A New Website

On Saturday 14th November, teamfishcake will have a new website and a few new articles for you to read. It won't be the first overhaul performed on our website in it's filthy sordid history...

The website started in 1996, back when the internet was a primordial soup of obscurity - it was basically only used by people with beards who liked to stare at weather map images. Our website consisted of static html pages, which made the site a nightmare to update everytime we had something new to publish. Also, the more content you had stored, the more work it would become each time you wanted to update the site. As much time was spent maintaining the website as was spent on producing actual articles.



Scripting languages like PHP began to really take off in the early 2000's. PHP allows you to perform various tricks that, basically, make running and maintaining a website much easier and much more automatic. Since I was involved in a couple of voluntary/hobby organisations, I started to pick up bits of PHP from the people who ran websites for those organisations.

Despite getting our own www.teamfishcake.co.uk address in 2000, we still had a static HTML based website and we were producing quite a lot of content. In 2002, we released our first video onto the internet (3 years before the advent of YouTube). We continued to battle through 2003, until finally....


Our first PHP coded website went live in mid-2004 - although it seems like decades ago. The website and messageboard were integrated and this caused a surge in interest in our forums. Quite a lot of original content and some silly games like truth or dare were played out with our readers. The forums have died down since then because people prefer to hang out on Facebook, which is too bad.

In 2006, we changed the website around a bit. We improved the way it worked a little, and we tried to make it look better. Overall, I think the design is better, but I think the site became less intuitive and harder to navigate.

This Saturday, the new design should be somewhere inbetween. We hope it looks good, but we also want people to be able to find their way around more easily. Other things we hope people will like are the integration of social networking sites and a blog/editorial area that we can update more regularly. It can be frustrating to write silly stuff that perhaps wouldn't justify an entire article, but now we have a spot where we can put it. This is the biggest overhaul of the website since 2004, and hopefully it should last us for a while.

Speaking of articles, we have a few bits and pieces that we have lined up for release over the next few weeks. We hope to get our latest video "Baby Sham" released before Christmas. And don't worry, as you can see from the thumbnail preview of the new site, it will still have lots of blue colour to it ;)

The new site should be live by 10am on Saturday 14th November.