Thursday, July 31, 2008

WELCOME...Sort Of...

So what's been taking up my (and many other folks' time) these last couple of weeks?

The new Dorktower.com website.



It went live-ish last night: some of you may or may not be able to see it yet, due to some server stuff (the actual Grand Opening itself should be Monday - I'm told whatever slowness and bugginess there is on the site should vanish by then, too).

Anyway, here's what I posted there:

It’s kind of hard saying “Welcome to the new web site” when a few of you are probably still seeing the OLD web site.

All this morning, I’ve been shunted back and forth between teh Old and the New as I’ve refreshed pages and tested them out. Apparently, teh intertubes work in mysterious ways, and a straightforward, clean switchover is quite hard to accomplish.

If you DON’T see the new web site - indeed, if you’re still seeing the “Technical Difficulties” message, don’t give up hope. The switchover’s been a bit more problematic that nay of us could have realized, but the good folks at Gamespy assure me that it’s just a matter of time -hours, perhaps - before the whole world sees the brand-spanking new DorkTower.com web site.

We’re still very much a Gamespy site: you can tell that by the loverly big Gamespy ads on the right-side of the page. But switching over to new servers means that we can proudly fly the Dorktower.com banner - any links to us should now simply go to “www.dorktower.com” instead of the old “Gamespy.com/hosting/lots/of/comics/on/our/servers” thingy, or whatever it was.

I can’t possibly thank Chuck and Chris from Gamespy enough. To say they suffered to get this new website up and running is an understatement. Massive, massive thanks also go to Dorktower.com’s new webmistress, Cat Wagner, who designed, built and pretty much implemented this entire freaking new site.

Wendy, our last and much-beloved webmistress, is off to Iraq in a few days, but she’ll hopefully be popping back in from time to time to say “hi.” Obviously, we all wish her the best overseas, and our biggest hope is for her safe return, soon.

This site is pretty much a work in progress. Time considerations dictated that we get it up ASAP after the old jalopy of a web site finally quit working - we’re still not sure why the code stopped allowing me to update new comics, but there ya go. Once that happened, we could either spend massive amounts of time trying to figure that out, or go full-steam ahead on the new site, on which we’ve all put in months of work.

More bells and whistles will gradually be added to the site, as time goes on. This coming Monday will be the official “Grand Opening,” as there are sure to be things popping up here and there. The Dork Store will become a little slicker, but for the first time, you should be able to get just about anything I make from there. (Of course, we’d still prefer you patronize your Friendly Local Game Store, but sometimes that’s just not possible).

The site will hopefully be cleaner, and easier to navigate. Please feel free to drop us a line as we go along with this.

John

1 comment:

Dave Tackett said...

The new site looks good, nice user-friendly layout.