Ok, so i’ve spend the past 6 days upgrading the site to use WordPress (thanks MajorNelson, and Moetron for the inspiration, lol!). What better way to celebrate the site’s 2 year anniversary than with an upgrade! (yes, you heard me right… my site is now 2 years old!)
What i thought would be interesting for this post would be for me to take a look the old versions of this site from the past few years to see how it has evolved…
First up, yep you guessed it, my original bigwheel.eurobell.co.uk site, unfortunately these are the only pictures i could get of it from Archive.org (click for full size image):
Not really much to say about that site, pretty good for a first attempt, but mostly pointless and full of adverts, and i don’t really consider that site to be part of this site’s 2 year history. (i think bigwheel came about back in 2001?)
Skip ahead a couple of years to one boring half-term in February, and remembering what someone said to me a few days earlier in school (“you need to get your own forum”), i thought what the hell, i might aswell try, and so i did… but of course i needed a site to go with that forum:
And so “Paulisgod” was born. There actually was another prototype layout before i settled on that one, it sucked badly, used tiny 350×350 frames, no good for my needs, i don’t have a screenshot of that, and i doubt anyone even saw that one. After finishing my site, i soon registered the paulisgod.tk domain name, and started my own forum (which became rather popular might i add!).
A little while later, i started experimenting with CSS, and i decided i wanted to convert my whole site to use CSS instead of HTML tables, well i managed it, but the site only worked in Firefox:
That version of my site only lasted a week or so, since i was changing ISP, and my new ISP (plusnet… who i am still with today), was offering greater possibilities for webhosting. So i then proceeded to register this domain name, and experiment a bit with PHPNuke (what a waste of time that turned out to be!):
Another image from Archive.org… sorry, don’t have any original screenshots relating to this one. Suffice to say, PHPNuke sucks, far too complicated, none of my visitors bothered to use any of the features, and it was bloated to hell. After a couple of months i gave up on that, deleted my forums once and for all, and replaced them with a tagboard, and this:
If anyone has a sharp eye, they will notice that this site is just a little modification of my previous paulisgod.tk site, just slightly different in places. I liked that site, it was simple, it done the job, and people used the tagboard. As a little side project that i was working on, i came up with this site (i wanted to try out some new things layout-wise):
That was my UNDER17 fansite, it was never actually finished, all i made was the template, no content was ever put into it.
And now if we skip ahead to a couple of months back, the old pocari.co.uk site was beginning to outgrow it’s boots too, i no longer had the time to be editing text files manually when i wanted to add something to my site, the gallery was a complete mess, and the table based layout was beginning to show it’s age. So i needed something new, and that’s where this new site sprung from. WordPress makes things much easier, everything can be edited online, installation was simple, people can leave comments on single posts, and the gallery is much improved (this one doesn’t litter my FTP site with random files, lol), and the site looks far nicer too.
I’ve tried not to change too much, so the layout should seem familar to everyone, it’s just that the site has had a bit of a polish by the use of WordPress.
Anyway… enjoy the new site, explore a bit etc. and what better way to kick off the new site than by leaving a nice comment against this post! 
(p.s. no, i will *never* be having a forum again)
…i really wanna play the new Harvest Moon game when it comes out. 
