Pondering the new site

• Posted by Paul October 25, 2011 - 734 views

  

  The brand new home for The Skyrim Blog has now been open for just under 24 hours. We're closing in on 500 members, who have already added 61 blog posts, uploaded 117 photos and made hundreds of comments on discussion topics, profiles and character stories.

  So its safe to say that things are going along pretty well 

  But as the new site kicks into gear, and the old site winds down, I want to reflect on a few things that I have been asked and comments that have been made over recent days. Some people have been asking 'why not just stick with the old site?' or have hankered after the old days when it was 'just a blog'.

  The truth is that The Skyrim Blog has now outgrown the straight forward Wordpress platform on which it was originally set up. Whether we regret that is immaterial, that's what has happened. Perhaps it was just too successful for its own good? Anyway, we are where we are....

  Quite apart from the lack of social features in a Wordpress blog (not surprising as blogging is usually undertaken as a 'one to many' medium) the biggest problem is that inability to share the workload by appointing moderators / Admins / editors. The only way to do that on Wordpress is to appoint someone as an Administrator and give them total access to every single thing in the back end of the site. I'm sure you can see why I would be reluctant to do that - one wrong key press and all my hard work over the last six months could be ruined! At least if I mess up, its my own stupid fault.....

  So I have been caught in a dilemma. Either I could just let the site go, and walk away on November 11th. Or I could re-imagine it and start afresh on a platform that does enable me to share out the workload. To confuse matters even further I had been approached by several people looking to either buy the site or merge it with another. Why didn't I do that? At least partly it was because they were looking to monetize the site, cover it with ads and/or premium content, and use it as a vehicle to make money! Since I always promised that The Skyrim Blog wouldn't go down that path, I felt I owed it to the loyal site readers to keep that promise. Yeah, call me a naive fool if you wish....

  Anyway we are now moving ahead with the new site. It's not perfect and there are definitely some things from this site that we will miss. I'm particularly sad for those people who only have Internet at work and have social sites blocked by their employees. But the reality is that the ONLY alternative was to close the site down. In all honesty I have been spending far too much time with this site - to the detriment of my full-time job and family commitments. I simply couldn't continue to pour in the the number of hours to the site that I have over the last week or so, in particular.

  So, the upshot was that change was necessary. What has been a bit of surprise - and I work in a field where 'change management' is a key factor - is the way that quite a few people seem to have reacted to change. I would have expected a tech-savvy, Internet-savvy crowd to have been a little more open to the changes! Oh well. I guess people will settle down and get used to things eventually...

  'Onwards and upwards' as they saying goes...