Welcome To Your Redesigned Hooniverse

Is this 3.0? Are we on 4.0? Who cares, because the basic idea of this Hooniverse redesign happens both up front and out back. And the overall goal is to make this a better place.

To tell you what it’s taken to get here, I need to back up and talk about where we’ve come from. Hooniverse started back in 2009. It was a simple site, built on a simple WordPress backend. We could easily handle our traffic figures and comment counts. Somewhere along the way, I felt a redesign was in order. That screwed everything up.

The design was good, but the handling of the rather hefty backside left much to be desired. As we transitioned to the newer look, the team handling things removed many of the older posts and pictures. Some great stories and photos didn’t make the jump and are now lost to time… or the Wayback machine.

The site never worked the way I had hoped. It was too heavy. Too slow. And devoid of any of the charm found in the original version of the site. I tried to change that on my own, but I honestly only have a basic understanding of how things relate to web design, storage systems, and backend refinement.

The site had become laden with bots destroying our server load times. In fact, more than half the traffic was pure crap, dumping useless spam comments on both old and new posts. That useless traffic costs me more in server and storage fees, for a site with far lower real traffic than we used to receive.

I previously attempted to have an outside party help alleviate the inherent heft that comes with having a website for nearly 18 years. That person started to do the work, then ghosted me and kept the money. Good times.

Now, I’ve turned to tried, trusted, and true help to fix this project-car-ass website. The design direction works perfectly on desktops, mobile, and eventually merch. On the backend, things are in place to weed out the fake traffic and comments. The server ease is in place, so page load speeds should be up to snuff. And the whole thing is ripe for fresh content, which is what I need to keep this thing rolling along.

My goal, moving forward, is to commit to a minimum of two posts per day from myself – and hopefully I can get a few familiar voices to jump in and help as well. We likely won’t get back to the site’s glory days, but this fresh look should at least make the reading and viewing experience quite a bit better than it had become.

Thanks for sticking around, or if you’re new, thanks for joining us.

-Jeff