Welcome to our new blog! Notice anything different? I’m very excited to announce we have a brand new website, including our blog, written from scratch and hosted on our own servers! This has been a project for a couple months now, and I’m super excited to finally release it. The new website will look very similar to our old one at first, but it is much more efficient, faster, has a better responsive design with less bugs, and a bunch of back-end changes that benefit the website as well as the server.

Now that all of our websites (the main website, blog, forums, map, etc) are on the same web-server we can begin integrating them on a much deeper level, which will benefit our SEO as well as user experience when navigating our site. Previously, the main website was hosted separately from everything else and you needed to visit each site by going to <directory>.alttd.com (bans.alttd.com, forums.alttd.com, etc). Now, you can visit them all and stay on the main site (alttd.com/bans, alttd.com/forums, etc). All of our files, like images, are now hosted locally which means all of our websites will load this data much faster.

In fact, the home page now loads in roughly 500ms (after your first visit) whereas previously it would have taken around 2 seconds. The home page is also 1.3MB instead of 5.3MB, which means much less bandwidth usage for you mobile users.

One of the most exciting changes is to the blog itself. We are now hosting a local copy of wordpress that we can configure any way we wish. This will allow us to add additional users to the blog (more editors!), customize the theme easily, and more easily create new content for you. Previously, to add a blog post on Weebly we would need to sign into Weebly.com, open the website editor, navigate to the blog page, and click on new post. Now we can just sign in at alttd.com/blog and click “new post”.

Explore our new website at https://alttd.com and let me know if you find any bugs.