Well, Gwen and I successfully managed to avoid dying in a horrible, fiery crash and made it safe to Indiana last night. We are just kind of relaxing today, before heading up to the Adepticon convention site tomorrow morning.

Since I’ve got the time, I thought I would lay out exactly why I am taking my website in the direction I am. Believe me, it wasn’t an easy decision to make, but I did have some very good reasons. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Ease of Updating. The old site was, to put it simply, a bit of a dog to update. Everything had to be done manually though MS FrontPage (I never did get around to properly learning HTML). So, when I updated the site each month I had to change and upload 3 or 4 different pages, as well as any photos that I was linking to. Even a minor “Hi! I’m still Alive!” post could take about an hour to do. This hassle and time commitment was a big part of why I didn’t update very often. WordPress’s tagging and auto archiving features make my old methods look prehistoric in comparison.
2. Change in Internet Habits. When I started my website, it was my primary means of communication to discuss my hobbies. Now, I mostly use the various forums I belong to, which means that there has been very little impetus to update many of the sections of the old site. Also, I’ve gotten away from doing the many Anime and video game reviews that I was doing when the site started. This is mainly because I decided that there were so many reviews of these things already available everywhere else online, my time would be better spent elsewhere. I might start to get back into that a little bit, since I can now post them as tagged blog posts, but those underlying difficulties remain.
3. Appearance and Usability. Admittedly,  my site has never been at the forefront of graphical design. Still, advances in web design over the last 9 years have made my website look increasingly obsolescent. Along with that, some of the features I’ve built into my site no longer work as intended. The Javascript menu? Turns the entire screen yellow (at least in Firefox). The Guestbook? Haven’t seen anything but spam in there for a long time.
4. Doing something New. While I am not the kind of guy that does new things for the sake of doing new things, there is something to be said for using change to refresh interest. In the case of the old site, I have pretty much been using the same design for the past 8 years, ever since I moved it off of the old Geocities hosting service. this is also probably a big part of why I was updating less and less; it had gotten a bit stale.

So, the new version of the site is intended to be easier to update, easier to use, and look a bit slicker. I’m hoping that this will lead to more frequent updates in the future, and prevent the site from just slowly fading away (which I fear it was on the pat to do before this update). So far, it seems to be working, considering this is my 3rd post in as many days!