The overhaul of the website that launched last year was an opportunity to build a version of the site that was able to grow and adapt new features over time. Another goal was to revamp and attempt to modernize the design that remained largely unchanged since 2013.

Since its launch, we’ve seen record amounts of traffic to the site and received a lot of feedback about how we could improve. Last month, we upgraded the hardware that powers the site. This has lead to considerable performance gains and quicker responses times, even under peak times with heavy visitor numbers. We coupled this with a re-write of our backend that handles database querying earlier this year, to focus on even more performance gains. We believe that the site is now in a stable and reliable state, which gives us the next task of looking forward and envisioning where we take the site.

What’s Next?

We pushed out a few new backend versions, and a few new frontend versions over the last couple of weeks. These versions don’t contain changelogs, since they were primarily polish updates (although, I admit that every version should contain a changelog moving forward, as it was promised).

The next phase
Now that the site is in a good place and the goals of the initial overhaul have been fulfilled, it’s time to think about the future of the site. The next big change will be a relatively large overhaul of the frontend of the site, building upon the foundation of the original overhaul completed in 2023. The focus will be on modernizing the website design and adding a more interactive feature-set.

So what’s this mean?
The next overhaul is in pretty early stages and it’s too early to give a complete overview of what it will entail. Although the development work has started… it is intended to be a slow and steady cycle. From a high level, the overhaul is intended to at least:

• Completely redesign the website (yes, again) with a more modern and cleaner design
• Add user accounts to facilitate personalizing the website and adding more functionality (optional, of course)
• Add customizability for the design of the site, where it makes sense
• Enable more detailed movie, TV show, and actor information pages to become a better hub for information beyond ages and basic information
• Offer video resources on movies, TV shows, and actor pages

Overhaul 2.0?
While this is probably big enough to be considered an ‘overhaul,’ I wouldn’t consider it as big of a change as the 2013-era to 2023 overhaul that released last year. In fact, I’d be more apt to consider this a continuation of the 2023 overhaul. The overhaul released last year has laid the foundation to make these upgrades and changes possible. The new version of the site will be built upon the framework of the currently available version.

Timeline
As mentioned above: there’s no real timeline for this overhaul right now. The site is in a stable and reliable state, and there’s not really a pressing need for an immediate release of the new site.

Keep your eyes on https://blog.actoragecheck.com. Thanks for visiting, and keep the feedback coming!