CFF Coding Source has a new look and new design, along with many other great improvements and features.
History
CFF Coding Source was founded in 2009 with a simple goal in mind: to create a place where anyone interested in learning website development or Windows programming could come and expand their knowledge. At our peak, we had several thousand registered members and monthly traffic exceeding 1 million visitors according to Google Analytics.
Over time, traffic declined as the internet evolved and development communities grew, but our passion for coding and teaching never faded. Our goal moving forward is not only to rebuild the community, but to grow beyond what CFFCS once was by offering coding tutorials, ready-to-use templates, development resources, and much more.
The New Design
I have been working on a brand-new design for CFFCS for quite some time and struggled to settle on a layout that truly represented the future direction of the site. After countless revisions and testing, I finally arrived at a design that feels modern, organized, and fast.
The new layout runs smoothly, maintains consistency across pages, and provides a cleaner experience whether you are browsing articles, searching for code, or exploring the growing collection of resources.
What's been added:
Header
A completely redesigned menu system that feels sleek, modern, and easier to navigate.
A double-layered navigation structure to help organize the growing amount of site content.
On mobile devices, the navigation now uses a clean Toggle Menu instead of the older dropdown-style system previously used throughout the site.
The sidebar has been removed to provide significantly more room for content and improve the overall page layout. To access [Categories], use the navigation menu at the top of the site.
A new [Search] feature has been added that allows you to search not only CFFCS, but also our Knowledge Base directly from the site itself.
Templates - We have officially added a dedicated Templates section to the site, giving visitors access to ready-to-use layouts, code structures, and future downloadable resources.
Images
In certain areas, you will see images have officially returned to the site.
Honestly, I am not sure why they were removed in the first place, as they help provide visual context for many tutorials and projects, especially when a piece of code produces a visible frontend result.
Not every article will include images, as some coding examples do not require them, but where visuals improve understanding, they will now be included once again.
Syntax Code Highlighter
This is a feature I have personally wanted to build for a very long time.
I finally designed and implemented my very own Syntax Highlighter«, built specifically for our coding articles and tutorials. You can read more about how it works, why it was created, and its development in the official Blog Post«.
Layouts - Designs - Easy Reading.
We have been refining and expanding the different BBCode systems used throughout our websites for both content editing and frontend article display. The goal has always been to create a more unified experience across all of our platforms, making navigation, formatting, and article readability feel more consistent from one website to another.
By maintaining a single shared source for many of these systems, new features, improvements, and updates can be developed once and then implemented across all connected websites. This approach not only helps streamline development but also makes long-term maintenance and future expansion much easier to manage.
Affiliate Books and Media
We host our servers in-house and plan to continue expanding our infrastructure as the site grows. Naturally, maintaining servers, storage, bandwidth, backups, and development resources comes with monthly operating costs.
Because of that, we have introduced Affiliate links through Amazon (with additional partners planned for the future), alongside Google Ads, to help offset some of the costs associated with keeping our sites online and freely accessible to everyone.
One thing that was extremely important to me was making sure advertisements remained as non-intrusive as possible. We removed Google Overlay Ads entirely because they negatively impacted the browsing experience and reminded me too much of the old spam-style pop-up windows that used to flood websites years ago.
While removing those overlays may reduce potential revenue, providing a cleaner and more respectful experience for visitors matters far more to us than aggressive advertising.
Better Error tracking
If you encounter an error anywhere on the site, our new tracking system will notify us immediately.
Visitors will now see a cleaner, more user-friendly error page that includes a reference number, enabling issues to be tracked and resolved much more efficiently.
Managing unexpected errors across multiple systems has always been one of the biggest challenges behind the scenes. But this new monitoring and reporting system enables us to stay on top of problems faster and improve overall site stability moving forward.
Templates
We plan to continue expanding the Templates section weekly as development continues.
At the time of writing this announcement, only a single template is available. I know that is not the strongest launch for such a major new feature, but much of my focus has been dedicated to polishing, optimizing, and preparing the rest of the site for this major public update.
Now that the foundation is finally in place, additional templates, layouts, and downloadable resources will begin arriving regularly.