First and foremost, I’m pleased to unveil the brand new look for the Marriland website! This new look is designed to be even more mobile friendly, to a bit more aesthetically pleasing overall, and to also hopefully make things easier to navigate to on the website.
Dark Mode, Activate!
Not only that, but there is now the ability to view the entire Marriland website in Dark Mode! In fact, if you’ve set your device to prefer Dark Mode (such as on your iPhone or iPad), it should automatically activate Dark Mode for you—otherwise, you can activate it by pressing the little moon icon in the top right of the window. You can also toggle back to Light Mode by pressing the little sun icon while in Dark Mode.
Hopefully this makes your experience on the Marriland website even more comfortable!
See Any Issues? Let Me Know!
As this is a rather substantial change to the overall look and feel of the website, it’s very possible that something, somewhere, ended up broken or not quite looking right. If you happen to see something that looks a bit weird after the update or if something isn’t working right, I’ll be more than glad to take a look at it and see if I can get it fixed—the best way to get in contact with me is via my Twitter, @Marriland.
I’ve tested all sorts of configurations, pages, and situations before making this update to try and ensure it is as seamless of an experience as possible, but it’s certainly possible I may have overlooked something, especially in Dark Mode, so just letting me know would be very helpful, but even if you don’t, I hope to fix as many issues as possible going forward.
Next Up: Team Builder Updates
Now that the website has a fresh coat of paint, my current next project is updating the Marriland Team Builder. It’s an incredibly useful tool on the website that thousands of people use every day to help construct their Pokémon teams, helping people figure out the overall weaknesses and resistances of their teams.
I want to make sure that it has support pre-launch for any officially revealed Generation IX Pokémon so people will be able to plan their teams out for the new games, and then also make sure that it is updated to support Scarlet & Violet within the first few days of their release! I also want to make sure that any Legends: Arceus Pokémon are added, as these aren’t currently available (they don’t use the usual 2D sprites like from Sword & Shield, so that’s just one of many issues that has prevented them from being included right away).
Additionally, I’ll be going through and fixing a few issues here and there, and hopefully adding some really cool new features! I just wanted you to know that it’s a top priority now, so look forward to it! 🙂
The Future of Marriland
While this year may have seemed very quiet as far as updates and site improvements go, the reality is, from March 2022 until the end of September 2022, I’ve been hard at work porting over thousands of pages on the Marriland website and converting it to an entirely new backend system.
I won’t go into too much detail, but currently, the website is powered by WordPress, and while it started out alright for managing a few pages here and there, it’s proving to be a challenge when working with high-performance, dynamic data like the Pokédex and tools, as well as semi-dynamic content like the site’s walkthroughs. I’ve run into a lot of snags with writing the walkthroughs, which is really unfortunate, because it meant I missed the boat on writing walkthroughs to cover recent games.
This was something I knew I needed a solution for all the way back in 2021, so in late 2021 and early 2022, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out a solution. In March 2022, I began learning a new backend system—Hugo—that solves so many of the problems I’ve had with WordPress and performance and that will let me write content waaaayyyy faster, but the problem is it is not an easy task!
However, in the process of this, I’ve also worked on bringing back some of the old Pokémon walkthroughs from the old version of the website, both to help me practice and also to preserve that really helpful content. So far, there are over 800 pages ported over to the new Marriland website, and that’s before the Pokédex section and other tools!
It’s a huge undertaking and I’m looking forward to it, but unfortunately work on it will be postponed until next year so I can focus on Scarlet & Violet coverage, including the Pokédex, walkthroughs, and hopefully even some videos. That being said, so much of it is already done, and I look forward to resuming progress on it for the future of the Marriland website, so I hope this little explanation helps shed some light on what I’ve been up to on the site throughout the year—most all of it has been behind the scenes!
Thanks For Reading!
Anyway, that’s about it for this post. I will try to keep the Site Updates category updated more often, especially now that updates are being made on this version of the website. I’m looking forward to Pokémon Scarlet & Violet and I hope that my site will be a major help to you through your adventure as well! Thanks for reading!