PowerWire Revamp
🎉 Journey Complete – And What a Ride It’s Been!
It’s taken a little longer than the year we originally planned, but we’re thrilled to say it: the final phase of the PowerWire overhaul is complete! 🚀
When we took sole ownership of PowerWire in July 2024, it was clear the site was ready for a refresh. What followed was a journey full of milestones, learning curves and more than a few cups of coffee.
🔧 The Road to the New PowerWire
Our first stop was a refresh of the existing website. This brought you new favourites like the Editor’s Corner and Calendar, along with a more user-friendly way to grab code snippets directly from articles.
Next, we waved goodbye to Mailchimp and said hello to Moosend, which now powers our monthly newsletters and subscriber database.
Then came a change we didn’t have any choice in, legislation required us to move from a .EU domain to .UK. That meant a brand-new domain and a new hosting provider – welcome to PowerWire.uk!
Alongside all this, we made a concerted effort to broaden not just our readership, but also our authors and the range of topics we cover. The PowerWire community continues to grow and we love seeing it.
And finally… the big one. We moved the website from WordPress (not a platform loved by our Director 😄) to Ghost running on Azure. Did it go smoothly? Let’s just say seasoned developers and sysadmins among you may raise an eyebrow at that idea, but it’s done, it’s live and the final piece of the puzzle is firmly in place.
✨ So What’s New?
From your perspective, things shouldn’t look too different – but behind the scenes, PowerWire is now much easier to update, manage and control and should be faster.
🏠 The Home Page
- The top advert banner is still there – prime real estate for anyone wanting to reach a wide audience of Power professionals at a very reasonable price.
- Our navigation bar is here to help (and yes, our Editor Andy, does have a fondness for words beginning with A).
- On the right, you’ll find the search button – perfect if you know exactly what you’re looking for.
- New monthly articles are featured front and centre, so if you’re up to date, why not dive into something fresh?
- We’ll also be adding Editor’s Notes to the front page when there’s important news to share, like details of seminars, user groups events or major announcements. These will also feature in the newsletter – yet another good reason to sign up!
PowerWire has always been free to use, and we’d love to keep it that way. To do that, we rely on advertising – but only adverts that are relevant and useful to our community. If you think your company could help support PowerWire, please visit our Advertise page.
There’s also a second advertising slot at the bottom of the home page (as with the top banner, this appears on every page on the site). While it’s not quite as prestigious as the top banner, it’s more budget-friendly and still gets great visibility.
✍️ Our Authors & Articles
A thriving readership needs great content and that means new articles. Our authors are as diverse as the topics they write about and there’s no pressure to contribute regularly – every submission counts.
If you’d like to know more about the people behind the words, visit our Authors page. Most of them remember what it was like to need advice (many still do!) and are keen to pass on their knowledge to the next generation. The only rule? Articles can’t promote chargeable products – for that, our Advertise page is the place to go.
With over 600 articles available, the Articles page is your gateway to everything we’ve published so far – and the search button is always there to help you narrow things down.
🚀 What’s Next?
No website or newsletter is ever truly finished. We’ll continue to make small tweaks based on your feedback, but this marks the end of the big revamp at last.
If you have ideas, want to advertise, or fancy contributing an article, just head to Contact Us – which, amazingly, really does contact us.
We hope you love the new look and layout and we can’t wait to hear what you think.