DarqByte

Yesterday marked a very historic moment for me personally. Yesterday at approximately 1:30pm Pacific time, OMGN was relaunched. The new launch is known as OMGN4.

This has been a long time coming. OMGN’s eventual relaunch is the reason that I haven’t been posting on my blog much or doing much else in my spare time, especially since school let out for the summer. But fear not! OMGN has relaunched! The announcement of the relaunch is on the site.

Really, I’m just posting to finally say something here on my blog about all of this. This is big for me. This is the first full-on redesign of OMGN since I launched it back in 2002. It’s been almost 8 years and now the site will finally be running a worthy code and database structure. The design is simpler and less crowded than it’s been for years, and I’ll be exerting more control over the content to ensure higher quality standards are met. OMGN has sucked up a lot of my time lately, and now it can take a little less. But I’m not going to just rest on my laurels, no. I’ll still be working on it and making it better than before.

As  a matter of fact, I’m going to run off and play some Final Fantasy 13 because I’m planning on reviewing it for OMGN. Interestingly enough, I’ve already achieved quite a lot of what I wanted to do over this summertime: relaunch OMGN, finish some books I’ve ordered, play some games, do some side work. Ahh, summer.

Unfortunately, OMGN has languished over the last couple years. Really, it’s been in the doldrums since the summer of 2005 when we hit up E3.  That was a fun time, let me tell ya.

I’ve been working on a new database structure and recoding for OMGN over the last 4 months. I still have a long ways to go, but I’m hoping that OMGN4, which is what I’m calling the new system, will work very well. The new codebase is much better and more modern, the database design is also much better and streamlined. And the new design in the works is shaping up nicely so far.

I’m really at a crossroads for what to do with the existing content on the site. I keep flipping back and forth on whether or not I want to retain existing content when migrating to the new site. And if I do retain existing content, what to retain.

See, I’m transitioning OMGN to a more fully-fledged video game information website. No more exclusive focus on small-market games, more professional writing and content management systems, better design, etc. A lot of the stuff in OMGN that exists now is either outdated, not even real video game content or just plain bad. The URLs are all going to change and I’m stripping the new site of a lot of functionality that existed before.

I’m just not sure where to go. There’s some content on the site that I kinda want to retain, such as some of the newer reviews of games, like Shadow Complex. But there’s just so much junk in the old data and issues with old URLs to new URLs and functionality lost, I think the new site might just be brand-new and clean. I’m just not sure what I want to do yet.

Please, this time I want your feedback and ideas.