pages on my part, like the header, footer, sidebar... makes it much, much less painful! It also means that the URLs for the website are no longer stupid and weird! Goodbye, /?a=/!! I've also learned a lot of JavaScript, making the implementation of a lot of things much easier on myself. No longer will I have to constantly repeat HTML code when I can add just like, one small line in JavaScript! Whoopee!

Another big thing is accessibility, which is very important to me. As many know, I am disabled. Not only am I autistic, but I have a visual disability as well. Not sure what specifically, but I know I experience eye strain very easily. As I've started to dive into disabled communities, lurking and reading about other disabled experiences, it made me learn how important making things accessible is. A big part of that is enhancing the contrast of the colors on my website. It still maintains the browns and oranges of its previous iteration, but now it's warmer and more saturated. Not only that, but it was designed for my specific disability! While not every disability is the same, I feel like it's a huge step forward. I've also took the time to go through and update and add image descriptions whenever possible. Journals depicting chat logs through Discord or Twitter also have buttons that will toggle (and save) the theme! There's a dark and a light mode. By default, it's dark, but light is always there just in case. (I don't want to hear "ew, you use light mode!?" as while I usually don't, it's literally an accessibility feature.)

This redesign also got rid of a few pages that weren't very maintained or active. Specifically, the retired Flash page will only be accessible through the Layout Archive, which was merged into the Extras page, now renamed as "Bits."

As I was inserting the Marlette section to the home page, it made me realize that at least on FireFox, the 4k resolution is a bit broken... I'll have to look into fixing that sometime. Speaking of, production of the next Marlette comic HAS progressed to creating images, but I still need to work on it. I need to figure out an ending...

Anyway, hope the new site design's enjoyable! I know it is for me.