tl;dr: There will be a change of servers on Thursday January 12th 2017 starting at 08:00 Uhr. Please be ready for a downtime of up to 8-10 hours.
After we already wrote about changes in our system of building blocks yesterday, we want to introduce our new homepage today:
From a user perspective the content of the site does not change a lot. The frontpage as well as the explanation sites for new customers have been redesigned and improved. All of the other content stays essentially the same.
Surprisingly ~30% of our visitors come to our site via a smart phone or tablet. This is especially surprising since our products are normally used/programmed with a normal desktop PC. To deal with this fact the new homepage, particularity the shop and documentation, will now have a better usability for mobile devices.
From a technical perspective the new site has big changes. We will use a completely new CMS. This will make creation of new content and blog entries considerably easier for us. Furthermore, the domain “tinkerforge.com” will relocate to a new server. We will then have a physical separation between tinkerforge.com, mailserver, brickv.com/iot-remote.com and tinkerunity.org. If the visitor numbers increase further in the future, it will be easy to move parts of the new site or single databases to new servers.
To do the server and software switch we have to migrate our complete user database (this took about 4 hours in tests). Additionally we will have to change the DNS entry for tinkerforge.com to a new IP. Until this is known by all nameservers it will take some more time (~6 hours). Our mailserver will keep the old IP and it should be reachable for the whole time.
The server switch will be on Thursday January 12th 2017 starting at 08:00 Uhr. Please be ready for a downtime of up to 8-10 hours.