Website overhaul.

So over the next few days I'll be making some significant changes to the website.  In all honesty, the word "overhaul" might actually not be appropriate; the word "overhaul" insinuates that I'll be making large changes to the old website.  I'm scraping most of the old site and starting over with brand new software and a brand new interface.

While I grew extremely fond of the old site design over the last year (we'll actually be celebrating the site's first birthday in March), I look forward to a lot of the new features that comes with the new software.  The new design will have a more robust interface, and I think that most people will come to really like what we can do with everything.

You can now leave comments directly on the news and updates posts.  You can also leave comments on an artist's/writer's page and leave comments directly on specific contributions.  This let's us drop the "News Comments" forum which saves a smidge (very, very little) bandwidth and server space; what I'm really excited about is that the site is finally catching up to the rest of the internet as far as features that are offered.

Updating someone's artist or writer's gallery used to take 20 to 30 minutes, occasionally more.  The new system lets me update things a shit ton faster, and I think that works in everyone's favor.  I used have to do absolutely everything by hand in HTML/XHTML.  Now the software takes care of most of the grunt work.

The software, however, does have some downsides.  On the one hand, a lot of things are streamlined.  On the other hand, I have to change the way I do some things because I have deal with the limitations on the software.  For example:  larger content updates are much easier to do now than they were before because the software does all the CSS work for me but it takes much longer to do aesthetic updates because I have to figure how everything works out.

Another big plus (and I do mean big) is that because this software uses PHP, which is what most forums use, I can actually appoint a few people guest administrators and they can help me with day to day updates.  This will let the website feature different opinions, which hopefully will encourage more people to get involved.

Thank you so much for bearing with me.  I hope in the next week or so everything will be up at one hundred percent.

You guys are amazing.