Welcome to the New CTMQ

Welcome to the new CTMQ. Don’t be scared.

I’ll try to keep this as brief as I can. A complete overhaul of the site was needed ever since mobile devices came onto the scene. The old site used a custom template designed in 2006. It was a beautiful thing back then. I came to love it and the way I built it. It was elegant… yet clunky. It was very well organized… yet not for everybody. The worst part of it, of course, was that it was non-responsive. In other words, no matter how funny or interesting my stories were, it was a pain to read on a mobile device. That had to change.

Change was not easy. This site contains over 1,700 pages of original content. Over 13,000 pictures, formatted in a way that doesn’t really work anymore. The old site was set up using “pages” rather than “posts,” which a few of you know enough to know that this redesign (to posts) wasn’t exactly a click of a button or two. I had the help of the most patient web design team in Leslie and Laurin at Streamlined Development in Groton. When I shopped this project around to various individuals and firms, everyone else went screaming for the hills. (This is true.) So a huge thank you to Laurin and Leslie. Please know: All the screw-ups and clunkiness and poorly formatted pictures and stuff you’ll still see here for a while – is not their fault. Undoing the framework, on a page by page, paragraph by paragraph, picture by picture basis is an impossible task.

Trust me.

You may have noticed that name of the site has changed. CTMuseumQuest.com worked for 9 years and although I grew quite attached to it, it was time to make a change to better reflect what the site has become. It’s no longer just about museums, although they still remain my defining focus here. But with so much content about CT hikes and CT food and CT beer… CT everything… I had to make the change. So just like when Kentucky Fried Chicken changed to KFC, CTMuseumQuest is now just CTMQ. (My own employer – not KFC – did this same type of change several years ago, so it’s really not all that uncommon.)

It’s a .org now too, but no one cares about that.

Some of you are seeing ads. After 9 years, I’m finally monetizing the site. I make no apologies for that. Over time, I hope to have “real” advertising and not just the Google AdSense stuff. I also plan to donate all or a large percentage of the ad revenue to the non-profit foundation I work with. But as of now, I have no clue if this will generate $2/month or $200. This will evolve.

Stuff to consider:

The landing/home page is pretty much in “default” mode right now. I have some ideas for changes I’d like to make, but just didn’t have time. (Like the whole header area needs help.)

The new Blog section will allow me to write short little posts about time-sensitive stuff. I’ve never really been able to do that before.

The Search feature actually works!

If you are the type that would contact me about a missing or incorrect tag or category, I welcome that.

If you are that type, please don’t be bothered by all the dead/wrong links. It’s just a fact of life these days. (Unless it is a link internal to CTMQ. Then tell me.)

CTMQ has several distinct audiences. There’s the museum crowd, the hiking gang, the beer crew, and the Smith-Magenis community. I am very lucky to be able to reach each distinct group and, hopefully, entertain. I hope you all can handle the change here without too much difficulty, and we can move forward with a better CTMQ.