Dino the Dark Dragon has been operating Dino’s Ultima Page — the original Ultima news site, from which the Codex draws considerable inspiration — for nearly twenty years, and he has redesigned it a few times in that two-decade span. As part of a recent technical migration, he decided that it would be fitting to rework its design yet again, evidently for the seventh time, with the aim of “consolidating a new layout across the entire site, and thus replacing the last remnants of its earlier incarnations”.

Happily, he’s decided to celebrate doing so with an article that discusses each of the design incarnations the Ultima Page has seen, which concludes with some notes about what we can expect from the latest iteration of its layout:

The seventh design, which is what most of the site is using today, is an incremental update of the sixth design. Aside from minor visual improvements, The most important changes it brings include:

– Adoption and enforcement of HTTPS (not part of the design, but still important).
– Upgrading from XHTML 1.1 to HTML5.
– Consolidating most of Dino’s Ultima Page under a single layout, for a consistent look and feel.
– Responsive image galleries including rich captions.
– Responsive mobile navigation.
– Enhanced metadata to improve SEO.

There are still improvements that Dino feels need to be made; he calls out the Savage Empire section of the site, specifically. But personally, I think the site looks mighty fine, and it renders quite well on mobile devices too.