Over the course of the years TWG really hasn't changed much, whether that's good or bad depends on what you want from a website, and some people don't care much for change--I'm not one of those. Since becoming TWG's developer more then a year ago I haven’t really done much with the site myself, I’ve always had big plans for changes but plans--even if big--mean nothing if you don’t have the time or strong desire to work on something. Well since then my thinking on what makes a website great has really changed, as have how I approach site development.

It use to be for me flashy, more features then you can shake a stick at, sites were what I thought was good. I thought people would only want a site that used everything in the web development world including the proverbial kitchen sink, but as I made more and more sites for others and studied websites I can to a feeling that what people want the most is content.

Now TWG has lots of content, about 1300 articles if you can believe that (or article numbers are higher because of one’s we’ve deleted due to testing, mistakes, double posts and the like) but it’s really hard to find anything on this site that’s moved off the main page. That’s why a few months ago I added pagenation to the front page to keep track of the blurbs we were posting, up until then we had been deleting the blurbs from the database after a week (something that was done by default with the version of Nuke we’ve been using I believe) and I liked it enough to move this over to the department pages.

Now we did loose some simple sorting features from the department pages, but a lot of people didn’t bother to tag their articles because the old system we had wasn’t very good, it was hard for the user to know what they were supposed to do. So I don’t feel there was a large loss there, especially with the new system we’re adding.

What’s the new system? Well you can see it here in the blogs department, it’s a multi-step category based system, one I’ve written many of papers on at school and am starting to implement here at TWG. What this system allows you to do is add categories to sort against aside from the first on you select, so you can better narrow down your results.

There’s not a whole lot of reason to have content if you, our readers can’t find what we have and over the summer you'll see more and more features added to TWG to help you find what interests you.