Tag website redesign

You may have noticed that ATC has been under construction for a few weeks. Okay, okay it’s been a few months. I’ve been busy painstakingly selecting and tweaking a design, loading new content, redesigning the layout and organizing the archives into a more searchable horde of content. If you visited while the pages were in disarray, I apologize for the chaos– the creative process isn’t an orderly thing, it’s more of a buckshot-into-glass type thing.

NEW STUFF on ATC:

We’ve added a new section called ATC Lifestyle where you can find information on what it means to ATC, what we believe, our philosophy, financing travel, and more. Our humor page is here, but so is our page on why vegans are neat. Under resources, in the same section, you’ll find tips to abandon your cube as well as great gear to start your paired down lifestyle.

You’ll also notice off the bat that we have an expanded section on Adventure, which covers everything from famous explorers, to top ten travel lists to great adventure travel companies to backpacking.

On the Road is where you’ll find insight into the Best American Road Trips and the Mongol Rally.

Our Guides section has been cleaned up and we’re excited to offer a bit of information on every country we’ve been to. We only cover the places we’ve actually been. What’s the point of reading a blog about hypothetical travel? Nope, these guides are about the places we have been, where we’ve stood and what we saw.

The homepage is different, and the first thing you’ll notice is that it’s pulling in a lot of our featured content. It was like looking through a treasured photo album for me as I picked and chose which blog posts would pull into the home page. After nearly a decade of blogging about abandoning the cube, there is a lot of content on the site. Some good, some not so great, some riddled with typos from writing on bumpy back roads in China, others riddled with typos from the time I had dysentery in Turkmenistan, or had only ten pre-paid minutes of internet in Odessa to blog. It was a nostalgic hoorah that ended with me finally grabbing a few to pull into the homepage, with the aspiration to rotate out old content and keep a cycle of fresh content on the page. Dream big, they say.

What do you think of the new design, layout, direction? Let us know!

That’s right. We’ve done it again. This is the third reincarnation of ATC. Ah, from its humble beginning as a Dreamweaver site using homemade templates to a mid-level Dreamweaver site, to a modern, shiny site that has all the navigation, responsiveness and interactive features the 21st century of ADD viewers demands.

We pay homage to the old site, which was a masterpiece in terms of human patience as we slowly built, nurtured and tried not to strangle the difficult and bulky site. Slowly, we came to detest the limitations of Dreamweaver. It was hard to update static pages. Harder still to get the templates to do what we wanted, and it just looked like something from the 1990s. On the road, we needed a platform that didn’t mean every little change required a full overhaul. Hence, our conversion to WordPress.

The old site:

Of course we put a lot of love and work into every single page. Above is our beer page. Today you can see that same page with all the same content (images, text) in our new theme, which allows you to cursor over each image to see the background story behind each breakfast beer. I’ll miss the long scroll style of reading on the web. But I might be the only dinosaur who enjoyed that. As we add more features (and more photos!) check back on the beer page to see what’s happening in the world of early morning ales.

Above is our Guides page. I painstakingly made each graphic using my Bamboo in Corel Draw. I then made sure the sizing was PERFECT and loaded them into Dreamweaver one at a time. I created new pages in Dreamweaver and populated them with guide details. I handmade the maps that went along with each country, also in Corel Draw. Each page took about a week to write, create the graphics for, and then slowly assemble in Dreamweaver. Each page was painfully made with love.

Today you can see the guides pages in a flashier, easier to read fashion. And it didn’t take me a week to make each page. All the same text and imagery is there, just in a more readable fashion. We hope you enjoy the conversion.

Mike and I built the ATC website in late 2007 as a means of keeping in contact with our families in America while we lived in Shanghai. In 2009 we traveled for over a year. In 2010 we did the Mongol Rally and then settled again in China. In 2012, we had a baby and returned to the US. All of our years of adventure are on this blog and in these pages, and it’s been fun to have the website grow along with us. To the next few years with the new design– cheers!