Product and site news

As part of the site redesign, there is a new section (which you are reading right now), "Product and site news". This section (together with the Knowledge base section) takes over from the weblog, which has existed in one form or another since 1997. To make it easy to find the new section, requests for the old domain will be automatically redirected here.

History

The site began its life on the web in 1997 as "Wincent’s Website", although it did not move to its own domain name until a couple of years later. On moving to the dot-org domain, it switched to a weblog format.

In 2002 with the release of Synergy, the nature of the site changed. It now had to serve not only as an informational weblog, but as a product website as well.

In 2003 I acquired the dot-com domain name and tried to establish a separation between the commercial content (products) which would be hosted on the dot-com, and the non-commercial content (articles, tips, information) which would continued to be hosted on the dot-org.

But as I’ve added more and more products to the lineup, the separation between the dot-com and the dot-org domains hasn’t been all that clear. To add to the confusion, additional subdomains have sometimes made it hard to locate information. For example, users who search for information may not realize that there are useful resources on the parent site, forums, a bug-tracking and feature request database, and the weblog.

The site redesign is largely directed at clearing up all this confusion and unifying the dot-com and dot-org domains into one easy to navigate website.

People who have been visiting for years will be able to continue typing the same address into their browser’s location bar and will arrive here. But new visitors coming here for the first time will be able to get here by clicking on the "News" link that appears in the navigation bar at the top of every page. The navigation bar is now consistent across the entire site, including all the product websites. Although the subdomains continue to exist, they now redirect to addresses in the main hierarchy. And as you’ll see, the navigation bar know includes "bread crumb" links that enable you to easily navigate upwards in the directory hierarchy.

I hope that these changes make the site more useful for everybody.