aradhanam_v2

🙏 श्रीमान् वेङ्कटनाथार्यः कवितार्किक केसरी । वेदान्ताचार्यवर्यो मे सन्निधत्तां सदा हृदि ॥ 🙏

Dear Bhagavathas,

W E L C O M E    T O    O U R    W E B S I T E    WITH   A    N E W    L O O K !

This is the special supplemental announcement page for introducing Version 2.0 of our website.
 
We will walk you through the upgrades and enhancements we made to provide this new and refreshing look for our website. First and foremost, we are switching the website theme from a free, 2010 WordPress Theme to a latest, licensed, customizable, professional theme named ‘Zakra Theme’. The key to this initiative was to make better use of a page’s real-estate and have easy-to-configure, customizable options. Earlier, we were wasting nearly 60% of the page area. This typically does not go well with content presentation management. Since this a system-level upgrade, we are preserving existing page content and presentation as-is.
 
Here below is the image of our new ‘shrIvaikuNTam’ (home) page with ‘numbered’ sections for explanations that follow after.

1. The site icon has been enhanced to match the new color theme.
2. Website now has a logo.
3. The common header section now has coordinated, color tones. Like before, this header will appear in every page you access.
4. The menu  items are in bold black font. The item that is active is shown in white color. The ones that have sub-menu options display a ‘down’ arrow after the item title.
5. We have 2 new buttons in the header section that, when clicked, will take you directly to the recently created YouTube Channels @aradhanam101 and @prArTHanA101 in a separate window tab.
6. The header banner pictures now refreshingly span the entire width of the screen. Newer, high-res images will be added later. For now, we are using the same existing set of eight randomized header banner images that we have been having all along since launch.
7. We now have an awesome sidebar with 3 useful, independent, interactive elements (aka widgets) to begin with. We can stretch this sidebar down as needed to add additional elements and also have one additional sidebar on the right-side of the page panel, if needed in the future. The current left-side sidebar elements are
   1. ‘Social‘: A welcome invitation to join @aradhnam101 Telegram Group. Currently, nothing much is going on. About 10 Bhagavathas have joined. Hopefully, in course of time, we will request experts/scholars to join and seek their help to support the interaction we need to help expand our horizon on our Sampradhayam and Sanskrit language along with making website announcement pointers as and when events take place.
   2. ‘Pick a Language‘: We have discarded the old ‘Language’ menu item which we used to select a language. Instead, we now have a widget with all the colorful language icons bundled together. You can click on a language icon to select the language you want for your access to pdf documents and stay on the same page where you currently are.

Note: With every major announcement, we mention at the bottom of the home page that you don’t necessarily have to select a language each time you visit the website irrespective of how many times and how frequently you visit the site. That is because website ‘remembers’ your selection using a cookie in your device’s browser (aka memory) and this is preserved across subsequent website visits. Selecting a language is needed only if

1. 1. 1. 1. you want to switch/set the language you want
         2. you clear the browser cache which also clears the cookies and thus clearing the language this website stored in its cookie
         3. you are re-visiting our website (very unlikely!) after 999 days which is the memory retention period for the cookie

          

Every webpage, where there is need to access a pdf document, will display one of the following 2 messages at the very top of the body content depending on what is in the cookie

• • • • “Your most recent / current language preference is Devanagari” (cookie has a language stored, Devanagari as an example)
      • “You haven’t yet made your language selection! Please select a language first using the “Pick a Language” widget in the sidebar on the left.” (i.e. cookie is empty). You must perform language selection first  to open a language-specific pdf document.

       

1. 3. ‘Calendar‘: For now, we have a plain old, simple English monthly calendar with the current system date highlighted. We plan to include categorized events later.

    

8. This is the page content area to the right of the sidebar. This area spans the entire remaining width  of the window. We have allocated 15% and 85% of the total window width to sidebar and page body respectively.

 
We will next look into the page-specific header feature with the image shown below.

 

9. This red band just below header image is the page header section. While the background color is common, the content in this section is unique to each page.
10. This is the title of the page you are currently in. It is in bold white font.
11. The technical term for this ‘breadcrumb’. We display the breadcrumb with ‘right-arrow’ mark in between levels. This displays the ‘menu-driven’, hierarchical path you have selected to reach the current page. In the example shown above, you selected ‘Sthothram’ menu item in the ‘shriVaikuNTam’ (aka Home) page, then selected ‘Shrimadh Ramayanam (2nd Edition)’ sub-menu-item option, and then selected ‘Sundharakandam’ sub-menu-item at the next lower level. For illustration, the menu hierarchy has been expanded in the above image. Also, you can click any segment of the breadcrumb and reach the page at that level directly.

 
Next, we look into the features in the page footer section with the image shown below.

 

12. As you scroll down the page (because page is longer than the display window height), you will notice that the page header stay at the top with the content including the header image scrolling up underneath the header. This is called a sticky header. This is very useful and we did this to avoid running up (scrolling back) the page to reach back to the header (i.e the menu area).
13. This is the footer section. We kept the background color same as that of the header.
14. As you scroll down, you will notice a little highlighted box on the left bottom corner with an ‘Up Arrow’ pop up. You can click on this to immediately return to the top of the content area instead scrolling all the way back.
15. We expanded the footer message to include the Copyright and Credit information in the next line.

 
Finally, we emphasize that we have preserved the elasticity feature of a page (aka responsive interface) which what we had in the earlier version. In other words, the contents of a page adjust to the size of the device window dynamically. In the new version, the header menu will morph into a small icon with 3 horizontal bars (as is typical when using a mobile device) as the display window size becomes smaller and smaller. All page elements (whether it is text, image, icons, etc.) are proportionately adjusted to render the page for ease of readability.
 
We conclude this announcement with the following four images that display the ‘shrIvaikuNTam’ page contents as seen on a desktop PC, a 10-inch tablet and a 6-inch mobile phone. In the case of the mobile phone, the sidebar, by design, is pushed to the bottom of the page.

 
Thank you for following this announcement.

March 5, 2023

🙏 adiyOngaL 🙏
madhumathi kasturi
nochalur kasturi sarangapani

🙏 कवितार्किकसिंहाय कल्याणगुणशालिने । श्रीमते वेङ्कटेशाय वेदान्तगुरवे नमः ॥ 🙏