Astro 5.

Well deck the halls with boughs of holly! Why not eh? With the festive news that Astro 5 has come out, it’s a cause for celebration. In the following splurge I’ll attempt to divulge why this is exciting news for both me and you! So get yourself a festive drink, a mince pie and enjoy the tidings!

What’s that? You want an analogy? Well it is the season of giving so here you go: Imagine a website is a house, OK a festive house! A gingerbread house!? Errm fine. So when you are building said gingerbread house you’ll want it to be robust, beautifully decorated and accessible. Astro 5 is like the latest and most modern recipe (Think Heston Blumenthal), accompanied by the very best kitchen gizmo’s and utensils that will make your gingerbread house the best one in the gingerbread house competition, that’s right there’s a competition now, which I suppose is the Internet… Hosted by Mary Berry or Prue Whatsherface. Hmm.

Anyway, Here’s how Astro 5 is the best gingerbread House assembly kit out there:

Astro 5 has a brand new “Content Layer” which makes bringing in data from different sources and manipulating it to your needs simpler and faster than ever! If we are sticking with the gingerbread analogy (I’m already losing enthusiasm for this), then this is a bit like being able to get decorations from all manner of different shops and applying them to your gingerbread house, whereas traditionally you’d tend to stick to one because of the faff and damage to loading times.

Astro 5 also rolls out the “Server Islands” feature which enables the static bulk of a website to load (navigation, text, images etc), separately from dynamic content (shopping carts, personalised elements etc). Bringing this back to ginger confectionery, this is like the gingerbread walls being loaded before the “Merry Christmas Dave” iced message is written (Please make it stop). This enables even quicker loading times! Imagine that!

What does this mean for website owners?

Well apart from having an absolute banger of a gingerbread house, It means they’ll have one of the fastest and most dynamic websites in the whole nativity, meaning potential clients will be happy and should be more willing to use their services! Sounds good to you? Thought so! Now I’m off to get some grub as I seem to be starving for some reason. Ho Ho Ho!