Hello World! New rtCamp is here!

If you have visited rtCamp.com before, you’ll find it changed beyond recognition today!

We always believed that “change is the only permanent thing in this world!” . Our journey through change continues, and this time we’ve done a great deal of changes!

So what’s new?

Here’s a small list…

1. Logo: We have completely redesigned our logo for the first time since rtCamp was registered as a company. That’s more than  four-and-a half years ago! I have posted a complete section below to explain our thoughts behind new logo.
2. “Long” Homepage: We have created a pretty long homepage for the first time. As time passed, we gathered so much to tell you that it became hard to accommodate everything above the fold!
3. Product-centric Design:  We have integrated the shopping cart and login/register links in the main menu as the number of customers kept growing. We hope this will improve their buying experience on rtCamp.
4. Wide-screen: For the first time, we’ve targeted screens above 1024px width in resolution. This gives us extra space to present our content nicely. Stats showed less than 5% of people will be affected by that. Well we have created responsive design to take care of fellows with less resolution.
5. Font-icons: We have stopped using CSS-sprites in favor of font-icons. Thank you fontello.com for making so many font-icons available to us. Also fontello makes it very easy to keep our font-library up-to-date.

Upcoming changes…

It is very hard to understand if we are done with our work or just getting started!

We are working on current redesign/revamp project from few months already. It will take few more months to finish off everything we had on our mind when we started this. So we decided to treat rtCamp.com itself as a product and create a roadmap for upcoming changes.

1. My Account Section: There will be a revamped account-center with helpdesk and affiliate program integration. Yes, we’ve had an affiliate program here for a long time. In case you missed it, you can join now.
2. MyCRED: We’ll be adding support for MyCRED soon. Don’t wait till then to contribute on rtCamp.com. We are working on a small MyCRED addon to calculate points for all previous forums posts and other activities. These points can be redeemed while purchasing products.
3. Dropping bbPress: bbPress is among the best forum software out there. But if you’re charging for something, you need to be more proactive with support. We are internally using our homemade WordPress-CRM for a long time, and that’s going to go live next month.
4. Landing Pages: With new tools, we will be creating landing pages on the go. So expect more aggressive marketing from rtCampers (of course, without spamming!).

Apart from above key changes, there will be many surprises in “store“. It’s better to subscribe here to stay connected.

rtCamp’s new logo: Being with the times

Back in 2009, we had put in a lot of thought while building our logo. But time flies, and it turned out that the old logo’s lines and minute details wouldn’t look great on small devices. You’ve heard that over and over again: Mobile is the future!

Because of the dimensions and asymmetry, we always had a tough time creating a square logo alternative for twitter, gravatar, Facebook, Google+, favicon, github…

With these concerns, our diligent graphic artists put on their thinking caps to come up with a fresh new symbol to identify rtCamp.

At the end of it all, if you ask me to look for one adjective that sums up our new logo, I would pick “versatile”. Yes, that’s something we strive to be at rtCamp!

The new logo: Ending many problems

1. It is pre-designed with a square dimension in mind which you can see in our header menu.
2. It also has a variant for banner dimensions which you can see in the footer.
3. At first, it appears to have two colors but it’s actually just one color. “rt” is cut out from a circle, like a stencil. That cut-out portion can pick the background color. For other areas in circle, any color can appear. So from a black and white logo, now we’ve moved to a logo that adopts any color and form!
4. The circle represents a top view for Round Table:  “rt” in “rtCamp” stands for just that. Also, the circle can fit inside a square (and a circle, of course).

Credits

Every rtCamp project is the result of all rtCamper’s hard work and dedication. Although the following rtCampers contributed to this project mainly, it’s other rtCampers’ hard work which made it possible to invest more than 500 man hours on this project in last 6 months!

• Design: The logo and site design is the brainchild of our designer Chandrabose. He was assisted by Design Head Ganesh Kerkar and Rahul Sangar.
• Development: Sagar Jadhav took care of much of the CSS. Faishal Saiyed dealt with templating. Pushpak Patel spruced up the plugin used to create the homepage and other landing pages. Joshua Abenazer helped the team by sharing his knowledge of the previous theme.
• Content: Naweed Chougle and Abhishek Kaushik handled most of the content, with steady guidance from Rakshit Thakker. 

What do you think?

Please let us know what do you think about new design.

If you find any issue/bugs or just have a suggestion, feel free to share. Like our products, this design will be continuously improved with daily patches for atleast next few weeks. We will love to accommodate your feedback.

A big thank you to all rtCamp friends, customers/clients and well-wishers out there. You guys keep us going! 🙂