Dawn of the Geeks

Free Ringtone Heaven.com is getting a redo. When first designing a web-site you tend to whip things up quickly and get them out there to see what happens. Then over time you tweak it here and there and maybe add a feature or 10. And eventually the site becomes stale and ugly.

That’s when you get to go in and force yourself to do things right. It’s time to clean up the code, apply better code design practices, update the interface, tweak the database, etc. And finally when it’s all done you get to tear down the old site and replace it with the brand new one.

In the case of Free Ringtone Heaven there is myMobile which users could use to upload their own files. However, it was so poorly implemented I’ve decided to just tear it down. People weren’t really using it anyway. So there will be a brand new myMobile launched. So when the new myMobile launches you will need to create a new account.

In that sense, I got lucky. There’s nothing about the old site I have to save. Except for the ringtones of course. I’ve got the backend pretty much complete with far more intelligent usage tracking. myMobile will have a password recovery feature finally. I’ve also cleaned up the ringtone directory structure a bit which should make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

The coming changes are too numerous to list them all. My goal is to have the new version launched sometime this weekend. FunkyCatz.com is my other ringtone web-site which I used to try out some things that are now being applied to Free Ringtone Heaven.

There is an old saying “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” Well technically Free Ringtone Heaven ain’t broke but it certainly has a lot of room for improvement. My main goals are to fix some of the stale aspects of FRH with the new download tracking and improve myMobile.

Sometimes it’s good to go back deep into the code of a site you built long ago and give it a redo. You’ll discover things you could improve, simplify and maybe even learn more for your next project.