6moons launched in June 2002. At the time a going convention for websites was a site width of 700 pixels to accommodate the smaller computer monitors and laptops then current. With 12 years having passed during which monitor screens and laptop displays grew as have televisions, the time had come to take up more real estate on your screen. I wanted to reduce the blank space on either side of our centrally placed location and also use larger images. Hence we've now gone to 1'200 pixels across. To compensate for the new layout, the font size has increased just a bit too. Whilst basic navigation remains unchanged, certain improvements now make it easier to go moon hopping and from one site chapter to any other.


As you can imagine and readily confirm, 12 years of operations have built up very sizeable archives. Because we don't use content-management software, a retroactive change of prior content to the new wider format wasn't possible; nor would the artwork or photos have scaled up without resolution loss. Given that the established feel and general appearance remain in place, this seems a minor issue. With the change implemented September 7th, 2014, content going forward will adopt the new width whilst pending reviews in preview form will still publish in the narrower width in which they and their photos began. Over the next two months as current reviews migrate down the audioreviews access portal and then into the archives, all reviews will have gone 'widescreen' to eliminate the current visual discontinuity of wide access page to narrow reviews. I trust our readers will forgive this bit of visual inelegance in the interim.

Incidentally, I had contacted two professional local website designers who proposed migrating the site including its archives into a content-management format. Alas their proposal was visually so off the mark that regardless of potential meetings, I didn't believe that their vision and my own would ever successfully overlap. So I redesigned things myself. This gave me the exact appearance I was after, albeit without some of the modern tech which the most current web design software offers. With the wider layout, the size of the large ad sponsor banners has increased as well. Since these companies fund this venture so you may read us for free, they deserve it. But to retain a visually pleasing balance between content and the commercial aspect, these banners haven't scaled up in height. Here they take up the same amount of space as before. Ditto for the smaller banners which remain unchanged but simply array themselves across the page in a different manner. Once you click any banner, the subsequent ad of course has gone widescreen too. This offers our supporters more real estate to showcase their wares.


Whilst our navigation should be familiar, the 'home' link goes to what now has become a combined splash and showcase page. At its bottom is the access panel of the now horizontally arranged six moons and the calendar of when we updated each with what new content. The headers for those main sections with archives now have direct links to those archives. The 'up' triangle gets you to the top of a page whilst the other triangles go to the previous or next page. The 'close window' prompt does what it says. All perfectly self-explanatory. And that's it. Enjoy!